A smidgen of writing.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu

The clocks cease meaning for me. To gird myself for an appointment, a call, I set an alarm, ask a daughter for a reminder. Counting backwards proves stupidly difficult: what hour to we need to leave? Write this on a sticky, please.

The flip side: I wake early one morning, kibble the cats, open my notebook and begin writing the pieces of this book I’m rewriting in my head. Daunted, I copy my draft into a folder. Someday whole sections might become another book, an essay, trash. Weeks before I heard the cancer diagnosis, I took a class with the remarkable Lauren Markham. All these weeks, these endless hours sleeping and half-dreaming, reading hungrily, much of this solitary but never lonely, much surrounded by skilled strangers who spill snippets of their own remarkable lives in the wee hours of the night, syringe in hand.

Now, aided perhaps by exhaustion, I envision the skeleton of this revised book, the joints that hold these stories together, beginning in a moldy basement, rising to a glass complex, surely, the endless firmament.

Neuropathy comes and goes, reappears in my fingertips. The knobby bones of my wrists and knees expand beyond my dwindling muscle mass. The prednisone prescription reappears for five chemo days, beginning next week. I try not to think of that, of the force these mighty drugs will weld over my body, how I will yield, pray for their power, try to keep to my feet at least marginally, moving my body, keeping in the everyday realm.

Like anyone, I’ve hard used this woman’s body I’ve been gifted, through pregnancies and nursing, decades of sugaring and the countless cords of firewood I lifted and burned each year, churning ice cream to sell with a baby on my back, fourteen years of peddling syrup spring to snowy autumn at farmers markets. The bleeding fissures on my fingers from washing wool filters. But so much pleasure, too, the ineffable joy of cuddling a daughter in my lap, of mountain climbing, intimacy, of lying on the dewy grass under the creamy rising moon. Women my age often complain about the indignity of hot flashes, but the real indignity for me has always been when the flush of my changing body courses through me in a male-centered meeting in my difficult work of budgeting for a town.

A rambly post here….. a variation of my inside-out world where the former rules are revealed as trite. Patience, patience. An hour of work. Half a cup of tea. Another half hour. December sunlight.

16 thoughts on “A smidgen of writing.”

  3. it may be hard to remember appointments, but your prose is beautiful. And which is more important? “beginning in a moldy basement, rising to a glass complex, surely, the endless firmament.” And so many more sentences…

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  7. Thank you for your writing. I imagine sitting at your kitchen table with a cup of tea, being a friendly ear to bend if needed. My own ability to read and write has been largely hijacked for the past several years of brain fog and exhaustion (a side effect of a spiritual awakening), only letting up sporadically. That said, I recently tore through Unstitched in two sittings. So beautifully crafted!
    It brought back memories of my time living in Vermont years ago (college and a little bit after), and educated me a bit about just how complex drug addiction in particular is. I’ve dealt with my own addictive behaviors but thankfully never with drugs. However, drug addiction has touched the lives of a few friends’ children. Sending Reiki to you for continued healing. – Susan

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    • I’m so happy to hear you liked Unstitched and found my book helpful! 🩵Writing that book was one of my life’s feats. …. Here’s wishing you good fortune on your own journey. I used to consider brain fog and exhaustion the enemy, but my understanding now is more nuanced. Wishing you good health…..

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