#travel

Ferry Boat Captaining

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

For years, I’ve taken my daughter and her friends camping for a few days on an island in Lake Champlain. We’ve been going so long now that the years and memories have interwoven — the July the raccoons ate most of our food, how I always cook pasta and clams and greens from my garden, the way we always explore every bit of the island.

What’s changed is that the girls themselves have grown from kids to teenagers. This year, less biking and more talking.

In the early night, I lie awake in the dark, listening to the lingering remains of a thunderstorm and the girls tracing through school and soccer, questioning and wondering and thinking their way through the world.

On the way home on the ferry, we admire a sweatshirt the ferry boat captain is wearing. The shirt must have been issued by the Vermont State Parks. The back reads, 2020 We Did It.

We sit on the ferry’s open top. In the cabin, the captain invites in all the little kids on the ferry, surrounding himself with five and six and seven year olds. On the loudspeaker, he says, Lots of future captains with us today. We’re so lucky. All the way back from the island to the mainland, the kids cluster around him. There’s one place between rocks, marked with buoys, so shallow we can see rocks gliding beneath the lake water. He guides us through effortlessly, and in the open water again offers his chair to the children, who take turns. The children are radiant. The captain places his hand on a boy’s head and smiles joyfully.

Burton Island, Vermont

July 1.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

This photo snapshots summer for me.

I snapped this photo of my beloved daughter’s bare feet at a gas station, just before I had a conversation with a couple who had left Tennessee (brutally hot, they repeated) for the romantic life in Vermont. I kept thinking, but you haven’t meet Vermont’s January yet….

After so long, we finally had a full dinner table on our back porch yesterday, myself and the daughters and the boyfriend and my brother and his partner, all of us together with summer’s greenery pressing in — the domesticity of my potted plants and the wildness of box elder and cardinals interwoven.

Rain sprinkled, and we grilled steak and vegetables. Our conversation wound through drought, the pandemic and the Delta variant, QAnon, and my teenager’s job in a general store this summer.

Over the valley, I saw clouds darken, and rain broke again. Plate by chair by glass we carried in what needed to be covered, and kept talking.

A Year Ago

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

…. A year ago, the date was looming near where I had that wretched dental procedure. On the 21st, as the oral surgeon brought a scalpel near my face, he said nicely, You might want to close your eyes for this.

This December, after weeks of virtual schooling — whatever that may be — I knock off work Friday afternoon, so the 15-year-old can drive. My oldest asked us to bring coffee. She steps out behind the doctors’ office where she works, dressed in scrubs, with a stethoscope around her neck.

Then she heads back in, jazzed for the afternoon challenge of of families and fears, from earaches to coronavirus.

In the village, my youngest parks behind the famous Stowe church, and we walk along the bike path. The path winds along the river, not at all iced over yet. We pass a few dog walkers. Behind a restaurant, the scent of dinner cooking follows us as we walk in the thin December sunlight. The savory smell reminds me of when I lived in Brattleboro, so many years ago, above a Korean restaurant.

The smell is delicious, and it follows us for a long way across a field. Stowe reminds us of those summers and falls when we sold maple syrup and ice cream at the farmers market. As we walk, my youngest tells me what she remembers of the market. These are good memories, and we share snippets of the vendors we knew in those years.

Back at the Subaru, it’s nearly four, and the sun is sinking towards the mountains’ horizon. We’ve been gone from Hardwick just a few hours and filled these hours with coffee, a scattering of snow beneath our boots, the sky overhead, the smell of dinner, and the narrow December sunlight between our words.

Carefully, she backs out of the parking space and heads for Route 100. She reminds me my brother told her to enjoy the small victories.

She pauses at the stop sign and looks at me. This is a big victory, she says.

December, 2020.

“Leisure”

By William Henry Davies

What is this life if, full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare.

No time to stand beneath the boughs

And stare as long as sheep or cows...

Driving Lessons

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

The dress my daughter wore in the photo below was a thrift-store find. A soft flannel, the dress was her favorite those years she was two and three. She wore the dress until it was above her knees. I can still remember how her bare knees fit perfectly into the palm of my hands, her skin suntanned long into the fall, often lightly scratched or bruised from playing.

At fifteen, now, she feels light-years beyond those days.

Here’s a piece I wrote about this summer when she and I switched places in the car, beginning, “This fall, my 15-year-old daughter Gabriela was at the wheel of my Subaru when I panicked….”

Photo by Diane Grenkow

Wild

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 7 Comments

December: cold, a scattering of snow, the ice settling into the ground.

In Hardwick, on impulse, I stop into a store and buy a string of white lights with wooden reindeer for my daughters. It’s Sunday morning, and hardly anyone is out.

Walking home with those lights tucked into my backpack with a brown paper bag of rice and a square of cheese, a bottle of sesame oil, I cut through the cemetery. Before long, the cemetery will be snowed in for months.

I’m walking up the path from the piney woods, near last summer’s potato patch, when a bald eagle glides down from a white pine. I stand quietly — yes, white tail feathers, head, its curved beak earthward. Without flapping a wing, the eagle catches an upwind and drifts over my blueberry bushes and garden, then disappears around our white clapboard house.

I grew up in New Hampshire and never saw a loon as a child. We never saw wild turkeys, didn’t dream of bald eagles swooping over a trampoline in a backyard, never heard coyotes except when we were camping in the Rocky Mountains.

When I step into our kitchen where my daughters are baking cookies, they greet my news of the eagle with cool, and keep on with what they’re doing.

While the pandemic reigns, the wilderness hasn’t gone away. Hungry eagle, what did you find for dinner?

On our kitchen wall…

Sunset, Skunk, State Police

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 11 Comments

Before I leave work yesterday afternoon, I stack piles of papers labeled with stickies in my scrawled handwriting — a roadmap for myself for the next day’s work.

Outside, the sunset is crazy beautiful.

I drive home, listening to VPR. The governor has sent the state police to lodging establishments, in an attempt to crack down on quarantine requirements. My brother, in New Hampshire, appears to be sealed off from us, in a sea of Covid.

At home, my 15-year-old dreads the thought of another lock-down, like last spring. But it’s not April 2020 in Hardwick, Vermont. In November, unlike in April, Covid is among us, in the schools, among people we know.

In the evening, my friend and I walk around town in the dark. The long bar in Positive Pie is empty, save for the barkeep at the far end, his head bent over his phone. At the high school, we walk down a wooden flight of stairs to the soccer field that a group of volunteers recently built. In the field’s center, we gaze up at all those stars, the Milky Way arched over the firmament.

Back at my house, we stand in the driveway, talking, talking, in the unusually warm November evening. A skunk ambles around the neighbors’ house — a normality I can embrace — although, after a few moments, I back up and head into my house for the night, where my daughters are planning to make tiramisu for Thanksgiving.

I wish I could invite all of you…..

“When I face the desolate impossibility of writing five hundred pages, a sick sense of failure falls on me, and I know I can never do it. Then gradually, I write one page and then another. One day’s work is all I can permit myself to contemplate.” 


― John Steinbeck

Photo by Gabriela