The Target

July 8, 2017 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Like many parents, I’m sure, much of my life seems a scramble between work and, honestly, everything else; then yesterday afternoon I picked up my daughter at camp, ate BBQ and lettuce so fresh it had grains of sand on one leaf, and realized, Here’s a bit of normalcy. Run by Fish and Wildlife, the camp’s youthful crew exuded energy, health, and merriment. Suntanned and happy, my daughter sat at a picnic table between an old friend and a new friend.

Here’s my goal for the gorgeous emerald Vermont July and August: remember, this is the only summer this kid will be twelve. Earn enough money, do my work – yes, of course – but much as this girl loved camp, she was happy to come home, and there’s nowhere else I’d rather be.

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes….

From (where else?) Dylan Thomas’s incomparable “Fern Hill”

Buck Lake, Woodbury, Vermont

Long Childhood Summers

July 6, 2017 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

In this room is a photo of my daughters I took a few years back, maybe ages 3 and 9, a summertime shot, the girls’ heads tipped together. Both girls smile, radiant. The oldest daughter’s arm is wrapped around her sister, in the unabashed ownership she has claimed over her sister since the youngest’s infancy. The littler girl is snuggled to her sister, eyes closed in bliss, knowing her most rightful place is with her sister.

At 18 and 12, the oldest is still preening her sister, asking (and sometimes not asking) to brush her hair, trim and paint her nails, for your own good.

This week marks the youngest girl’s first week of overnight camp. Reaching into a spill of moonlight on the porch tonight, I wondered how the moon flows over my girl, this pure light. How gritty is that sleeping bag? What stories will you tell us?

Sure, I embrace this opening of my growing girls’ worlds and my own release from near-constant mothering, while remembering the incomparable sweetness of an infant sleeping, cheeks milk-flushed rosy, along my forearm. Lady Moon shining over all of us: familiar friend.

Summer Kitchen

In June’s high light she stood at the sink
With a glass of wine,
And listened for the bobolink,
And crushed garlic in late sunshine.

I watched her cooking, from my chair.
She pressed her lips
Together, reached for kitchenware,
And tasted sauce from her fingertips.

“It’s ready now. Come on,” she said.
“You light the candle.”
We ate, and talked, and went to bed,
And slept. It was a miracle.

– Donald Hall

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The View From Here

July 4, 2017 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

My youngest daughter, aspiring to be an FBI agent, discovers FBI training teaches its recruits not to believe in coincidences. As a writer, I’ve taught myself the same principal. Understood or not, isn’t the world laced through with meaning?

Leaving my house in the dark early this morning, I tipped my head back and admired the firmament, the moon sunk down over the horizon, the innumerable stars one of my earliest memories. Yet each time I see the stars I have that odd swirl of familiarity and the unknown: always magnificent.

Driving through the country dark, the roads empty of any traffic, a coyote sprints before me, so near I spy its shaggy coat, eyes focused ahead, intent on its course.

Here’s a few lines from Roxanne Gay I read last night, in her memoir about super-obesity.

In the before of my life, I was so very young and sheltered. I knew nothing about anything. I didn’t know I could suffer or the breadth and scope of what suffering could be. I didn’t know that I could give voice to my suffering when I did suffer.

– Roxanna Gay, Hunger FullSizeRender

Back Again

July 1, 2017July 1, 2017 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

In a rosy dawn yesterday, we left Prince Edward Island, the sleeping kids sprawled in our little Toyota, sun-browned and a little too red on one daughter’s shoulders, myself driving and drinking coffee from my thermos, listening to CBC.

As I listened to the Island Morning’s interview with Henry Hank Gallant who walked across Canada in 1967, I thought how different the tenor of this place feels compared to my own country, even relatively liberal-minded Vermont. Much later, deep in Maine’s interior, listening now to Maine Public Radio, Trump’s voice whined over the airwaves about a great trade agreement, and all three of my young passengers who were playing Blackjack on a folded-over atlas howled. We are not Trump aficionados.

But Trump’s word great gave me a thread of the difference between these two nations: America, so fiercely militaristic and competitive, and its civil life – while doubtlessly filled with decent people – underpinned with suspicion and distrust.

We were glad to sail over the Connecticut River and return to our little Vermont village, to stop at the grocery store and have the teenage cashier whose hair was now dyed iridescent green rather than the cherry red from two weeks ago ask, How was your trip?

Dripping humidity here, the kind my mother abhorred when I was a child. July – the growing month in Vermont. My older daughter laced up her shoes and disappeared into the mist for a run.

A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom.

– Martin Luther King

Nearly perfect strawberries I bought from an old man with just a few teeth along a roadside in Maine.

Growing Girls

June 29, 2017 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Not that many years ago, the enormous trunk of my old Volvo held a stash of gritty plastic buckets and shovels all summer, tucked to one side, opposite spare oil quarts and a yellow jug of coolant: well-used childhood possessions.

This beach trip our family is entirely without sand toys, although we’ve been to numerous beaches, and even created castles with our hands and this fine red sand, with smooth stones and dried seaweed. I am likely the only one in our family who remembers those sand toys.

Here’s what we do now: on a chilly morning yesterday, the older daughter filled out a college math assessment on-line. At a particularly knotty problem, she looked at me. My own adolescence of function and cosecant reared up before me. I could feel myself teetering on a edge, before I said simply, Call your uncle if you want help with that one…. There’s only so much I can do, and cosecant no longer falls into my skills.

Which blended in perfectly with Jeffrey Lent’s beautiful new novel, Before We Sleep, about a daughter growing up – and much, much more.

There were far worse things than to prepare youngsters for the world that would lie ahead of them. To prepare them for the day when, inevitably, that world would not make sense.

– Jeffrey Lent

Photo by James Dailey

Salty

June 27, 2017 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Last night by the light of a crescent moon and the setting sun, the long red-earth rows of raised potato beds held shadows in their furrows, while all around was the sweetly pink sky, the cumulus clouds scudding across the blackening sky.

On the shore nearby, beach glass abounds, allegedly from numerous shipwrecks. On these pristine June days, I imagine the manifolds secrets buried unreachably far down. Swimming today in easy waves, I emerged with a salty mouthful, the brine of sweat and birth – of the sea.