travel

Cat’s Heart

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

My daughter’s cat lies on the gray-painted floor at the top of the stairs, just outside her room, looking in. She’s away with friends in Maine. Over email, her sister and I see pictures of her swimming in a lake and the ocean — all that great blue and green wilderness around her 13-year-old self.

Her cat, of course, knows nothing of this, but simply lies at the threshold to her door, waiting for her return.

This morning, the rain’s returned, a great downpour. In the garden, yesterday, I pulled out handfuls of dead lily leaves, the broken and blackened remainders of lupine stems. Middle of August, and school and soccer start soon. The evenings come earlier, and the Black-eyed Susans burst brightly along the weedy roadsides.

Things do not change; we change.

— Thoreau

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Ides of August, Buying Gas

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Stopping to buy gas late in the evening, I walk into D&L and immediately stop: the familiar clerk is mopping the floor. It’s so muggy, even long past dark, that he holds the back of his wrist to his sweating forehead.

Go ahead, he tells me. Walk on it. And he crosses the wet tile floor himself.

We talk a little about this hot, sultry summer, now winding down. Already, I’m waking in the dark, turning on the light over the kitchen sink to feed the mewling cats.

In this liquor and gas station on the edge of town, the clerks are sharp-eyed, scanning the crowd, but this evening, it’s just him and I. He leans on his mop handle, nearly finished with his day’s shift, nearly closing time.

I mention that six months from now, in lightless January, I’m going to be complaining to him about the subzero cold.

He laughs out loud. Oh, boy, I can’t wait.

Outside, the gas station lights are an illuminated bubble in the surrounding darkness. Most people sleep at night in this little town. I’m sure there’s mothers and fathers awake with crying babies, the heartsick or troubled who wander their dim rooms, drug users or simply those who are sleepless. The crickets whirr their song, this still night, with not even any passing-through traffic. August: season of t-shirts and sandals, and, this morning, rain sweetly falling.

The Chinese junk
not stopping
moving on through the mist

— Buson

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A Sweeter Version of Macbeth’s Day to Day

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

On our back deck yesterday, my 19-year-old and I talk about the crickets, how their songs are lengthening and yet quieting at the same time, their strength slowly leaking away with summer.

The sunflowers are high in our garden.

This summer has been one of the daughters coming and going, and myself mostly staying put. The younger daughter’s suitcase is packed again, as she happily heads to Maine with friends. The older daughter has been working mixed-up nursing home shifts — most recently the graveyard hours. Her bags are packed, too, as she anticipates returning to college.

We’re busy, sure, but not that busy. In the midst of all this, we cook dinner together when we’re all home, and in these long dusky evenings, we go for walks.

Last night, we were in the town’s community gardens, taking photographs in the pink-leaved echinacea. I remembered that very first year I was a mother, and I kept trying to grab some stability — Oh, this is what being a mother is like. This is how our life will go. But my baby kept changing. She slept, or she didn’t sleep. She crawled, and then she ran. She babbled. Sometimes, she cried fiercely. She was radiant and fierce and deeply loving — a babyhood version of who she is as a young woman.

But she grew and changed all the time, which is — and I really don’t know why this came as such a shock to me — the essence of this earthly life. But the deep down elements of our lives haven’t altered: her eyes are the same curious, merry upside-down crescent moons I first saw on the night she was born.

All this, I suppose, means that I intend to swim in the nearby pond as long as possible. The water is warm yet, and the banks are brilliant with goldenrod.

I had to learn that I was a better mother and wife when I was working than when I was not.

— Madeline L’Engle, Walking On Water

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Photo by Molly S.

Crickets

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

My daughter’s pinpointed the difference between her two tiger cats: Acer has an imaginative life keeping him busy — he’s a mighty African lion, a belly-crawling spy, a baby who must be carried up the stairs — while Tar is simply happy being a cat.

I’m a little worried the contrast offers great metaphor for human life. Satisfied and sweet? Or creative and twitchy?

Yesterday, on such a lovely August day, after swimming in the pond, my friend reminds me of this E. B. White quote from Charlotte’s Web. Ah…..

The crickets felt it was their duty to warn everybody that summertime cannot last for ever. Even on the most beautiful days in the whole year – the days when summer is changing into autumn – the crickets spread the rumour of sadness and change.

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Summer Growth

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

I wake this morning listening to rain, thinking about shears I left in the garden — such a little worry. Dry the tool off and put it back on the shelf.

My younger daughter is home again — two weeks away, and I didn’t recognize her from the back. It wasn’t simply that she wore a shirt I didn’t recognize. I was looking for  little girl — how she’s imprinted in my mind — when she’s nearly all caught up to her sister. Here they are, scavenging in another’s garden.

All the way I have come
all the way I am going
here in the summer field

—Buson

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Craftsbury, Vermont

Gifts, Flowers, Vegetables

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

I’m in a meeting negotiating options to spend a gift to my library when I leave the table to check my laptop for a program’s fees in my email.

I see my daughter, off from work that afternoon, has sent me a photo. That’s all: a photo. She’s somewhere in Vermont, where I’m not particularly sure, driving around in her little blue Toyota she’s named Sammy.

The trustees have spread around the center table in our one-room library. An elderly woman reads in one corner, while her husband works at his laptop in an opposite corner. Two children play on the floor.

When the couple leaves, I walk them out, and the children and I pick cucumbers and zucchini from the garden around the sandbox. The plants are wildly producing. The husband and wife are both 90. They’re headed back to Massachusetts for the winter. We look each other in the eyes and say, Have a good winter. See you next summer.

This is a way of saying that our deepest spiritual, religious, and psychological problems are extremely simple. Just go out and look at the sky. Get to know where you are. Heaven is there for all to see.

— Alan Watts, Cloud-hidden, Whereabouts Unknown

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Photo by Molly S.