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Hunger.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 13 Comments
Curious cat named Acer

A few years back when my youngest was doing odd jobs, she came home with four strawberry plants someone had given her from a garden she weeded. Naturally, I planted these in our garden. The plants spread and have produced beautifully this year. I crouch beside these weedy plants and devour red berries. The crop is so small no berries ever make it into the house. Since it’s usually just me here these days, I eat in the garden. I’m famished for this sweet food. I devour the strawberries, juice dripping down my chin.

I’m ravenous for the sharp June sun, for this morning’s cold dumping rain, for my daily midday reading break, for the purring cats who clamor across my keyboard. Healing from cancer, I’m supposed to sleep (get seven to nine hours!) but, come that glimmer of gold at the horizon, I’m finished with bed, hungry for coffee, oatmeal, maple syrup. Eager to finish my novel revisions.

In those months of chemo, I’d worried my mind and imagination might dull, my fierceness lessen. Six weeks out from surgery, I’m diminished in body but a peculiar power blooms in me. A determination to do what I want. An impatience with artifice. Don’t waste my time.

And yet, the old haste that plagued my days and nights has quelled. Stopping by my neighbor’s, I sink into her armchair, set my feet on her footstool, listen, let the day’s exhaustion drape around me. That fatigue is now familiar to me as the blanket a stranger gifted me at the beginning of this cancer journey. We talk and talk, then wander outside and keep on with these conversational matters, the color of paint she’s considering for her house’s clapboards, how to encourage Columbine to grow among the phlox.

This time, I really want to listen…. I’ve spent my life mistaking instinct for fact, subjective experience for reality. What a waste of time here on earth to spend it as a slave to one story, how boring and repetitive, how many of our days are spent in chains.

From Sarah Gilmartin’s Service.

“Quite Serious”

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 9 Comments

My neighbor runs out his back door, shouting and waving his arms. I’m working on my upstairs glassed-in porch. He cranks up the volume on VPR’s Morning Edition. I’m guessing he hopes the young woodchucks burrowing beneath his deck aren’t NPR fans.

Like my neighbor, I am a VPR fan. This morning, news of Iran dominates the air. As I labor to join noun to verb, I notice my heart beating at Steve Inskeep’s words. Eventually, I leave my cat sprawled on the windowsill and head downstairs to wash the dishes. I’ve listened to NPR my entire life. Heck, the radio was probably playing when my parents brought newborn me home from Presbyterian Hospital in Abuquerque. Little these days is good news.

This winter, I’ve written in this space about my obsessive struggle to remain among the living on this planet. Only now—two surgeries, six rounds of chemo, 11 hospitalizations later—do I realize the diciness of my determination to live. A few weeks ago, driving with my daughter, she showed me a lawn where she cried on a bench because I believed my mother would die. Every day now, as I begin by feeding my two cats and drinking coffee, I carry this winter, those months of spitting distance from my grave, within me. As at the beginning, my greatest worry was/is my daughters. So many months later, I understand how my life is connected intrinsically to so many others. That what lies before my eyes are the twig tips of stories.

In my younger, brasher years, I might have written about politics and conflict, but the Mideast is a place I’ve never been, with people I’ve never met, for whom I will never speak. Too, I’ve knocked around this planet long enough to know that violence changes the world, irredeemably. That the combination of deceit and anger and hubris wrecks destruction. And that cruelty wrought can never be undone. We hurtle onward. I keep listening.

June, and pink roses bloom against my house, planted by someone I never knew, perhaps the woman known as Grandma Bea buried in the adjacent cemetery’s crest. My daughters climb a mountain with a view of Vermont’s shimmering Lake Champlain and the emerald patchwork of farms stitched together. They return with a gift for me, a thorny rosebush with fragrant blossoms that fill my cupped hand. In the evening, shortly before dark, I walk in my bare feet, the long grass already cool with dew. High heat is predicted, the planet is surely burning up, but this ruby-and-gold sunset drags in a coolness. Lush, so lush this month. The butternut tree I planted stretches towards the apple someone else carefully cultivated and noted in pencil on the barn’s bottom wall. A record someone held dear.

In 1956, Allen Ginsburg wrote: “America this is quite serious.”