Knock it down, revise your life.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

March, northern Vermont, the long dragged-out amorphousness where winter drags its slushy sulkiness into sodden spring. I long for a few hours of blistering sun. This season was the weather my mother despised most, all those New Hampshire years of my childhood. One afternoon, she pulled over on a back road and instructed my siblings and me to run through a farmer’s soaked pasture, patchily emerged from a winter of snow, and head for the woods at the far end. We did not know who owned the field and argued. Go, she insisted, go. You kids need to run. So we ran.

My novel, Call It Madness, which will be out in at the end of June, in a month when I intend to swim, is about the unvarnished craziness of family, of fiercely knotted threads of desire and thwarted passion, how the stories that shape and mold our lives are buried generationally. The novel is not about my mother, but it’s for my mother, the woman now dead nearly two years. She was mercurial, passionate about love and destruction. In the long-beyond-time stretch of recent cancer treatments, those endless months on the couch, I often thought of her; she was the only family member who had endured the triple violence of cancer-and-chemotherapy-and-surgery, sheer survival tenuous as a snowdrop. My mother surprised me until the very end of her life, the whole range of the unexpected, from sorrow to contentment. As her youngest daughter, how little I knew her, and yet I carry her with me, in my own might and fallibility.

In these months of remission, I’ve learned from yoga that inquiry is a force, a variation of that impossible Socratic dictum, know thyself. Healing, I plot a venture into transforming my kitchen, my home’s heart, and hire a carpenter to take down a wall, open an exterior wall with windows. Am I crazy, I wonder. At the edges at least of madness, recklessly heady with survival, with the raw knowledge of mortality clenched in one fist.

When the vinyl flooring is ripped up, the carpenter and I ponder the hardwood boards, stained and blackened and scraped. The lives of previous occupants rises like mist, mesmerizing, unknowable. What remains are their scars. My cat and I sit on the dusty floor and share a bowl of arugula. Wet snow slides from the roof in the flowerbeds. I planted the gold compass flowers. Who planted the pink roses I’ll never know.

Back out of all this now too much for us,
Back in a time made simple by loss
Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off
Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather,
There is a house that is no more a house…

Here are your waters and your watering place.
Drink and be whole again beyond confusion. — Robert Frost, “Directive”

Under the kitchen vinyl.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

While the radio carries in terrible news, the carpenter tears off the vinyl on my kitchen floor. I run my hands over the worn maple boards that are revealed to the daylight again. In one corner, a rotten board where perhaps the sink leaked. The carpenter cut out those pieces, and I look down at the basement’s graveled floor. In another corner, there’s a blackened place where perhaps a woodstove once charred the flooring. He and I stand there, considering, wondering about who once lived in this house. I wonder about their patterns of heat and sustenance, these people who passed from this world, decades ago.

When the carpenter leaves, I vacuum, then sit on the cold floor while the cats sniff curiously. I rub my hands over these boards bruised from living and speculate that I can sand and polish this small space, quicken it again.

I began this project with a desire to take down a wall, open a room, and chase away the dismal memories of illness, to acknowledge that, indeed, this is the house where cancer devoured my body, tore at my flesh and mind. I survived. To continue surviving, I must revise my life, change my patterns of living.

I know a few of the names of the people who lived in this house on a village hillside. Now, barefoot on these cold hard-worn floorboards, I sense the mysterious stream of connection that runs between the dead and myself and those who will someday live here, when I have moved on myself, to other earthly or unearthly places. Who laid this floor I’ll never know, but I’ll put my hands and my muscle to it, lend my energy towards restorative beauty, towards the scantness I can do.

I am beginning to understand that healing is not about returning to what was, but about accepting the change and adapting to the brokenness. This is happening all around us, for people, for the land. People have done damage to the earth and to each other that can’t be undone. We can lament what was, but that won’t help us take care of what we still have. In fact, it might just hold us back. Nature herself keeps giving and never giving up. ~ Helen Whybrow. The Salt Stones

Mired in fog.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 12 Comments

I hole up for the weekend reading Wallace Stegner, a pastoral novel about friendship and mortality, about the pre-internet world when complicated events unraveled perhaps not more kindly but more slowly. Vermont March is the season of live-or-die, the fits and starts of spring, jagged with driving ice, whirling snow, delirious sun.

I drive home from a dinner out in a fog so thick that the car before me pulls off, turns on flashers, and maybe simply intends to wait it out. It’s not late, but there’s no one else out, the wind throwing twigs at my windshield, the radio jingling Lou Reed. I’ve not driven in a fog so profound since I was in my twenties, living in the wooded spine of the Green Mountains, in the years when I was brash with youth and amor. The edges of the road vanish. I pull over at the spring with its pipe where people gather water, and I stand just outside the beam of my headlights, the nearby stream gushing against what remains of its winter ice. I surely can’t stay here for the night, shivering, on the edge of my own mad solitude. The way back, the way forward, all around: pathless, and surely a metaphor for this time.

I’m still shaken to the core by lymphoma, by chemo, by the surgeons who sliced me open and removed those physical scars so I might live. I’m here for this moment, flesh over my slender shoulders, my now bony hips that once carried two babies, and flesh—well, so easily ruined. I spent most of last March in one ED or hospital room or another. While the world spun on, I leaned into treatment, propped up by dear ones, who ferried me to remission.

Now, shivering, nearly blind with fog, I turn off my car and the headlights. The fog wraps around me. I drink it in.

“In the gnostic gospel of St. Thomas, Jesus says, “If you bring forth what is within you, what is within you will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what is within you will destroy you.” — Andrew Solomon

Knock down a wall, survive for a bit

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

The advance copies of my novel that will be published at the end of June, Call It Madness, sprinkle out into the world. I print postcards and mail those, too. Email me your mailing address (brettstanciu@gmail.com), and I’ll drop a postcard. The novel will be published June 30, and summer events slowly add up. I imagine sultry July, steamy August, spaghetti strip sundress, tumblers of ice water.

The novel is divided into sections of place: an apartment, a pantry where the protagonist Avah hides, the roadside Blue Lion Motel where Avah tracks down her mother, and Echo Lake—a great gossamer spill, a fat layer of ice…

Places define us. Unbelievably, I am now nearly a year out from chemo. All that long last winter I huddled on my couch, too sick to feed my own woodstove, I kept thinking, I think the kitchen wall removed. I want the small rooms of this old house opened. Now, a year later, holding what will be forever-fatigue in one hand and my strengthening return to health and merriment in the other, I hire a carpenter to remove a wall of early 20th century two by fours and lathe. I return to my dusty and torn-up house in the late afternoon, step in, and think, This is how the house is meant to be.

With the mind of a novelist, I wonder at the calculus of human decision-making: the mixture of numbers, of cost and house value, a stacked rationality. Take that arithmetic, and add to it my fierce desire to re-imagine my future where my garden bounty of jalapeños and garlic meets kitchen cleaver, where I revise another book at my kitchen table, where illness is swept from my house by the spring wind rushing through the open windows, smudging my rooms with the fecund scent of mud, the castanet jingles of mating frogs.

Vermont spring: thaw, fresh snow this morning, stove ashes sprinkled on the icy paths, robins. All the things.

“Survival, it is called. Often it is accidental, sometimes it is engineered by creatures or forces that we have no conception of, always it is temporary.” — Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety

Dad, at 89.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

In the summer of 1980, my parents had the summer off. Dad was a college teacher, and my mother, an RN, was encouraged to take unpaid time as the hospital census was low. My parents owned a Jeep, and my dad loaded sleeping bags and two tents in an oilskin on the luggage rack, and secured the bulk with bungee cords. From New Hampshire, my parents headed west with their three kids.

Now, older than my parents were at that time, I wonder what the heck my parents were searching for. As a kid, of course, you simply go with the family flow, show up at the picnic table and eat chili from a plastic bowl. As a writer, I know that all life is propelled by desire, for that bowl of chili, for the wilderness my parents loved, for the far murkier desires that lurk in a human heart. We were never a Bobbsey Twin family (although good lord how I longed for that, a long-quelled desire), but three of us grew up and created our own complicated lives, never far from the wilderness.

Today, my old man is 89, a remarkable age. I woke thinking of him on one of those summer trips, back in the world before cell phones and internet, when no one knew where the five of us were, just us—dad, mom, the three kids—rattling around in that Jeep. Dad always packed tools, and he fixed our vehicle along the way. High up in the Wyoming mountains one summer, it was cold as heck. He got up before any of us, brewed coffee on the Coleman stove and made buttered toast. He unzipped the tent and handed in toast and hot coffee. Stay in your sleeping bags until it warms, he said. We’d been on the road for weeks by then. He was unshaven, bundled in a jacket, and he kept that makeshift hearth of the Coleman stove burning, feeding us toast. Happy birthday, dad. ❤️

And the Hayden Carruth poem that reminds me of my parents…

Birthday Cake

For breakfast I have eaten the last of your birthday cake that you
had left uneaten for five days
and would have left five more before throwing it away.
It is early March now. The winter of illness
is ending. Across the valley
patches of remaining snow make patterns among the hill farms,
among fields and knolls and woodlots,
like forms in a painting, as sure and significant as forms
in a painting. The cake was stale.
But I like stale cake, I even prefer it, which you don’t
understand, as I don’t understand how you can open
a new box of cereal when the old one is still unfinished.
So many differences. You a woman, I a man,
you still young at forty-two and I growing old at seventy.
Yet how much we love one another.
It seems a miracle. Not mystical, nothing occult,
just the ordinary improbability that occurs
over and over, the stupendousness
of life. Out on the highway on the pavement wet
with snow-melt, cars go whistling past. 
And our poetry, yours short-lined and sounding
beautifully vulgar and bluesy
in your woman’s bitterness, and mine almost 
anything, unpredictable, though people say
too ready a harkening back
to the useless expressiveness and ardor of another
era. But how lovely it was, that time
in my restless memory.
This is the season of mud and thrash, broken limbs and crushed briers
from the winter storms, wetness and rust,
the season of differences, articulable differences that signify
deeper and inarticulable and almost paleolithic
perplexities in our lives, and still
we love one another. We love this house
and this hillside by the highway in upstate New York.
I am too old to write love songs now. I no longer
assert that I love you, but that you love me,
confident in my amazement. The spring
will come soon. We will have more birthdays
with cakes and wine. This valley
will be full of flowers and birds.

Vermont Town Meeting Day, Mud.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

I live in a village with a single blinking yellow light at its intersection. In all those multiple trips to Dartmouth for consultation, treatment, medication, we drove out of town, over the hills, along the Connecticut River, all the way to the Hanover, New Hampshire exit. There, a traffic light greeted us.

For a few months, the village will be rerouted through temporary lights while a crew rebuilds walls to keep the town out of the river and replace a footbridge over the river. For drivers, something to complain about. For walkers, a point of interest.

On town meeting day, in the historic town house, a day of voting, hot emotions, decisions of material import. A school budget voted down.

March is the season of fluctuation between mud and ice. One afternoon, the blowing snow drives bitterly into my eyes; I huddle in my coat. The next afternoon, I tie my coat around my waist, let the breeze push through my hair.

The sun beams with real heat. The earth reveals her immense size. Meanwhile, the humans, with all our passion and fury. I seek both the companionship of people around me — how dearly I treasure this, more and more — and seek solace in solitude, in the chitter of chickadees, the clouds rushing over the sky, the full moon hung over a forested ridgeline, gleaming.

“What I like most about Buddhism really is its fearlessness. So much of what warps people is fear of death and fear of impermanence. So much of what we do is simply strategies to try and hold back death, trying to buy time with material things. So at its best Buddhism provides people with a way of seeing their own frailty: you need less in the way of material objects and fortresses around yourself.”
― Gary Snyder