Dividing line: rivers running north and south.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Lost, I spend a crazy amount of time on back roads, driving from here to there, searching for a house where I’ve never been. A porcupine ambles along a dirt road. I slow, the car windows rolled down, the sunroof open and dust drifting in. The quilled creature disappears into the roadside weeds. I follow the paved state highway north, a two-line twisting road that cuts through farm fields jeweled with blooming dandelions.

I find them, finally, this kind couple, and apologize for my lateness. Turns out, they’ve worried about me. We stand outside in the sunlight, with their little dog and their grown daughter who stops by, this witty and laughing family who has endured tragedy. We’re on a rise of land that overlooks a pond. We are at the dividing place, I learn, where water flows both south and north. As we talk on this old homestead, I sense the world’s expanse, how brooks and streams and thin rivers join immense lakes, powerful rivers, the mighty beast of the Atlantic Ocean. Around us rises the history of this homestead, how the house and family has grown and contracted and changed over the decades. Spread overhead, the gleaming night sky, the pinprick constellations.

Black flies chew my hairline. Post-chemo, my lost straight hair returned as ringlets. On my way again, I retrace my way through swamps dense with marsh marigold. On this sunny day, the trees push out new leaves, further, further, in these few hours. I return to a former school house, where the town is voting again that day on a failed school budget. People come and go, cheery with the spring weather. I stay late for a hearing and drive home under a blood-red sunset, the breeze through my car windows sweet with plowed earth and manure.

How furiously I labor to remain in this world. To savor the inevitability of lostness, the chance crossing of a porcupine on its solitary animal journey, the stunning May blossoms. Many months ago, I asked my brilliant oncologist what I did to invite lymphoma into my body. Vehemently, he replied that I’d done nothing, absolutely nothing, to cause this brutal disease.

This physician saved my ragged life, but do our philosophical planes align? Two years ago, as the cancer sunk its silent teeth into my flesh, those intertwined demons of fatigue and despair shook me, too. Always now, skimming beneath my days and nights, flickers that fear: relapse. I’d spent so much time, that winter of illness, in the Dartmouth ED that the nurses and MDs became familiar. They knew my daughters and I by name. The general surgery team appeared repeatedly in that huddle around my bed, and I began to understand the hues of that word restraint as they considered their surgeon thoughts. There was that dreadful evening when I informed the oncologist that I could endure no more, and he gently replied that I could. He would get me through. So I endured. Many years ago, when I was so young, 21 and naive and freshly falling in love, I whined to a professor that I could not finish my thesis; I’d done enough. He kindly informed me that someday I would write a book and I would fear I would never reach the end. All this, in fact, transpired.

Restraint and effusive joy. Sooty despair, the pleasure of a purring cat. As the night settled down through twilight, I drank tea on my back step, leaning against my house. A fox trotted across the violet-strewn grass, quickly, on its way. So much for monotone winter. Wild spring.

Dandelion 

The first of a year’s abundance of dandelions 

is this single kernel of bright yellow 

dropped on our path by the sun, sensing 

that we might need some marker to help us 

find our way through life, to find a path 

over the snow-flattened grass that was 

blade by blade unbending into green, 

on a morning early in April, this happening 

just at the moment I thought we were lost 

and I’d stopped to look around, hoping 

to see something I recognized. And there 

it was, a commonplace dandelion, right 

at my feet, the first to bloom, especially 

yellow, as if pleased to have been the one, 

chosen from all the others, to show us the way.

~ Ted Kooser

Re-teaching loveliness.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

Photo above is evidence of my loose approach to living with cats, an approach my visitors either embrace or wonder, what’s up with the cats on the counters? Brush stroke by rag wipe, I proceed with my kitchen project. I am a woman who craves order. Keeping my kitchen in cardboard boxes is not my SPARK JOY go-to; nonetheless, I persevere.

With added windows, I am relearning the light in my kitchen. Sure as anything, the metaphor of this project does not elude me. A year ago, a friend visited me in my Dartmouth room, bringing knitting and butterscotch pudding. Before she left, she walked me around the hall, 150′. We walked that loop twice? Through the window, the green and rain filled the day.

A year later, novel writing and paintbrush washing, property taxes and weeding, the Monday morning plan for a week’s work. The metaphor of this has not escaped me. In the co-op, reaching for broccoli, a long-ago acquaintance startles when he sees me.

I’d heard you were dead, he says.

Not yet, I laugh. Squeaked through, for now.

A year ago, I’d envisioned a kind of ease for myself; surviving lymphoma had made me invincible to misery in certain ways—a disinterest in petty bullshit, a newfound ability to let the little bickering struggles that seem to plague our time, or maybe simply our human nature, fall with the dust and debris on the kitchen floor. But what rose, instead, with sharpened teeth, were those existential questions: how does meaning structure my life? Who’s with me? Where to tap happiness, that old true word?

Walking home, I cough and touch the lymph nodes in my neck. Has that mighty disease returned? I’m at the kids’ ballfield, where the turkey vulture roost in the surrounding woods. Evening, the thrush sing. Holding these two things — the thrush’s melody, the circling vultures — I head home. Where the cats wait for me on the kitchen counter.

The bud

stands for all things,

even for those things that don’t flower,

for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;   

though sometimes it is necessary

to reteach a thing its loveliness… ~ Galway Kinnell

“… spring’s thousand tender greens…”

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

Two sleek loons swim and dive in the lake while I stand on the shore, listening the conversation about mean water level and stones and a grandfather who bought this property, back in the years when no phones reached here, and travel to the lakeshore was by foot or by hoof or a wooden-spoked wheel.

Chilly, I pull my sweatshirt hood over my head. A story about this summer cottage is that it was a farmhouse. Not so long ago, the landscape was cleared around this lake, and farms stretched down to the water. In the winter, ice was sawed into great chunks and shipped via train, cushioned in sawdust, to faraway homes.

In my own home, the carpenter has finished. I keep on with my paintbrush, call a daughter for reinforcements. A year ago, just out of surgery, I could stand only as a wilting flower stem, crooked over in pain. Sequestered in a hospital, I longed for cold rain on my face. Now, on this breezy afternoon, the wet wind burrows behind my neck. Later, at home, I feed my woodstove. There’s nothing permanent, but for now, this.

… I longed for spring’s thousand tender greens,

and the white-throated sparrow’s call

that borders on rudeness….

— Jane Kenyon

First greens, gift.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

On this Mother’s Day, I pull on my coat and wander into the early spring garden with hot coffee. Blue dawn, the birds are at their singing nesting work already. My cats, satiated with breakfast, sleep on windowsills, dreaming perhaps of red-breasted robins prying worms from the rain-soft earth.

My mother died two springs ago. She’d lived a long life, crammed full, from joyous passion to bitter despair. In the same year, I suddenly stared at my own mortality. In those first days of the cancer realization, I railed that I wasn’t done, that to die while my youngest was yet a teenager, was out of the natural order. Or what I wanted to believe was the natural order. A belief which had, of course, no bearing on any natural law, whatsoever.

Severe illness returned me to childhood again. Too weak to boil water for oatmeal or tea, with hours upon days upon weeks upon months, lying in bed or on the couch, watching sunlight and shadows move across the maple floors in my house, the hospital tiles. There was an old tradition of slipping a knife beneath a laboring woman’s mattress to cut the labor pains. In those months I fought to remain alive, I slowly realized my mother and father had each slipped me a knife: my father gave me that writing and fortitude, my mother a wily stubbornness that was sometimes silly and often tenaciously sharp. Invaluable.

Yet here I am, lucky enough to have another act of my life unfolding. The daffodils I planted last October are blooming, brilliant yellow against the row of lilacs that are just beginning to bud. In my kitchen, I washed last night’s dishes, discovered a white quartz left as a gift on the table.

The First Green of Spring

Our walking in the swamp picking cowslip, marsh marigold,
this sweet first green of spring. Now sautéed in a pan melting
to a deeper green than ever they were alive, this green, this life,

harbinger of things to come. Now we sit at the table munching
on this message from the dawn which says we and the world
are alive again today, and this is the world’s birthday. And

even though we know we are growing old, we are dying, we
will never be young again, we also know we’re still right here
now, today, and, my oh my! don’t these greens taste good.

~ David Budbill

Map Revision

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Fickle May, windy and wet, sweating and chilly, the green urgently shoving through last year’s dead brown. Every day, a different pleasure: marsh marigold blooming in bracken water, violets sprinkled under the apple trees with their tiny tufts of leaves.

Nights and early mornings, I lie on the couch and read Arthur Frank’s The Wounded Storyteller, “The voices that speak to us at particular moments in our lives, especially during transitions or crises, imprint themselves with a force that later voices never quite displace.”

Oh, the imprint of life.

A year ago, in yet another Dartmouth-Hitchcock hospital room—fourth floor, the best of the ten rooms where I stayed that winter, with a sunset view of the mountains and such a kind nursing staff—the surgeons stopped in yet again, the pack of them, head surgeon to med students. Listening, I stared through the window at the walking path that wraps around the medical complex. I supposed I could keep arguing against surgery, get someone to push me in a wheelchair to the elevator, hobble outside, and then return via the Emergency Entry. My daughters and I were pretty darn familiar with that entry by then. There was no other option; I said, okay, signed the consent, phoned my siblings and pleaded for fresh horses to arrive, to get me through.

On this dawn-rosy May morning, no fresh horses needed today. A year ago, my daughters arrived for Mother’s Day, and walked me outside beneath the just-opening apple blossoms. We visited the courtyard gardens that we had stared at through the winter of chemotherapy, snow blowing. The cherry trees were profusions of pink. I salvaged books from free carts, novels and histories that I would stock up, like pain meds, to ferry me through the next round of recovery.

This morning, the daylight flooding in, a year later, a wall’s been removed in my kitchen. The dishes and baking pans are piled in cardboard boxes, a sole knife and cutting board in my sink. Will this chaos keep me in the world? Will messiness root me here? Or is this simply my lifelong patterns of creation-destruction-creation, life’s paddlewheel, that I lean on now? Er, maybe that I’ve always stood upon?

“Stories have to repair the damage that illness has done to the ill person’s sense of where she is in life, and where she may be going. Stories are a way of redrawing maps and finding new destinations.” — Arthur Frank

Harrowed Up Heart.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

As part of the 2050 project, I’m asked to read at Newbury’s Tenney Library, surely one of the prettiest Vermont libraries, and Vermont has plenty of these. The crowd is full and cheery, the snacks are sweet, the librarian gives me a tour of this enchanted place, built inside as a series of arches. The original gas lamps have been converted to electricity, and I ponder what it was like in 1910 or so, coming in from a slushy afternoon to a warm and glowing library.

Newbury is a town on the Connecticut River, the village high on a bluff. Before I head out, I walk across the street and behind a church. Through the trees and brambles that are just tufting with green, enormous fields stretch along the river, long rectangles of emerald, others black earth harrowed up for planting.

I linger, shivering a little in my wool sweater, hands jammed in my jeans pockets. Early May, spring season of promise. That plowed-up land, the blue swoop of the river, the invincible thrust of spring pushing mightily through the chill — such happiness here. I head not back to the interstate, but up a mountain’s dirt road, to a house surrounded by green and blooming daffodils and a tangle of apple trees. A lovely couple invited the readers to dinner. The couple is both humorous and gracious, the conversation full of the idiosyncrasies of local talk and global concerns. The pleasant evening drifts into night, from eggplant to lemon tart. Exhaustion, my now familiar, weighs my bones. After thankyous, I stand outstanding in the cold wet, breathing what might be the spicy scent of daffodils growing, threading through in my mind the unfamiliar roads I’ll follow home. Then I let that worry go and simply breathe, damp spring holding me, as if I’m a daffodil, too.


“Like daffodils in the early days of spring, my neurons were resprouting receptors as the winter of the illness ebbed.”
― Susannah Cahalan, Brain on Fire