Whatever Happens…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Immersed in a long span of writing and work, I’m nudged into driving on a rain-greasy dirt road, defrost working against the mist on my windshield. Rural Vermont. Wind throws gold leaves over the road.

The days shorten, summer’s radiance cooled. I have numerous irritating habits, but I’m a solidly reliable designated driver—the woman at the bar eating a grilled cheese and tomato sandwich and drinking a bubbly peach kombucha. Mostly like to say, “Have another Dark ‘n’ Stormy.” It’s a slow afternoon, and the bartender and one Fat Tire-drinking soul at the bar’s end lean into our conversation. We laugh at that ageless conundrum of woman-and-men, of desire and sex and unspoken and unmastered rules, for whatever these may be, or what they may be worth.

I laugh until my jaw bones ache. It’s a kind of antidote to a teasing conversation I had recently, shot through with the meanness of sarcasm, that afterwards made me, ashamed, apologize. Aren’t our days short enough? In this warm space, a companion offers me her aioli, which I eat. We gently cheer on a friend as she follows her heart’s path. Home again, I take a long walk through the village and into the woods. These days are discrete things, each its own marvel shot through with toasted sandwiches, the creeping in of Winter. Each day touches the next, an Impressionist painting, Autumn in Vermont, turn of the clock again.

Prayer 

Whatever happens. Whatever  
what is is is what 
I want. Only that. But that. ~ Galway Kinnell

The Garden You Can Reach.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

Blue Lady, above, Dartmouth Hitchcock campus, the statute the DHMC nurses had told me about — elusive woman — when I was marooned in a hospital bed. The 2025 May afternoon before my second, brutally painful surgery, my daughters walked me outside, and we sat on a bench beneath a blooming apple tree. Mother’s Day. Visitors arrived with bouquets and flowerpots. I hadn’t the strength to walk around the building.

The next month, visiting again with my daughters for a follow-up visit, we walked slowly on a path, in the time between surgeon and oncologist consults. We passed the wooden playground that I had seen from the windows of the last room where I stayed. And then there she was — the Blue Lady. Those two weeks I’d passed in that room — in the many rooms where I stayed that winter and spring — she’d stood through the snow and the rain, the sunlight, in an evergreen forest, so nearby.

At Dartmouth again, yesterday (gratefully for no emergency), a leukemia survivor shares his story, a man stricken with disease in his thirties. He says the most remarkable thing: that his disease was the worst and the best thing that ever happened to him. His words make me tremble, this mirror of my own thinking. Afterwards, I step outside in the chilly September sunlight and lean against the building. Wracked by the disease and treatment’s fatigue that transforms my bones utterly inconveniently into stone, I’ve forced myself to make this drive down the interstate. Within me, at all moments, I hold that cleaver of lymphoma.

On this Sunday morning, near to the equinox, that’s about all. Remember, tend to the part of the garden you can reach.

Illumination of Constellations.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

On the way home from a conference in Montpelier, I stop at #10 Pond. Late afternoon, there’s no one around, and I open my laptop and work, perched on a rock. For a good long while, it’s just me and two curious loons swimming by, the September sunlight dropping over the hillside full of hovering gravity-defying dust and damselflies.

A stellar autumn day.

I hadn’t intended to swim, but the afternoon turns sweaty. The water’s temperature hovers at perfection, the morning’s chill vanished this late in the day. Afterwards, I stand on the shore’s mud, drying off. A stranger appears and wades in. The sunlight moves between us, a great creature.

We talk about the clear water and the leaves turning gold, and waking in the post-midnight wee hours. The nights are cold, and we agree that we close our windows, now, to keep some warmth in our houses for the morning. A young mother and two small children scramble down the bank. The youngest child runs into the pond, splashing, hands outstretched.

19 years ago to this day, my youngest and I were at the ER, when my husband had a chainsaw accident. All’s well could be the pronunciation, nearly two decades later, but is that so? Another of these questions that only I seem to ponder—how much of our difficulties were caused by us, how much by fate? An impossible question with no answer. A human, not a loon, koan.

Mid-September, a day balmy-sweet. I drop my damp towel and wade out. I fear I may not swim again this year, maybe never, but as I stroke out further than I have this summer, far beyond shore, I let those fears sink down to the pond’s hidden bottom.

Much later, the day’s heat lingering, I lie on my splintering picnic table beneath the Milky Way and let the words wash out of my mind, sink down through the grass and sandy soil, the realm of worms and grubs and groundhog burrows. The constellations illuminate the darkness.

Metaphor.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

In a whirl of what I call doubt, I hole up, sequester myself from the clanging world and the roaring news that AI has escaped the sandbox and my own gnawing worries about how, anyway, am I spending my allotment of mortal days/weeks/hopefully years?

I wake hours before that that glowing rim of dawn rises over the cemetery, my fine silent neighbors, and begin the work of joining word to word, noun to verb. Writing, I return again to that morning nearly two years ago, when I stood at my bedroom window staring down at a mock orange bush. The upper branches had been broken when the house painter’s ladder fell on the bush’s crown. I had learned the evening before that I had metastatic cancer, later revealed as stage four lymphoma. I stared at the jagged branches and realized I might die that winter.

It was the morning of the 2024 Presidential election, which had and has disastrous consequences for so many people, but that morning, consequences were heading in a markedly different direction for me and my family.

Now, two years later, the place I live on the globe—northern Vermont—again bends towards the shorter, darker days. It won’t be all that long before snow settles in around us. The mock orange yet needs trimming. But the work before me is to write hard into metaphor: to parse the layers of mortality, of human good and ill will, the brokenness and beauty of the world through this human tool.

As for the photo above…. the Old West Church in Calais, September home to Words Out Loud, one of my favorite annual literary events.

We don’t suffer from a shortage of metaphors, is what I mean. But you have to be careful which metaphor you choose, because it matters. If you choose the strings, then you’re imagining a world in which you can become irreparably broken. If you choose the grass, you’re saying that we are all infinitely interconnected, that we can use these root systems not only to understand one another but to become one another. The metaphors have implications. Do you know what I mean?”
― John Green

Practicing.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

Twice a month, I gather a Writer’s Circle at the Civic on Hardwick’s Main Street, about a six-minute walk from my back door. A simple notion—I offer a poem, we write, read, talk. A consistency in a fragmented world. Housed in the former Buffalo Mountain Co-op building, the Civic has three floors. A carpenter, my ex spent countless hours in this building. In those days, I had a key, too, and often used the top floor as a writing studio, slinking in with my laptop and writing in the dim space that stored baskets and yarn. I finished drafting my first book in an unswept corner.

Now, like the curiosity of a large family house, the space is pushed and used in different ways. In the cool September late afternoons, we claim the tables on the first floor, watching Hardwick’s foot and vehicle Main Street traffic. Dump trucks with firewood, trash haulers, pickups and SUVs, kids on bikes. My friends walk to a restaurant for dinner, then amble back, boxed leftover in hands.

We write on. Months in, we’re learning to know each other. Yet the writing is often a surprise. What will emerge?

I live in this town, work in the adjacent town, these complex organisms unique in their own ways, built upon layers of history and families. Endlessly riveting, sometimes maddening. Which, I suppose, is the human way.

And a little Kurt Vonnegut: “If you want to really hurt your parents… the least you can do is go into the arts. I’m not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake… Do it as well as you possible can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”

Solitary Sailboat.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

I make a difficult phone call to a family member. Late afternoon, the perennial sunflowers stretch above my head in my garden. I’ve walked barefoot from my house through the grass that’s already cooling in the shadows to my garden, the soil warm from the day’s sun and so dry it’s verging near dusty. Afterwards, there’s a second call, then a third. I find two zucchinis that need picking, an onion I’d forgotten beneath the tansy. I gather these.

I’ve had this worldview of cause and effect: make a decision, or not a decision, and the consequences creep up or roar upon you. No stasis in this world. A selfish view. Meanwhile, of course, the transient world churns along, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ceaseless waves, the pollinators feasting lustily on these sunflowers whose petals are already beginning their autumn wilt-and-drop.

September: a month jammed with color and sadness, the fleetingness of this life. Two years ago, disease was rampaging in my blood. I did not yet know this, while already my ailing body was sailing me into faraway seas. That journey was me in a solitary life raft, cold winter starlight drenching my eyes. Swimmers tossed over the edge of that rickety inflatable boat the things that kept me alive: medicines of all kinds, tiny bowls of hot soup, books and money, the hands that propped me up and guided me on walks, the company of voices. Meals and kindness that sustained my daughters, and so sustained me.

Overhead, the bluest of a Vermont sky. I answer my phone again. What luck, immensity of good fortune, to be enmeshed in wildly unknown world, relishing fatty marrow.

Into My Own

One of my wishes is that those dark trees,
So old and firm they scarcely show the breeze,
Were not, as ’twere, the merest mask of gloom,
But stretched away unto the edge of doom.

I should not be withheld but that some day
Into their vastness I should steal away,
Fearless of ever finding open land,
Or highway where the slow wheel pours the sand.

I do not see why I should e’er turn back,
Or those should not set forth upon my track
To overtake me, who should miss me here
And long to know if still I held them dear.

They would not find me changed from him they knew—
Only more sure of all I thought was true. ~ Robert Frost