#cancer

Travels.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 12 Comments

I’ve been away and now I’m home, the mist this first September morning flecked through with cold, writing in bed and drinking coffee, my cat Acer purring between my legs, jubilantly happy in the way of well-fed toasty-warm cats.

The (brilliant) oncologist and the (amazing) surgeon and so many others (gratitude, gratitude, gratitude) eradicated the lymphoma in my body, chopped me up and stitched me together, exorted me on. Now, after a summer of learning to walk and eat and sleep again, relearning how to be a body in this world, existential questions propel me to a remote part of Vermont, seeking answers to the questions I’ve always had — what are the meaningful threads that hold this life, my life, together? For nearly a year, I’ve held the imminence of my death against my chest, a sputtering candle, and the questions are rubbed raw.

Because I am myself, too, always, I’m seeking the ending to a book I’m writing. And because this is the way my mind works, I’m seeking the details of cause and effect, how these stitches work into the whole cloth.

A friend loans me his tent. The first night, I wake freezing, hands knotted between my knees. I no longer have a once-cheery immunity against minor cold. I stumble down to the farmhouse, sit on the porch talking, drinking coffee. A stranger remarks that I looked chilled. I am cold down to my bones. He brews tea and offers me a steaming cup. I drink it quickly, heat, steam, strength.

“A world which increasingly consists of destinations without journeys between them, a world which values only “getting somewhere” as fast as possible, becomes a world without substance.” ~ Alan Watts

Lists, Loons.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 14 Comments

My kitchen table, notebook, car console is littered with yellow post-its, my hand-scrawled lists of work things, schedules, BUTTER written on several versions, COFFEE BEANS, sandwiched between AT&T — my reminder to figure out the phone bill.

How good to have a list again — more, multiple lists — my daily roadmap under constant revision. An acquaintance tells me about a weekend of work and he’s looking forward to Monday. Of course, he says, on Monday I’ll look forward to Tuesday. On Tuesday… Isn’t my list a variation of this?

In contrast, I consider the loons who swim near us, diving under the pond’s still surface, reappearing, vanishing. Four sleek birds: two parents, two juveniles, the loon nuclear family charming us with their haunting songs, the younger ones still halting and squeaking.

Sunday evening, I stack my crumpled post-its into a pile and shove this in the recycling bin. To circumvent my churning thoughts, I email myself a Monday morning list. Autumn’s moving in, the majesty of these long summer days clipped shorter and shorter at each end, the daybreaks dewy and cool…. I pull on my sweatshirt and Danskos and lie on the picnic table’s bench, fingers in the unmown grass. The lilac leaves are withered brown with thirst. The woodchucks have been eaten by the foxes, or they’ve packed their own valises and headed out for new territory. Dusk creeps in, and still I’m there, the wood and my bones and flesh keeping some kind of wordless company. That afternoon’s loons and the swifts darting overhead, the crickets sizzling, and myself, too, each of us in our own language. At last, the rain patters down, drip-dropping, ubiquitous.

“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.” ~ Danusha Laméris

August Light.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 12 Comments

A neighbor paints her house turquoise with salmon and forest-green accents. The colors are up for discussion on our short dead-end street; myself, I love this blue and speculate how cool it would be to transform our houses in a Vermont village version of San Francisco’s Painted Ladies.

Mid-August (already?!), rain has ceased. Our lawns are all cropped short and no one’s mowing. Late afternoon, watering the perennials I planted this summer, I eat sun gold tomatoes in the garden, the sandy loam warm beneath my feet. This summer, endeavoring to heal from lymphoma and surgery, I retreated into my garden, writing, walking. Pay attention, I cautioned myself. Take time to visit my neighbors and talk about shades of blue.

Survive cancer (and cancer treatment), and you discover the world has the same facts (the electric and property tax bills, the need for steady income, spilled oatmeal in an upper kitchen cabinet, a hole in the chimney that needs repointing; these chores jostle on my post-it lists) and the questions that muse through my mind in yoga practice and wick away (why?: an apple tree shedding leaves, a clandestine coffee klatch, my recurring expectation that I may see my dead mother around street corners….)

Vermont’s radiant summer rolls into balmy autumn. The rain may commence at any moment, or might hold off until snow and sleet. The winter will be whatever it will be. In my own realm, I soak up this end-of-summer stillness, water the new transplants, wake each morning, yet alive. A low bar, or, conversely, the highest I’ve set for myself yet.

Prayer

Whatever happens. Whatever
what is is is what
I want. Only that. But that. ~ Galway Kinnell

Survive, Thrive.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

In search of a story about wool and weaving, about Colonial America and these sultry August days, I discover a trailhead for a nearby town forest. I return with my daughter. We drive on back dirt roads, the terrain unfamiliar to me. But the way the maples are nearly in the road, their leafy branches stretching over the road and touching, is the Vermont I first loved, so many years ago when I was 18.

We pass houses flanked by sunflowers and hydrangeas, gardens with six-foot high fences to keep deer from marauding the kale. Not so many decades ago, these were farm fields. In the forest, we follow a former road beside a stone wall. In New England, a forest moves in quickly, erasing the labor that once cleared this land.

August, the woods are quieting. In a break in the forest, we walk through a field of goldenrod, a strip of pink Joe Pye Weed at its edge. All summer, I’ve written sparsely in this space, intently picking up the stitches of my life: walking to mend lost muscle, relearning habits of sleeping and cooking and eating — such simple things I once did so easily. When an acquaintance’s dog leaped on me on a walking trail, I rushed deeper into the woods and wept. I’ve cried so little during this year of cancer, but there I was, ridiculously weeping beneath pines, so fearful of my own fragility, of breaking.

August, and I’d take a whole summer again, an impossibility. Instead, again, we’re in the edge between seasons, the days shortening, chilly at sunset and sunrise. My cats eye the unused wood stove and then eye me, wondering what my plans might be.

Survive, I think. I’m cooking fish and offer these plump tabbies a second course. Thrive, I add.

We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. ~ Jack Gilbert

Following the Bear.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

Mid-August, the mornings are cool, the leaves of the pin cherry tree sparkling with dew. I find a bruise on my bicep; the cancer’s returned? But no. I remember I snagged my arm on the garden fence. Mid-August suddenly and the tomatoes are ripening. Last year, watching the full solar eclipse in our yard, the eclipse’s heart revealed this world’s ineffable beauty: such pure gold. Likewise, surviving cancer (thus far) revealed for me that knife of mortality within me, within all of us, hidden, ever-present.

Mid-August, mid-afternoon I’m drinking lemonade on a bakery porch and staring across the street at a house nearly obscured by sunflowers and globe thistle. I’m curious as heck about this Italianate with ornate corner boards. Who built this and who lives here now, and is the yard’s intent to cultivate wildness, or is no one at home?

My companion and I are talking about hard stuff, a third novel I’ve sent off to my publisher, the book I’m drafting now, about disease and suffering and how to wring meaning from misery. I’m compelled to write this book; writing this book looms impossibly. The afternoon’s quite hot, but by late afternoon the air will settle and cool. Nights, I walk after sunset, the crickets and tree frogs clamorous. I keep thinking about that house (empty or not?) and the thin line between wild and domestic. Here, this border has blurred. Will I cut the pin cherries to widen the canopy of the walnut tree I planted? The rose bushes seek a crack in my house’s foundation.

Wiser now, or maybe simply tired, I care less about the wild honeysuckle and raspberry canes that fortress around my house. I’m no Rapunzel, squirreled away in a tower, waiting for her Prince Charming. The hungry bear tunnels through the undergrowth, showing me a way.

Summer night—
even the stars
are whispering

~ Issa

Lucky.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

August is exceptionally hot this year, the rivers so low they can be crossed by foot. In the woods, streams have dried to rock beds. In Montpelier, the state’s tiny capital, I walk by a store with bright bowls in the window and think, My mother would love this store. She passed over a year ago, and yet I still catch myself thinking that she might appear around a corner, her purse tucked under her arm, amused at me. Of course I’m not gone…

My father, the physicist, schooled his three kids early on about entropy. In a week where things repeatedly broke — the hot water heater leaking, the Jetta refusing to start in the rain — he made jokes that we were in a High Entropy Zone. So, this lovely August, with the chorusing crickets and the waning red moon — I’m determined to suck each day to its marrow. Sandwiched around work and the steadiness of washing dishes and so on, I’ve pushed aside space for swimming and ice cream, for lying under the apple tree and studying a spider spin her web. The entropy of living keeps on, as it does.

In the years when I was raising my own young daughters, our days zigzagged from bowls of blueberries to bath time. The days were endless, and the years rushed by. Now, my girls newly grown, I relish the silence and crave their company. Lucky I am, so lucky, to be alive this summer, this month, these days. All day long, I walk around with my tender heart cradled in my hands, wounded and raw from cancer, from weeks of hospitalization, from the knife of mortality pressed against my windpipe. August: the season of great loveliness, the intimation of winter. The reminder to love where and what we are.

Hitch Hiker at a Truck Stop

The hitch hiker asks to look at

the palms of my cold hands

and thanks me for unfolding them

on the frost-edged

picnic table between us.

While I look at his downcast eyes

trying to see if he sees,

nearby truckers stare

at his narrow face,

long blond hair.

He asks me if I garden,

rips a scrap of newspaper

and folds it up

into a tiny origami

package for anise seed.

Here, he says,

seed I gathered in Oregon,

plant it in Colorado.

I always have a garden, he adds,

I plant and leave to others.

He tells me he has no sex;

when you ride in the righthand seat,

you have to nod your head

without listening.

Face pressed to the window,

he can see the lacquered edges

of the earth.

So I imagine him 

practicing calligraphy

on truck windows,

recommending honey and vinegar

in a glass of water

every morning.

Mad, mad, mad.

A yellow warbler,

the moon at the bottom of the stream.

Out on the highway

he is raising his thumb again. ~ Mary Crow