Author: Brett Ann Stanciu

Inauguration Eve. Cold. And me, the mad mutterer.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 18 Comments

On this Sunday inauguration eve, all day long, intermittently, as I go about the things I do, I’ve been thinking of a Mary Oliver poem. As I’ve written before, a friend has been sending me a poem each day that she reads aloud in her voice as clear as winter wind. Mid-January, Vermont, is the season both of winter settling in for the long haul and, conversely, as life often is, of lengthening days. We seek the merest brightening of the light as proof of spring’s promise. In her recording, my friend mentions seeing the division of seed packets in farm store, solid evidence of spring’s inevitability.

Later, just before twilight filters in, I walk out alone, tromping the short path through the woods and cemetery to the upper edge of the village. A few flakes of snow twirl. Otherwise, no one. My boots crunch over hard, packed snow. My mind is jammed with its usual monologue, when suddenly I realize my euphoria at walking along this wide road, flanked by white pines with broken branches, a single crow winging its way over the snowy Little League field. Yes, yes. I’ve forgotten my mittens, and my hands knotted in my coat pockets throb with cold, and yet I keep chortling like a mad woman, Yes and yes and yes.

Like any writer, I’m quite capable of running wildly with words, but as for the politics and national people, I’ll simply leave Mary Oliver’s words from her poem “Work, Sometimes.”

… What are we sure of?  Happiness isn’t a town on a map,
or an early arrival, or a job well done, but good work
ongoing.  Which is not likely to be the trifling around
with a poem.

Then it began raining hard, and the flowers in the yard
were full of lively fragrance.

You have had days like this, no doubt…. Ah, what a
moment!

As for myself, I swung the door open.  And there was
the wordless, singing world.  And I ran for my life.

Tiny flames, ice.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 18 Comments

Bootstep by bootstep, my strength begins to return. It’s cold, darn darn cold, slicing at my eyes and cheeks. The cold and I are no strangers. I made maple syrup for years in an unheated outbuilding, raised my daughters in a house with scant heat, have spent decades of my life tromping beneath snowy trees in search of…. what? The usual things I suppose, by which I mean the unexpected. Or maybe just the sheer loveliness of a fresh snowfall.

Here’s my barometer for how I know I am improving, the cancer lessening. A long ago college friend appears at my house with the flu, explaining away his symptoms. At first, I don’t understand; what is he asking me? My old moxie rears up, fueled perhaps by the Red Devil chemo drugs. I’m taking in a poison to save my life, after all. As if it’s not enough to have cancer, I had to send him away, banish him from our hearth, point that what, whatever he thought he might be doing had nothing to do with me at all. It was all him. At this precise moment, there’s no space here for that, or for the flu.

Later that night, neighbors appeared with ice lanterns made from five-gallon buckets. I grabbed my coat and stood outside, talking, while they lit beeswax candles and shared news of town. When they left, the tiny flames glowed brightly in the starless night, sure evidence that fire can burn even surrounded by fat ice.

Vessels, Rooms, the Unbounded Sky.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 15 Comments

16 degrees on this sun-kissed Sunday, my cat considering the squirrels.

In cancer land, still putting my muscles together, I’m outdoors only with someone else these days, the long solitary walks yet a future promise, again. Early mornings, I brew coffee, fill the cats’ bowls with their breakfast. All day long, we’re filling and emptying things: water glasses and soup bowls and cat dishes (again), filling a notebook page with penciled words, a suitcase with my daughter’s clean clothes as she heads back to college, a new lightbulb in an empty socket.

Likewise, this disease has filled my body for months, now emptying; illness has slipped into every crevice in my family’s life, too, like the power of freeze in a river, rearranging the flow.

In a year that’s begun with so many families losing their homes on the other side of the country, the sunlight on this morning, a chilly walk this afternoon, the cold scraping at my cheeks – yes, yes – a scrap of gratitude for January Vermont sunlight. Here’s line from one of my favorite writers, Andre Dubus, who knew loss keenly.

“We receive and we lose, and we must try to achieve gratitude; and with that gratitude to embrace with whole hearts whatever of life that remains after the losses.”

Three things of varying importance…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 19 Comments

Because I’m writing from Vermont, first, the weather: cheek-slashing cold, furious wind.

Second, back at Dartmouth these past few days for a consult and an infusion. Checking in, my insurance card was denied. Denied because it’s January and the new year wasn’t set correctly, or denied because some system is broken? I imagine these numerous co-pays, from ninety-cents to $750, piling up in my electronic portal. I’ll kick that to Monday, begin to straighten that out then…

Halfway through my treatments, the Good Doctor gives me the heads up about what’s to come, including the shift from what I’m calling Cancer Land back to the Everyday World. Although I’m sure he hears this repeatedly, I say how otherworldly is this cancer journey. Rarefied isn’t precisely the word I’m looking for, as so much of disease isn’t lofty or grandiose but mundane and sometimes miserable. But the journey is like nothing else I’ve undertaken, laced through at times with impending death, elevating the stakes to the utter center point of what matters. There’s nothing trivial here.

Third (and certainly not last), I’m so grateful for the lovely mail in my P.O. Box – cards and books, seeds and poems, such as this one by Danusha Laméris.

Insha’Allah

I don’t know when it slipped into my speech

that soft word meaning, “if God wills it.”

… How lightly we learn to hold hope,

as if it were an animal that could turn around

and bite your hand. And still we carry it

the way a mother would, carefully,

from one day to the next.

Refusal that the World is Random.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 24 Comments

Cancer or not, the everyday world proceeds. I renegotiate the dullard car insurance (why would I pay to insure myself when I’m not driving?). This morning, the cat, seeking the milk jug on the counter, leaps on the kibble container I didn’t properly close. Kibble mounds over the kitchen floor. For the briefest moment, both cats stare, unable to process their astounding luck: a landslide of food.

Among minor domestic changes which involved a ridiculous amount of discussion: we swapped one washing machine for another. I posted the old one (a workhorse from the previous century) for free on the local digital bulletin board. While I was heating up the pot roast my friend dropped off, a young man I’ve known since he before he lost his milk teeth asked if the washing machine was available.

He arrived not long afterwards. We stood in the kitchen, talking about infected wisdom teeth (his, removed) and cancer (mine, in process of removal) and the medical system and capitalism. He asked if I knew what gave me the cancer, what empowered one gene to divide and divide again and again.

I have my theories, my guesses about this answer, nothing hard and set chiseled into stone. But isn’t it often the way that a sudden shift in events is triggered by multiple strands of actions, working seen or unseen? Leaning against the door, rose-cheeked with cold, he posits that nothing happens without a reason, that the universe is never capricious. I set my wooden spoon on the counter.

Here’s a thing: two months — 60 days — into the cancer world, with two rushed ER visits and two dodges of the grave, two chemo sessions, a complete upheaval of my life, my family’s, my colleagues’ — I woke early one recent morning and realized cancer will be with me until I cross into the next realm. But likewise, what I’ve labored hardest and most tenaciously and (often) most joyously will be with me, too. Raising babies into women, writing books, sobriety, cutting off a troubled marriage and recreating my life. But aren’t we all that way? Shouldering along with us the stones of our lives we’ve chosen, and the rain that’s fallen from the heavens and soaked us, too?

Here’s a Vermont Public Radio interview with Vermont Almanac editors Dave Mance and Patrick White, about this unique books and the non-cliché Vermont world.

A few lines from Dave Mance’s preamble to a book packed with plenty more….

…. seek out things that are real and hard…. Gravitate towards things that are beautiful. Lean in to things you cannot understand…. Tell stories where trees are protagonists. Look at the lines on your palm and see that, like wood, your skin has grain.

In the cracks around kindness.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 28 Comments

Thaw, on this New Year’s Day, hovering near freezing, my neighbor’s yard under her great pines exposed to soggy grass, the fields on the hillside across the village bare as late April.

I pull on my coat and boots and stand on my porch. The tree branches are festooned with droplets. Cold will press in again this week.

Wednesday morning, holiday, my scrawled list penciled on a post-it on my kitchen table, waiting. I perch on the covered sand bucket and sip the coffee, my hands wrapped around the mug. My memory wanders back to the Maine coast where we spread my mother’s ashes last June. My mother loved domestic spaces. She would have been enchanted by the colored lights my kids strung over my barn, along the porch roof over my head. Likewise, in my house, she would have admired our tree with the red star topper, the room illuminated with tiny lights. Nearly housebound with cancer recovery, my household has been blessed with gifts of candles, savory meals, foil-wrapped chocolates, fragrant rose oil from Bulgaria. All this, too, would have intrigued my mother.

My mother loved the wild, too, for much of her life quick to pack up the car and head for the open road.

In Maine, we parked near the shore. The sweetness of rugosa roses buoyed along the breeze’s brine. In the curving, layered landscape of rock and the rhythmic crashing pound of the ocean like the planet’s beating heat, we returned her remains to the immense wild, the mysterious territory where she had, after all, emerged from.

A crossing over.

This second memory, too. Later that summer, visiting my old father in New Mexico, my young woman daughter and her friend fried eggs and buttered toast for breakfast. In their strappy sundresses, they sat at the round oak table, sipping coffee. The friend had never visited New Mexico; her eyes gleamed. My father gave them his credit card and told them to eat lunch in downtown Santa Fe, in the courtyard which had been a family compound, 200 years and more ago. Later, the girls returned with leftover enchiladas and stories of flowering trumpet vines and singing birds. We must go into the beautiful mountains.

Yesterday, this daughter walked me around the high school, the beginnings of my strength returning. In the hidden back, a path leads into the woods. She held my hand, admonished, “Not yet.”

On this misty, rainy New Year’s morning, a prayer to cultivate patience and mercy for these interwoven journeys…

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go…

— Naomi Shihab Nye