Real v. Unreal, Doorway in Seasons.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

Evening, I visit with a friend on her porch. I’ve forced myself from the couch, leaving behind a Carl Hoffman book. My friend talk about little things—knitting mittens, a curry recipe—and the submerged currents that drive our lives—poetry and sex and a vision to transform my side yard into perennials. The daylight dwindles. Today, foliage colors hum at their radiant best, and I say goodbye, gather my hat, and head out on a walk into the twilight. That afternoon, I’d stopped along the Rail Trail to run. A man had parked a long RV in the otherwise empty lot, watercolors and an easel propped on the granite block wall. When I returned, gasping and sweaty, we talked for a bit. I just want to be here, he says, outside. Which mirrors my own sentiment.

There’s no one else out this night, but two boys on bicycles, racing and shouting, crossing the nearly empty road.

Twice, today, I’ve had that otherworldly sense of déjà-vu. While listening to this stranger with his watercoloring and my friend with her library book in her lap, I’m also in a consultation room and the oncologist tells me the lymphoma has returned. I understand the seriousness in his voice; we’ve laughed about many other things, but there’s no laughing now. In this strange state, I leap up and stand in the doorway, one foot in the room, one in the halfway. Real, or not?

For years, I’ve endeavored to hone my discipline, to keep writing, keep working, read, walk, pay attention, listen to the story around you, for goodness sake, but the physical pain of cancer forced me to be here now, in ways I didn’t want. Nonetheless. And that’s one enormous nonetheless.

I loop around the village and return up my short steep road in the darkness. I’ve been on that threshold for years, half in, half out, always running for the woods and the trails along the river, the mountain path, gathering little scraps of conversations and friendships into my pockets, never trusting their radiance, like this foliage, won’t fade. Cancer, of course, as disease will, rendered running impossible. Across that lawn where I intend to sow a wider garden, a fox streaks, shadowy in the night. For a few moments, I stand in the surprisingly warm end-of-September night, breathing in the fragrance of fallen apples, juice sweetening the earth.

And that Hoffman book about the Asmat? The shifting realm of what’s real and what’s not? Unlearn the questions.

“But the world is in motion, we are but small pieces, and control is an illusion. We make our own luck, our own destiny, but only to a point, and we never know what could happen at any moment…”
― Carl Hoffman

Wild Apples: Details of Living.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

The red of my friend’s daughter’s hair matches this autumn—sunshot red—remarkable. Walking along a dirt road flanked by immense maples, abundant with purple asters, the child races forward, drags behind, curious as heck about the world as she gathers stones from the road and wonders if we might follow this inviting path in the woods. Where does it go?

She’s curious, too, about me and what I might say. My dog loves to bite. (The dog does not.) She holds out her hand to illustrate that it looks like mine. Walking, talking with my friend who’s doing her own fascinating unique adult things, a line from Dr. Paul Kalanithi’s book When Breath Becomes Air returns to me. Holed up in my hand-me-down chair from another friend, nearly incoherent with fatigue by the working week’s end, I’ve just reread this little gem. “There is a moment, a cusp, when the sum of gathered experience is worn down by the details of living. We are never so wise as when we live in this moment.”

In ways, the book is a meditation on that Buddhist proverb, for advice post-enlightenment: “Chop wood, carry water.”

One result of what appears to be a permanent stamp of intermittent fatigue (not a sleepiness alleviated by a nap) is a double-edged parsimony and generosity. I’ve refining a few simple sentences in email and meetings—that’s all I have for this—but I also often ignore the hours; I lose track of time in ways I never allowed myself before.

My friend climbs an apple tree and shakes the fruit loose. Her daughter considers an apple seriously. The tree was planted years ago and has now gone wild, unpruned, its branches an immense tree bouquet. The apple’s skin is crimson, tart, the flesh sweet. The child rubs her thumb over a bump in the skin and then bites into the apple. She eats gleefully.

If I timestamped this, I’d note, somewhere in Vermont, late September, gnawed apple cores tossed back into the wild.

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 / 6 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