The die is cast?

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

Writing notes for a reading for Call It Madness, I scrawl in my notebook that this novel is jammed with secrets. Avah Lavoie, protagonist, stashes secrets of theft of longing, and she’s surrounded by secret-keepers, too. Early in the novel, I offer readers two clues. These questions underpin my life, too. No surprise.

The first that’s slipped into the narrative is the story of beavers in New England, how these creatures and their laborious dams once flooded New England, rendering that birch bark canoe a viable form of transportation. When the craze for beaver hats set in, the beavers were trapped nearly to extinction, drying up the land. The story of the past shapes the terrain where we live and how we see the world.

The second is Caesar’s line Alea iacta est — the die is cast. The machination of fate. It’s a question that’s arced through my life since I was a teenager, immersed in Russian novels. Now, from my Vermont house, in the tender dawn, pearly crescent moon hanging low in the horizon, the stars snuffing out as light grows, the robins striking up their day’s singing, this line returns to me. Is fate sealed for this country where, by circumstance, I live, a madman as a leader, intent to wreck destruction and pain, war crimes? Around me, the questions reverberates through everyone: how to live?

Sunday morning, the earth after this fierce winter softening, the daffodils pushing up through black earth, the delicate snowdrops pearly, persistent, the strength of these slender stalks a strain of secret, too.

“If, then, I were asked for the most important advice I could give, that which I considered to be the most useful to the men of our century, I should simply say: in the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.” — Leo Tolstoy

Gravy

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

In the town where I work, the summer folks haven’t yet returned. By chance, on a rural road around the lake, I meet a builder. “Hey!” he calls to me, and I can hear the surprise in his voice. You’re alive? I am, indeed, yes.

Around us, a sugar snow melts. Sunlight falls through the trees that are a month out, at least, from this year’s first nubs of leaves. Behind him, the silent snow-covered lake. We kick around, as Vermonters do, what it’s like to live in our Green Mountain state right now, how hot passions run, how immediately aid is given to a neighbor in need. What it’s like to live in the crumbling of the American Empire, a madman at the helm. In a copse of cedars, blackbirds chorus.

Precisely one year ago, I could not walk outside my house alone. Ravaged by cancer and chemo and hunger, I was so weak I trembled, on the verge of falling. A rattle of bones, scraps of flesh.

On this clearing day, on my way home, I stop by the co-op and buy two pears. I lay these on the seat of my car and dart across Main Street to the post office. Without realizing it, I’m running. As I leap onto the sidewalk, I marvel at the pleasure of movement, the sun in my short hair, my cheeks wind-burnt from a recent long walk along a muddy backroad. I took the time to stand before a tree of chittering goldfinches.

All this week I’ve been reading Robert Frost, perhaps my mother’s favorite poet. A poet who wrote of stone walls and apple picking and the ineffable darkness of human life. But here’s a poem to celebrate today, this day, no matter where or who you are, by Ray Carver who knew the great symphony of life, too.

Gravy

No other word will do. For that’s what it was. Gravy.
Gravy these past ten years.
Alive, sober, working, loving and
being loved by a good woman. Eleven years
ago he was told he had six months to live
at the rate he was going. And he was going
nowhere but down. So he changed his ways
somehow. He quit drinking! And the rest?
After that it was all gravy, every minute
of it, up to and including when he was told about,
well, some things that were breaking down and
building up inside his head. “Don’t weep for me,”
he said to his friends. “I’m a lucky man.
I’ve had ten years longer than I or anyone
expected. Pure gravy. And don’t forget it.”

The full extremes.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

The days are hurrying right up to that mark of a year of healing from chemo. After that final treatment, I lived into a little lull where I allowed myself to believe that all would be okay again, but the need for surgery roared up, too. Much as I fought against this — and, honestly, my fighting was from fear of a horrible outcome and, perhaps even more, if I’m dead honest, was my terror of YET MORE PAIN — but as I said, much as I fought against this, I eventually ended up back at Dartmouth in a hospital bed, my daughters beside me wondering when the heck this was going to end. That huddle of surgeons appeared. It was, after all, a teaching hospital.

I said no. The surgeon said, I put you on Tuesday’s schedule. Doubtlessly, he was satisfied to finally, after those months, to get to work repairing me. I stared out the window and knew there was no way I would ever make it home. So I said yes.

But a year… a year ago, I was somewhat seeing a man who was more interested in me than I was in him. I was interested in admiring the daffodils and learning to walk again. I was interested in never returning to the hospital again. I had other things on my mind, too. I was rewriting a book, and, since I had lived, I had to start earning a living again.

It’s been a remarkable year, suffused with radiant joy, with gratefulness to walk and eat and read and write and sleep—without pain. And a year filled, too, with the darkest thoughts I’ve ever experienced, as if the cancer had broken every inhibition, allowed me to feel and fear all the rottenness I’ve kept away for so long. This is not something I’ve written about here, but I keep bearing in mind my oncologist’s prescription: Go and live your life, Brett. A year later, the word that surfaces is fragility. I live in a world that bandies resilience—resilience of soul, resilience of Flood Ready Vermont!, resilience of community and systems. A year later, I know intimately the thinness of energy and health, the scantness of my days, your days, our days. All of it, I know; live all of it, such largess.

“The society to which we belong seems to be dying or is already dead. I don’t mean to sound dramatic, but clearly the dark side is rising. Things could not have been more odd and frightening in the Middle Ages. But the tradition of artists will continue no matter what form the society takes. And this is another reason to write: people need us, to mirror for them and for each other without distortion-not to look around and say, ‘Look at yourselves, you idiots!,’ but to say, ‘This is who we are.” — Anne Lamott

Natural resurrection.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

I am reminded of spring by the quality of the air . . . It is a natural resurrection, an experience of immortality. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Friday begins raw and shivery. I’ve shed my long underwear and regret it. By mid-afternoon, the sun’s emerged. I park along a muddy road and hike up through a soggy pasture to the stone cellar holes. A hundred years ago, a farm must have been rooted on this hillside, bracing against winter’s snowy wind, full of summer sun. A view of mountains and the Lamoille River Valley. Sugar maples dominate what remains.

As I approach, robins flutter, fly, resettle, their singing unbroken. I tie my coat around my waist, cram my hat in my pocket. At home, green nubs of lilies and crocuses emerge, just beginning their greening. Among the lilacs, I look for those daffodils.

Mighty spring, season of healing. The winter’s debris of compost and spent woodpile and last fall’s unclipped perennials emerge. Every year, spring rushes in with a surprise. A certain reminder of mortality, but so lovely, so marvelously endearing…

Thawing earth, tempered heart.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

My neighbor and I kvetch about what the spring thaw reveals: dogshit and stove ashes running into pools of black ink. The mud is a housekeeper’s bane and a gardener’s promise. In the rain, we swap stories of illness and books and parenting. These days, I keep T. S. Eliot’s words in my pocket.

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

Inexorably (and grateful, so grateful to be here, writing), my days unfold towards that first-year mark of emerging from chemo, from the brutality of drugs that both scorched and healed my body. In rickety last summer, I started yoga classes, at first hardly able to climb the stairs to the third floor with its windows that overlook Main Street and the Village Diner and the blinking yellow light intersection. In this mindful class, those ER visits appear again, drift through my thinking, vanish. In my fifties, now, like anyone, I’ve lived through the gamut. The most fearful times of my life, I was often quiet, utterly focused, like the terrifying afternoon when my youngest baby had an allergic reaction and a stranger rushed us to the ER.

Enduring the chemo was like that, too, so many months of cowering beneath a rushing train, nearly always on some variation of the pain scale, intent on the single goal of survival. I longed for the everyday world. In this were small bright gifts. My daughter’s friend would sometimes raid my post office box and bring me books and letters and medical bills, news of the outside world, literary fodder.

Disease is a strict teacher, with lessons of endurance and patience, of non-negotiable acceptance. My world constricted so often, breathing through pain to survive a little more, a little longer. One afternoon in April, my daughters walked me outside the hospital. We sat on a bench beneath a profusely blossoming apple tree. Through the white-petaled flowers with their ruby hearts, the blue sky. We sat and talked. For ten minutes? Half an hour? What does it matter? The limitless spring sky, the infinite mystery.

April this year, not otherwise
   Than April of a year ago,
Is full of whispers, full of sighs,
   Of dazzling mud and dingy snow;
   Hepaticas that pleased you so
Are here again, and butterflies. ~ Edna St. Vincent Millay

Life can only be understood backwards…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

Kierkegaard wrote that famous line, “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” This is the story of my life, and probably of yours, too. I’m a few weeks shy of a year away from the last chemo session. During those hours of infusion, I dozed, watching cardinals and house wrens through the cancer center window. That night, I slept profoundly, believing done, done, not yet realizing an excruciating surgery would lear up unavoidably a month later, that I would phone my siblings and beg for their arrival, that I needed fresh horses, the calvary’s arrival, that the end to these months of cancer treatment seemed impossible.

A year later, I’m still here, living forward, still waking before dawn to reckon what kind of light might kindle the day. A year ago, I could hardly lift my laptop. Now, I text a friend to borrow a belt sander. I am determined to lean my shoulders and back into revitalizing this old wooden floor that had been hidden for years beneath vinyl.

Cancer reshaped me in multiple ways, diluted my rage, cushioned my prickliness, whetted my fierceness to entertain no truck with catty foolishness. Disease fed my solitude and forced me to reach out and grasp hands. And now a sander.

A friend recorded Vermont’s poet laureate Bianca Stone speaking about Robert Frost. The recording is up for a few weeks on the local radio station, WGDR, on the March 22 Bon Mot show; it will feed your heart.

And one of my favorite Frost poems:

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.