The truth is erasure.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

Saturday morning, I chip at my day’s list, persistent: my thousand creative words, email that shouldn’t linger, the house chores of wood and compost. On the nearby trails, I ski and later drink coffee with my beloveds, and we ponder construction that will tie up this town, Hardwick, until the sundress-wearing season. At home again, I finish the 2025 taxes, stow things in boxes, preparing for a carpenter who will remove a kitchen wall and put a window in my kitchen. This plan I hatched while I was marooned in my house for months, struggling through chemo. Now, this winter, I wondered, Am I mad? Will I still proceed? But opening the heart of my house to the view of the village seems a hopeful act, a kind of creative resistance against dismal five-year survival statistics, an act of beauty in contrast to the darkening world.

I abruptly need the sky and the muddy earth beneath my boots. I consider phoning this friend or that friend to walk with me, but I doubt anyone will jump at the sudden request. On this ridgeline road, I see a friend who quickens my blood. We walk and talk for bit about the things that nourish my winter-worn soul: about the unexpected in our lives, about writing and doubt, an April event of poetry and art and food. About what Bashō called “the journey itself is home.”

She heads home, and I keep on along the maples. All winter I’ve walked here. One frigid January, I’d gone too far and considered flagging a stranger in a car for a ride, but I didn’t. I kept on, as we all do. An eagle spreads its wings over a hayfield then disappears over a treeline. Blackbirds sing. A skunk waddles along the road. The snowbanks are above my head. The creature and I consider each other. Then, on our respective sides of the road, we each ease along. When I look back, the skunk is hurrying along, too.

Another spring. So many years I’ve lived through a New England winter, so many springs, and yet each March arrives as a surprise, a fresh reckoning. The wind smells of the opening earth. Twilight will soon be nestling in, and I’ll be home again, feeding my cats and the woodstove, eating a blood orange. A friend plans to visit, and we’ll keep each other company. Better to think of the days without names or numbers. Wiser to place these with a friend’s name, with skunk, puddle, blood moon.

You ask the sea, what can you promise me
and it speaks the truth; it says erasure.

… Nothing can be forced to live.
The earth is like a drug now, like a voice from far away,
a lover or master. In the end, you do what the voice tells you.
It says forget, you forget.
It says begin again, you begin again. ~ Louise Glück

Strange gift.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

A year ago, I couldn’t manage the three steps onto my back porch without holding a daughter’s hand. A reversal of those early parenting years when I held my toddlers’ teeny fingers as my children learned to walk and then, quickly, to run. A year later, my oldest and her partner load up our skis, and we head out for a seven-mile trek. I once thought idly of skiing, a mere pastime, nothing more. Now, it feels nothing less than miraculous.

A year ago, my daughters and the partner propped me together through the darkest months of my life. In those months while I endured chemo, little bits of lights and happiness trickled towards me, as if falling down an ancient stone-walled well. Sunlight in my living room, in the hospital halls, (never in the subterranean ER), flash of cardinals, the boxes of books and gifts of miso and cards and checks that kept me alive.

Post-ski, I feed my mewling cats and eat blood oranges, then lie on the couch and read Jonathan Buckley’s One Boat. I’m relaxed as if I’ve swum with a friend in a Vermont pond, and then we linger on the shore, talking about nothing and everything. But it’s February yet and snowfall is circling again. We’d skied from hayfields down into the forest and circled around and around. At one moment, I’d hit fatigue, where I wondered if I would emerge from these deeply snowy woods. It’s a place I’m now beginning to know intimately, where I know the life I clutch so fiercely can so easily slip away. I was reminded recently of Robert Frost’s lines that “the best way out is through,” a minute guide for human life. On this day, all the human things.

Shift in POV.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments
(photo G Stanciu)

My daughter sends word and photos of walking on Lake Champlain, frozen hard. I send word back, Be mindful! For those of us who love to swim and lounge on lakes and ponds, walking on the ice in the dead of winter is exhilarating, a flip in view in these cold months.

11 degrees this morning when I rise in the dark and shovel ashes from the woodstove while the cats mewl a protest for breakfast. I’m still thinking of those photos, and how it feels to have the cold air descend on your cheeks and walk that border between hypothermic water and all that sky. In a troubled winter I worked in a nearby town, I’d walk on the lake’s ice at noon and lie down and stare up at the sky. There were a few ice fishing shanties, never a sign of anyone, just me and the crows, all ice and the limitless sky and whatever the heavens had to offer. Sometimes spitting snow, sometimes endless blue, sunlight without warmth.

Heart of February. The skiing is excellent. A friend who I’ve known forever picks me up, and we walk along an ice-and-sand-strewn road. Below, the valley where the Black River and Route 14 is hidden in the folds of mountains. We look across and muse at the snow we can see on the mountains’ forest floor, how the bare trees reach up towards the sky.

Full moon:
my ramshackle hut
        is what it is. — Issa

Plunging through….

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

I drive a friend home, and we linger in my car, talking. She asks me what makes an individual an individual. Early evening, darkness wraps around us, my headlights off, the day’s dripping icicles frozen again. The juncos and cardinals and finches that nip at my feeders have settled silently for the night. I am at the place of near-wordlessness again. I’ll be home again soon, too tired to brew tea, longing to lie down and let sleep wash over me for the night.

Nonetheless, we talk about memories and habits, the nature babies carry into this world, the inescapability of genetics. I lean forward and rest my forehead on the steering wheel.

Cancer, that relentless instructor, reshaped my appreciate for the common noun and verb—for the tangible—drove me inescapably into my body, far from ideology into the ineffable appreciation of swallowing water, the comfort of visiting friends, sunlight on my face.

In northern Vermont, we are again in the prolonged season of start-and-stop-and-start again, the loosening from ice on back roads, the freeze again, the steadily warming and lengthening light. On this road, I meet an acquaintance and his sweet little dog. We walk together for a bit, speculating about schools and consolidation and possibilities that perhaps will never transpire. Meanwhile, the dog sets her small muddy paws on my knee. I crouch down and rub her velvety ears. The cold breathes from the dirt road, the turning earth’s exhalation.

“… this life is not a gate, but the horse plunging through it.” — Jane Hirshfield

Stars as a trail of crumbs.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

When I was a little child, age six or so, I lay awake before sleeping and wondered at the borders of the darkness. My sister, brother, and I shared a room that seemed vast, although now I remember the footprint of that townhouse and realize my memory of that room is child-sized. Above the kitchen and entryway, the room could not have been large. Across the upstairs landing was our parents’ room with a view of the interstate and, some nights, a flickering drive-in movie screen. While my younger brother slept, my sister and I discussed the limits of infinity.

We lived there for two years. Now, I realize my parents turned 40 in that townhouse with the orange-painted metal door. In those two years, I have no memory of the stars in that place, an odd thing given that the night constellations are my earliest memory, my father parking our Volkswagen bug on a roadside, and my mother admiring how the Santa Fe city lights mirrored the stars.

The night before I realized I had cancer I stood on a back road in rural Vermont. It was late autumn, and, my God, how the country dark gleams its power, how radiant the ineffably distant stars. I carried that memory with me as I descended into the depths of profound illness. A few nights ago, over a year after that autumn night, I parked in Montpelier and walked along the sidewalk that was mostly empty in the sharp cold. Small lights gleamed in the closed-up shops—the candy store, the bookshop, the AT&T outlet. The stars pierced the night: sacred and profane illumination. The cold drove me back to my car, and my headlights showed me the way over the low mountains, back home again. I’d left my porch light on. I stood on my step for a moment, shivering. I was more perceptive as a child, before language encouraged me to divide the world into categories. Wonder. For this moment, nothing but wonder.

“Sometimes I think we can learn everything we need to know about the world when we read fairy tales. Be careful, be fearless, be honest, leave a trail of crumbs to lead you home again.”
― Alice Hoffman

Bake and eat your cake.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

I ask a few friends to eat leftover birthday cake on a cold afternoon. But my house is warm, or at least in the living room with the woodstove toasty and the sun streaming in and my two cats stretched out on the rug, appreciative of company.

While we talk, I remember that, a year ago, I was in a rotten funk, after another hospital stay, a chemo infusion delayed, and a growing fear-bordering-terror that I might never escape the cancer patient status. I did. Hallelujah—and again, hallelujah. In those sleepless nights, I read the New York Times, including a great deal of NYT cooking.

My parents taught me to cook, and I’ve been preparing meals my entire life, raised two kids on homemade bread, stirfrys, shepherd’s pie, focaccia with handfuls of herbs from my garden, but I couldn’t bake a cake worth the four-letter name. A year ago, I could eat about six things, including Saltines and hard-boiled egg yolks and broth. While my body was, actually, starving, I read about cooking, a variation of trapped in a tent on a polar exploration while a months-long storm raged.

It was clear to me that I couldn’t bake a cake because I didn’t follow the directions, but here I was, following to a precise T my oncologist’s directions, or as best I could. The upshot is that, weirdly, having cancer taught me to read the pesky directions and bake a decent cake. This does not translate to the whole of my life; I’ve saved my patience for writing and enduring long walks in the cold. But for baking the occasional cake? Read the directions, choose a decent recipe, and don’t rush.

“When it comes to most skills, failure is the only way to become better at something. Knitting teaches you that. You may have to unwind all of your stitches and start anew. That doesn’t mean you’ve wasted your time. You learn from every stitch, even those that don’t amount to anything. All writers should be made to knit a hat before they start writing a novel. It would help with understanding the importance of revision, and that the process is what can bring you the most joy.”

~Alice Hoffman