Petal. Stone. Blood.

August 28, 2021 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Just before school starts this year, we spend a Sunday driving to the other side of Vermont, down along Lake Champlain, and crossing at the Crown Point bridge. There’s little traffic anywhere. We stop in Bristol for coffee, and then I keep driving, my friend and I in the front, our three daughters with their long legs sprawled in the back.

We’re headed to Fort Ticonderoga. Our daughters are taking an intensive history course this year, and I’m thinking the girls view the trip at first as a combination of the dusty past and an Instagram opportunity. Very quickly, we realize this is a site of stone, metal weapons, rammed earth, strategy, and bloodshed.

In the day’s sultriness, we wander behind the fort and discover the Fort’s immense gardens, now given over almost entirely to flowers. There’s few visitors and apparently no staff.

Below us, the lake lies still as a photograph, blue surrounded by the green hills. The crickets unfurl their slow late summer song. We’re in absolutely no rush at all, lingering among these flowers petals while, up on the hillside, someone bangs a constant dirge on a drum.

This ruined temple
should have its sad tale told only
by a clam digger.”
— Basho

Sunday Morning Reading.

August 22, 2021 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

On my drive a few weeks ago to New Hampshire, I listened to Donald Antrim’s essay in The New Yorker about his hospitalization shortly before he published a memoir about his mother’s death. He was eventually treated with electroconvulsive therapy, partly at the urging of David Foster Wallace.

In this sticky August weekend, I’m reading that memoir, The Afterlife.

Here’s a line from this fiercely written book:

People are fond of saying that the truth will make you free. But what happens when the truth is not one simple, brutal thing?”
— Donald Antrim

Vermont Day.

August 20, 2021 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

Soccer practice begins. School looms. In the night, I wake and wonder what does any of that mean anymore? What is this strange time? Sleepless, I read The Farm with a cat on my feet. Through the open window, the humid night swallows sound, the crickets’ nighttime singing almost a whimper. Unlike the raucous spring mating season, late summer sounds dwindle.

But the season is fat, full. I dream of delicata squash lying on the ground, beneath their wide leaves.

My youngest sits on the couch beside me, with a bag full of pens and paper that her uncle bought her for school. She snaps open her binder and replaces last year’s ragged dividers with unmarked manila pages for this year. On the tags, she writes CALC, then APUSH, outlining her junior year courses.

I pick up my knitting — yarn I’ve unraveled from a previous sweater I never finished. Maybe this project will remain on the needles forever, too.

Sebastian Junger, one of my favorite writers, collaborated on a documentary, The Last Patrol. Combat veterans take a long foot journey, searching for what’s good about America — particularly relevant these days.

“The public is often accused of being disconnected from its military, but frankly it’s disconnected from just about everything. Farming, mineral extraction, gas and oil production, bulk cargo transport, logging, fishing, infrastructure construction—all the industries that keep the nation going are mostly unacknowledged by the people who depend on them most.”

― Sebastian Junger

So Much Water.

August 16, 2021 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

In the chilly August evening, my friend and I swim after dinner, while our families kick sand on the beach. We swim into the sunset, and I’m on the verge of shivering before we hit the ropes that mark off the swimming area.

When we return, the beach has been emptied of everyone except our families, and a little girl who wanders, eating from a bag of potato chips while her mother reads a tablet. The breeze raises goosebumps on my skin, and I pull clothes over my wet swimming suit.

I ride home with my youngest, the seat warmer toasty, the car’s windows filled with the sunset’s iridescent strawberry.

She wants me to trust her driving. Because I am me, I feel all around us the coldness of autumn creeping in, and how that cold whispers its own story. This evening, though, I lean back in her car, my bare feet shedding sand on her floor, and let her drive.

A half moon rises over the hillside, the pearl color of shell’s interior.

Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?”
— Jack Kerouac

Night Driving.

August 11, 2021 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

I had dinner with six other adults last night at a restaurant beneath a tent. Across the table from me, one man said he didn’t think he’d eaten with that number of people in, well, what seemed like forever.

Ditto, me.

I’d driven down I-91 along the Connecticut River to meet the team at Steerforth Press and talk about my book Unstitched that will be published in a month.

On my way home, I drove out of New Hampshire in the dark that had fallen while we were talking and telling stories. I drove away from the congestion of Dartmouth, and then north again, into the deepness of Vermont. The day was still humid and sticky with summer, and I left the windows open, while I listened to The New Yorker‘s Atul Gawande talk about the Delta Variant.

I remembered driving in the dark in my mid-twenties, alone, over the Continental Divide. At the top, I parked and stretched. Although it was summer then, too, the elevation’s chill made me shiver in my t-shirt and shorts. In the women’s room, drying my hands under a stream of hot air, I chatted with an elderly woman. Where she was going, and what she was doing, I’ve long since forgotten, but I remember stepping outside the little building with her and admiring the stars.

So many years later, I sped through the warm and velvety night.

At home, my daughters had left the little string of lights on in the living room, and the back porch lamp glowed. Our house, freshly painted white, glimmered a little as the clapboards rose above the woodpile and purple echinacea. The cats sat at the door, watching moths, or maybe waiting for me.

A few minutes early to New Hampshire yesterday, I walked through a park and discovered a community garden devoted almost exclusively to flowers. A woman and her dog paused and watched me admire the blossoms. The poodle suddenly stood up on its hind legs and barked a hello. I laughed. The woman nodded. Then she went her way, and I went mine.

Wildflowers.

August 2, 2021 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Last summer, my neighbors put a Black Lives Matter sign in their front yard. The sign was stolen. They purchased another. The second sign was stolen. The patten repeated. Our neighbors brought the sign in at night. They placed the sign between our two houses. They kept at it.

Earlier this summer, I noticed a sign had appeared on their lawn again, above a tarp spread out near the sidewalk. I didn’t note much of that. It’s a way I don’t usually walk in the non-snowy months. I nearly always cut through the cemetery or take a different side street.

But last night, walking home in a faint rain, I saw they had planted a row of wildflowers where that tarp had been. The flowers are about knee-high, festooned with delicate blooms. Their sign remains.