Monday Morning, Back to Work

July 9, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

When my little daughter was three, one morning in the kitchen she noticed the orange day lilies had opened their buds, and she ran upstairs to her sister, calling, Willies! Willies, sissy!

Yesterday, driving around Vermont — perhaps in an attempt to shake off a funk — day lilies bloomed everywhere, colorful masses along the roadside and white clapboard meeting houses and tiny shacks with fantastic views of green and blue mountains.

Fully into July now, I know our summer will be filled with work — some terrific and some not so — with the family complexities of single parenting, of keeping our life not only cohesive but creative. There’s lists of things I’d like to do — climb the Underhill route to Mansfield’s summit, paint the trim, plant two fruit trees — but lying in bed this morning, listening to the songbirds crack open the daybreak, I decided to par this down to one single thing: swim in the pond until the water grows cold and hostile. I lay there thinking that’s free to do, and then wondered when I had lost the sense of free in this life might be.

… (the day lily is) coarse and ordinary and it’s beautiful because
it’s ordinary. A plant gone wild and therefore become
rugged, indestructible, indomitable, in short: tough, resilient,
like anyone or thing has to be in order to survive.

— David Budbill, from “The Ubiquitous Day Lily of July”

Sudbury, Vermont

Summer, 13

July 7, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

My 13-year-old daughter, after considerable thought, purchased in May a blow-up swimming floatie in the wedged shape of a piece of pizza. The only drawback, in her eyes, are two mushroom pieces on this pepperoni-and-green pepper pizza.

For the $8, this purchase has been hands-down one of the best in our family this year. Yesterday afternoon, swimming again, she and the two friends she’s known all her life drifted down the pond. I swam on my back looking up at the sky, watching two, utterly white clouds nearly touch each other before they drifted apart, disappearing over an oak tree.

On shore, I looked at the girls drifting and laughing, splashing, and then lay down and read Random Family, about life in the Bronx. Not so many years ago, I could never have imagined I would emerge from hovering over toddlers, and yet here I am, reading and taking notes while the girls swim happily. I was merely the transportation of girls and pizza floatie.

Finished, the girls gathered their towels and flip-flops and walked up the weedy path. They didn’t look back.

Diving In

July 5, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

This in-between holiday week, our unstated goal has been to swim twice a day — in the midday hard heat and in the dusky evening, when the surface of the water holds warmth and our feet trail into the cooler eddies beneath.

We’re drinking our fill of milkweed blossoms, the reflection of clouds in rippling ponds, ice cream cones — as if this stockpiling might carry into the white and gray palette of Vermont’s winter.

I wonder what became of
purity. The world is a
complex fatigue….
(The geranium flowers) are clusters of richness
held against the night in quiet
exultation, five on each branch,
upraised. I bought it myself
and gave it to my young wife
years ago, in a plastic cup
with a 19cent seedling
from the supermarket, now
so thick, leathery-stemmed,
and bountiful with blossom.

— Hayden Carruth, “August First”

Hardwick, Vermont

Yes, Summer

July 3, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

My 13-year-old wraps an ice pack in a kitchen towel and gently rubs it along her cat’s hot paws. The furry creature nuzzles his head against the cold pack. Hot, hot, the cats lie on the wood floor, panting.

Viridescence begins this July, these very long days slick with humidity, turbulent with thunderstorms, the domestic garden and wild woods pulsing, rampaging green — growing headlong, magnificently wild.

This slice of summer is the season of cousins, of sprawling sunsets and lingering dusk, s’mores, and the overarching goal for today: swimming.

In a New Hampshire river, my daughter stands at the edge of a waterfall — the rocks around us radiating heat, the water so cold the small bones in our feet ache. She disappears behind the waterfall, wholly hidden by the frothing water, then emerges blinking and drenched, her smile luminescent.

The short summer night.
The dream and real
Are same things.

— Takahama Kyoshi

These Unbroken Days

June 30, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Nearly July, we’ve had rain, and we’ve had sun — an apt metaphor for life, I suppose.

Early this morning when the sun spread its inimitable crimson across the horizon, and the cats stepped on my hands, reminding me gently of their hunger, I lay listening to the birds and thinking how wrong I was to envision my life as pieces — work for these hours, sandwich in volleyball, the endless litany of email, handfuls of garlic scapes I picked from the garden, hanging laundry on the line.

Our lives — my daughters’ and mine, the others around us — flow as one stream, sometimes turbulent, sometimes sweet as a June rose petal.

I’m folding up the laptop for a few days, in this summer melody.

According to Flannery O’Connor, the fiction writer’s material falls into two categories: mystery and manners. The latter are, for the most part, observable human behaviors, often socially constructed…. while the former, which reside at our human center, constitute the deeper truths of our being. These truths we often keep secret, because to reveal them makes us vulnerable. To my mind, an even deeper mystery than the secrets we keep is the mystery of the way our hearts incline toward this person and not that one, how one soul selects another for its company, how we recognize companion souls as we make our way through the world…

— Jennifer Finney Boylan, She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders

Good Humor

June 26, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

My dad had this phrase when I was a kid — a high-entropy day — a confluence of crazy, falling-apartness. All those years we sugared, March was high-entropy: we endured ice storms, broken machinery, illness, unexpected expenses.

In snowy and muddy Vermont March days, I always fooled myself into believing June was nothing but sweetness.

June, yesterday, green and gorgeous, and around us: chaos — all the factors of work and extended family, wound through with the golden chicken who got into the neighbors’ garden. At the end of the day, I stood in our upstairs glassed-in porch, threading through a work problem on the phone, watching birds dart around our house. Little tiny birds I didn’t know dove into an enormous, flowering mock orange tree.

When I came downstairs, where my girls were at the dinner table, they showed me a three-line text from their MIA parent, the one who hasn’t so much as given his girls a piece of bread in years — travels with father — and I laughed. Here’s the epitome of family life, maybe of human life: a baffling and incredibly painful mystery. What the heck does any of this mean?

I write this not so much because it’s my story, but because I see this reflected over and over in the families around me: that the harder years of parenting through adolescence, through parental desires met and unmet, bring to the forefront those tensions between what’s best for the one, and what’s best for the family.

My girls and I kept eating and talking. I fed our cat a bit of bacon from my fingers. The windows were all open, and the scent of the roses drifted in. We kept talking about the day’s chaos, and then we kept laughing and laughing. It’s the only antidote I know — laughter — to the hardness of family life, to just the plain-out strangeness of what might seem so simple.

Then we went out to talk to the chickens, too.

Stony Soil Vermont

Vermont Writing

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