#books

The Scythe, the Past.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Twilight, 25 degrees yesterday, the temperature dropping, I’m walking back and forth by the town garage, a tumbling-down quonset hut beside the town’s towering sand pile. Such much winter yet to come. On the snowy road, I pace back and forth, watching the sky turn from blue towards black, the stars hidden behind the clouds, talking with my friend about family and politics. Listening, I remember the Christmas manicotti she brought me last year. My daughter and I ate that delicious meal at the kitchen table; through our glass doors, I watched the snow fall, wondering if I would live another year.

Another year is not a guarantee for a single one of us. Another lymphoma lesson. I’d woken that morning with that now-familiar fatigue, as though sandbags were tied to every bone in my bone, pulling me earthward. I fed the wood stove, drank coffee, rallied and did my writing, rallied again and pulled on my coat and boots and left the house.

Later, by chance, at an outdoor fair I see a woman I’ve known for many years, who was part of a trying time in my life when my daughters were young. She offers me a particular kindness, and I thank her, wondering what I’m supposed to say. She does not seem to expect the standard answer of all’s well, that’s over and done because of course any fool knows, once cancer has rooted profoundly in a body, the reaper’s scythe does not hide. By now, it’s not so much the scythe that frightens me, it’s the suffering to get there.

On my way home from the fair, I pull over and get out of my car. The sun shines brightly, but it’s freezing, and I’m shivering. I walk back down the dirt road that’s empty of everyone, not even a crow perched in a bare-branch maple. Far up the valley I see enormous white wind towers, the Lowell Mountain Project. To my left is a house where one of the leaders of a group that protested the towers now lives. When the tower project began, my then-husband joined that protest group. The experience broke my naive love affair with Vermont and my blind faith in that too-hard-used word community. Not so long after, the husband and I divorced. My life went on, and I became intimately familiar with my own fallibility, my own deep pockets of untrustworthiness. I devoted two years of my life to writing and publishing a book in atonement for my own callous actions. Which never changed the consequences but widened the story. Then, cancer — the plot turn.

Robert Frost, no stranger to suffering, famously wrote that everything he knew about life could be summed up in three words: it goes on. Standing alone on that roadside, I imagine myself as the mangiest cur, footsore, half-starved, near mad. Disease may yet be rising within me. If not now, perhaps soon, perhaps never. This hillside above the Black River valley will endure long beyond my bones and flesh, long beyond yours, too. The sun and wind cut into my eyes. Why do I refuse to remember my mittens? Rather than letting all this go, I stuff these stories back into my heart and trek back to the village. I’m not finished with any of this. I’m still following the strands of all these stories.

…. and last, Rick Agran of Bon Mot has kindly invited me to his radio show at 5 p.m. EST tonight…

Stopping in the Snowy Forest.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

In the woods, I hear voices and pause, thinking a cluster of children might emerge over the hill. Instead, a flock of clangorous geese wings low overhead, then a second V, a third. Town traffic sounds filter into the woods. I am not in the deep wilderness, not so far from high school and road and village, but for this hour, it’s just me and the sweep of wind and drifting snow and the human and dog prints of whoever walked here before me.

As a kid, my father was never one to be daunted by adversity. Evenings, he often set down his coffee cup and took us on walks to the library or around the block, and around the block often meant across a thin-grass soccer field to the woods. Who owned those woods, I never knew. We jumped across the stream and along worn logging roads, past the piles of New Hampshire boulders and stone walls in the forest where fields had dominated not so many years ago. The woods were alive with rabbits and deer, birds and ferns. We wondered about the Natives who lived here and the colonists who cut down the trees, and then the trees grew up again.

On this twilight Monday, I lean against a hemlock, snow in my eyelashes, remembering when my daughters filled their snowsuit pockets with tiny hemlock cones. Intentionally or not, my father instilled love and not fear of the forest in his kids, the understanding that our feet could carry us to unexpected and miraculous places.

Here’s that classic New Hampshire poem threading through my childhood, my daughters’, and so many others:

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

By Robert Frost

Whose woods these are I think I know.   

His house is in the village though;   

He will not see me stopping here   

To watch his woods fill up with snow.   

My little horse must think it queer   

To stop without a farmhouse near   

Between the woods and frozen lake   

The darkest evening of the year.   

He gives his harness bells a shake   

To ask if there is some mistake.   

The only other sound’s the sweep   

Of easy wind and downy flake.   

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,   

But I have promises to keep,   

And miles to go before I sleep,   

And miles to go before I sleep.

Gifts at the Back Door.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

I arrive home in the dark and find one of my red deck chairs at my kitchen door, a white container set on its seat. It’s not late but dark already. On my way home from work, I’d walked along the river and walked further than usual. When I’d returned to my car, darkness had fallen.

I’ve been living in or nearby this village for thirty years. I’ve seen a share of miserable things — from addiction and homicides to petty cattiness — and its goodness, too. How, in times of trouble, folks appear with aid. No questions, often very few words. My god, the grace of this.

Scorched earth is how I consider myself these days, not so many days post-chemo, post-surgery, leering up on a year’s anniversary since I learned I had cancer. See how I write this? Past tense. And yet, transmogrified is a word I used with a friend. How this disease has transmogrified my being.

In the dark, I unlock my door, set down my backpack, a pile of library books, a bag of apples. My cats mewl for their cat supper. The container has soup, barley and beef and spinach. The woodstove has gone cold, my jacket drips rain on the floor and my cats’ dense fur, darkness presses against the windows. And yet, serendipitous soup. I take a spoon from the drawer. As for figuring out the rest of my life, or this week, or even this evening — I let that go.

From my library book stash, Sally Mann:

“As for me, I see both beauty and the dark side of the things; the loveliness of cornfields and full sails, but the ruin as the well…. The Japanese have a phrase for this dual perception: mono no aware. It means “beauty tinged with sadness,” for there cannot be any real beauty without the indolic whiff of decay. For me, living is the same thing as dying, and loving is the same thing as losing, and this does not make me a madwoman; I believe it can make me better at living, and better at loving, and, just possibly, better at seeing.”

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

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.”