summer

Long Pond Cape Cod

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Ten-year-old Gabriela Stanciu is a guest blogger today. She loves to eat watermelon and read Harry Potter.

I was on a vacation at Cape Cod a few days ago and we had just gone swimming in the ocean so we thought we should wash the salt water off by swimming in a fresh water pond. We went to Long Pond. It is a Pond in Wellfleet Cape Cod. so we showed up and parked. Me, my Grandparents, and my dad got out of the car. When we got in it was really warm compared to the ocean. It was a beautiful lake. The water was crystal clear all the way through. And it was really shallow. When I got like a third of the way out into the lake it was only like five feet deep. The sand at the bottom was really soft and there wasn’t any rocks. Like 15 minutes later my sister and aunt showed up. My sister didn’t want to go swimming but my aunt did. When my aunt got in she got in over my head so I hopped on my dad’s back since I can’t swim very well. We swam for a little more and then got out.

Next we went to this store that we call the floatie place even tho we have never been there. Well, it has a ton of giant floaties all over the building. They probably have any floatie you can think of in that place but we did not go there to get a floatie we went there to get a life jacket so I could float around in the sea. My favorite floaty was the giant flip flop but it probably wouldn’t fit in our car. But what we did get did fit in our car.

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Summer

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

My younger daughter told me today, It will be bad for me in a few years.

Why’s that? I assumed she was pre-mourning her older sister’s forthcoming passage into adulthood and that ached-for leap into adult life.

My child said, Because my aunt buys my really nice pajamas at a place where she buys her boys’ pajamas, and we love these pajamas, and the sizes don’t go above 12.

My child will never remember this conversation. Two years hence I could bring up this remark around the woodstove, and I bet cash now she likely won’t remember this. But today, here, this meant something to her. A summertime world of utter happiness, a way of living this season where she and her two beloved cousins sleep in a small room, reading and giggling, all in their same beloved pajamas. These are days filled with bikes, swimming, endless meals –  also of ears primed to hear, trying to piece out the puzzle of adult lives, the constant threads of conversation and emotion. Mainly, though, these children seek space for their growth and energy. Tonight, this child wanted to go walking in the gloaming. We went out, all of us, walking along the gravel road, and didn’t cross back into the house until long past dark.

Here’s Dylan Thomas on childhood in a stanza of “Fern Hill”:

All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was
air
And playing, lovely and watery
And fire green as grass.
And nightly under the simple stars
As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,
All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the
nightjars
Flying with the ricks, and the horses
Flashing into the dark.

Photo by Molly S.

Photo by Molly S.

What Is of Value

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

This afternoon, in a driving rainstorm that almost instantaneously altered to sunny skies, I took the girls with me to a staff meeting in Burlington. They read for a while, then headed down to the lake’s waterfront, and by the time I arrived, they had both decided Burlington was THE place to live.

On the way home, we stopped in at Big Box Store Land. With all our recent house guests, our towels have been revealed in all their deplorable condition. While I wandered around a mammoth store looking for towels in what had been advertised as a bath store, but had a sizable luggage department, too, the girls scoped out the premises.

They were truly amazed: hair clips could be bought in a plentiful pack and three dozen hairbrushes were on display. One daughter murmured, I’ve never seen so much shampoo in one place.

Such marvels! We left with towels and hair clips. Back at our house, in the cool and rain-fresh evening, we walked around the garden, the little girl noting the singing crickets, while the wood thrush trilled her inimitable melody. As summer winds down, the birdsongs gradually diminish.

The world of plastic baubles thoroughly admired, the girls and I sat on the couch and read.

(Donald Hall) is a writer who (at least on the best day) does not succumb to inner or outer pressure but, rather, knows that what he calls “absorbedness” is the answer–the only answer. Through all of life’s twists and turns–those fleas–he turns to the work the way his grandparents turned to the soil, to the harvest, which waits for no one.

– Dani Shapiro

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New Hampshire White Mountains by Molly S.

Shadows

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

July has reached the point where it’s tipping into August, early summer already flown past. Biking with my daughter along the road last night, I felt the shadows’ coolness, their dimness harboring a deepening darkness.

Nonetheless, growth roars on, the elecampane blooming way up there, above my head.

WITHOUT

we live in a small island stone nation
without color under gray clouds and wind
distant the unlimited ocean acute
lymphoblastic leukemia without seagulls
or palm trees without vegetation
or animal life only barnacles and lead
colored moss that darkens when months do
hours days weeks months weeks days hours
the year endures without punctuation…

the sea unrelenting wave gray the sea
flotsam without islands broken crates
block after block the same house the mall
no cathedral no hobo jungle the same women
and men they long to drink hayfields
without dog or semicolon or village square
without monkey or lily without garlic

– Donald Hall

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Photo by Gabriela

Summer Evening

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

One simple and incredibly marvelous piece of our summer so far has been making a ring of rocks into a fire pit. The small daughter has naturally seized on this as a daily s’more opportunity. With the fairly regular rain, we’ve put up my old farmers market tent, and now we seem to be moving more and more outside. Dinner? I stir fried peas and garlic scapes and carried the skillet outside, while the girls roasted sausages. Sadly, our chocolate s’more supplies are depleted. The other morning I twisted my ankle leaping off the porch and spent the bulk of the day with my laptop outside. Since I couldn’t walk, that pretty much eliminated chores, which – while as a long-term scenario is hugely unappealing – for a July day really was an odd kind of opportunity. In summer, I’d rather live outside than in, and the smoke dispels some of the opulent bug life….

Whereas he baled hay. I baled sentences into paragraphs of prose. The meadows revealed themselves as pages, and the barn itself became the equivalent of the book where it all goes, to feed the mind and soul.

– Julia Shipley

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Flux

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

My daughter, picking peas in the garden, reached down and plucked a pod chewed ragged by tiny snails, the little creatures with their whorled homes still climbing on the green. Next bed over, a black swallowtail caterpillar munched the parsley. Early this morning, not long after dawn, as my daughters and I drove across Vermont, we saw a fawn sprawled over the pavement, two porcupines, a raccoon. Weeds, breeze, pollinators: the ten thousand things wildly grasp these long July days. Nothing still, nothing static. Even the children, asleep at last, lie breathing softly with dreams murmuring through their minds.

… the ten thousand things (are) in constant transformation, appearing and disappearing perennially through one another as cycles of birth and death unfurl their generations: inside becoming outside, outside inside. This is the deepest form of belonging, and it extends to consciousness, that mirrored opening in which a heron’s flight can become everything I am for a moment…

– David Hinton

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