travel

Antidote

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

A photograph of my daughter and her friend is on a Good Citizen poster.

What the heck does that mean, she asks? Who’s a good citizen?

I drag up my standard answers: that history matters, that good fortune doesn’t equate with good character, that our actions affect others, whether we see — or want to see — this or not.

Later, I realize I should add this in: read and write poetry.

Poems build our capacity for imaginative thinking, create a tolerance for ambiguity, and foster an appreciation for the role of the unknown in human life. From such compact structures of language, from so few poems, so much can be reinforced that is currently at risk in our culture.

— Tony Hoagland, Twenty Poems That Could Save America

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Age 13

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

My 13-year-old returns from her travels slightly shifted, changed in a perceptible way. She’s tasted a bit of the world cracked open. The younger sister, she’s now taking steps — err, leaps — into her own life. Who am I, and what do I want to do?

These early summer mornings remind me of my own wanderlust at that age, how as a child our family was happiest on the road. A number of summers, my parents packed up the Jeep, and we drove west from New Hampshire with a vague itinerary and nothing more. Maybe Wyoming, maybe Mexico. Always Colorado.

13 — such an age, such a year. While adult years all blend together — that was my wild twenties, the childbearing thirties, the hard forties — there’s age 13, the year my daughter is a child and began stretching toward not-a-child.

Chicken tending chores, her best friend, ice cream for lunch.

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.

— Annie Dillard

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Hardwick, Vermont

Summer, Again

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

On this first day of summer, mock orange blooms beneath our bedroom windows — an enormous bush that nearly reaches to the second floor — its scent so sweet it’s nearly liquid.

Yesterday, a day that perhaps reflects our summer world: chaos combined with a languid beauty winding through. The chickens fly over their fence. My two jobs clamber for my attention. My oldest daughter coughs. My bank account teeters on dipping into the red.

And yet, a small dog named Dammit wanders through the library. The little children play in the sandbox for hours, digging with bent spoons and old trucks. That evening, I return to the library for a novelist to read. Four kids whose mother is at the food shelf follow me in. They check out books. I give them handfuls of bookmarks and Reading Rocks! tattoos. The youngest plays on the floor with the dollhouse, eating potato chips, sharing her life story with me.

Each summer I bring friends out
to note and share the (garden) display and produce.
Here is life’s habit on grand exhibit
and the hard work hidden.

— Leland Kinsey

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White Mountains, New Hampshire

Age 19

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Oh, ode to June in all her lovely greenery.

Remember being 19-years-old? Remember desire, desire, desire?

The summer river.
It’s happy to walk across it.
My hands with zori sandal.

—Buson

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Dog River, Berlin, Vermont

Female House

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

The summer my second daughter was an infant, the season was particularly hot and sticky — at least in my memory it was. That summer I just didn’t do certain things — I washed clothes and probably even folded them, but I rarely put them away.

Domestic chaos? Maybe. But I knew I would never have another baby, the  irreplaceable sweetness of a nursing infant in arms.

We were at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center that summer with our 6-year-old for a very minor procedure, and my then-husband and I took turns walking up and down the hospital hallways with an infant. At one point, I stood swaying with my sleeping baby from foot to foot, reading the posters on the wall.

One watercolor was a purple hyacinth blossom with the words beneath: Choose joy.

When I drove away from the hospital, with all four of us, and crossed the river back into Vermont, I was so light-hearted, so happy. It was such a minor thing that had occurred, and we were all together and well.

Now that infant daughter is a teenager, the oldest daughter a young woman. Like all families, we’ve lived through the gamut of happiness and grief and rage. Every now and then, I remind myself, slow down, breathe deep, and finger the strand of life that’s joy.

You might as well answer the door, my child,
the truth is furiously knocking.

— Lucille Clifton, Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969-1980

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Lady Lupine

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Here’s a line from a children’s picture book — my younger daughter’s favorite — You must do something to make the world more beautiful.

Last evening, I overhead the girls planning to spread lupine seeds gleaned from the flowers blooming before our house. Maybe that thousand and one readings of Miss Rumphius sowed deep, or maybe spreading these blossoms is just instinctual, part of being alive.

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Photo by Molly S.