#books

“You ask the sea, what can you promise me…”

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 13 Comments

About 17 years ago – in what doesn’t at all seem like another lifetime but part of these continuous decades I’m living, I walked in the dark from our sugarhouse to our house with my two children. Having worked all day, I’d received a reprieve from sugaring and carried up the dinner chili pot and dirty bowls and spoons. March, the nights are always cold, although sometimes a balmy breeze stirs up as a teasing promise of spring.

I threw the kids’ soaked snowsuits in the washing machine (in those days, the washing machine was always churning) and banked the wood stove. I was knitting something from yellow yarn. What this was – a child’s cap, a gift pair of mittens – I can no longer remember. But I remember reading Maurice Sendak’s Chicken Noodle Soup with Rice to my five-year-old, who slept beside me, profoundly as a child sleeps, her cheeks flushed rosy from a day outdoors. In these hours of making syrup, the children had brought in the mail from the driveway box.

The house was warm after hours in the unheated sugarhouse and also cold, since no one had fed the fire all day. I opened The New Yorker and read “March” by Louise Glück, a poem I probably quote every March in this blog. 17 years later, I’m still reading this poem, even as that kindergartener is now a college sophomore. There’s that cliché, in like a lamb, out like a lion, but March is often lion and lamb, all the time. Now, 17 years later, less impatient with spring’s maddening dawdle, I no longer read Maurice Sendak. Yet, unlike the triteness that when the children are grown, they’re flown, our family delves into my disease, digs hard at the stuff of what family means.

Still at Dartmouth, the nurse muses this morning about nine degree temperatures. March is a brutal tease and may leave more sharply than she arrives. But it’s March. The earth will thaw. The universe ambles along, dragging us, too.

You ask the sea, what can you promise me
and it speaks the truth; it says erasure….


The earth is like a drug now, like a voice from far away,
a lover or master. In the end, you do what the voice tells you.

Born in 1933…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 14 Comments

William Maxwell writes in his riveting short novel So Long, See you Tomorrow: “The reason life is so strange is that so often people have no choice.”

This strange world, indeed. My daughter drives us up Vermont’s long loneliness of I-91, the interstate running above the river. Villages are tucked into the blue and snow-sprinkled mountains, these tiny clusters dominated by spires of white clapboard churches. This has been a week of in-and-out of ERs and hospital rooms, of resurgence in energy and a low so low I’m unable to bother to speak. Now, the ride home, the passing through of this winter country, where the new snow (so pure white) piles high on tree branches. This northern land in midwinter is territory I know with a familiarity akin to the veins on the backs of my hands. A haven of cold, often slow-going, a muted palette of pale blue, sooty gray, evergreen nearly black.

We talk until we’re spun out from chatter. I lean my head against the cold Subaru window. In the last room where I stayed, my companion was a woman born in 1933. 1933 marked the end of Prohibition, the year stenciled on the green-glass-bottled Rolling Rock beer we drank in college. 1933, the year of Roosevelt’s New Deal. The woman’s voice was clear as a spring stream, often studded with small wry jokes. When she saw me, her face glowed in a smile. Of all the things I’ve learned from this week and scribbled into my notebook, this woman’s radiant smile and easy language sticks with me. A few times, I wandered her way, hoping to have some of her joy rub my way.

Mirth in the mirthless. A great mercy.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 19 Comments

Mirth in messiness… another night drive to the ER, so cold, what were we leaning into? Five degrees, maybe six? The stars above the river ice a mockery of light. Kindness and Dilaudid, another scan, a hurry-up-and-wait, the three of us talking about nothing in particular save for a hike we once took in a thunderstorm and an orange water bottle confiscated (gone, forever) at the Albuquerque airport.

It’s the small hospital not far from our house, not the cancer complex with its soaring blue-green glass. On this zero-degree night, my daughter presses her feet against the room’s wall heater. There’s hardly any patients, save for a man we never see who insists that he must be heard. In the night of dim small lamps, I sleep and wake, talk with a woman from the high plateau country of the upper midwest. She remarks wistfully that Vermont is too tiny and cramped for the sweep of the midwestern sky. Maybe it’s just the Dilaudid, but when sleep folds over me, I dream of those childhood summers my siblings and cousins and I chased fireflies while the grownups drank bourbon and ate our leftover birthday cake and kept at their two-week conversation. The dew washed our bare feet.

The hospital morning flicks on before the sun has dulled the night’s darkness. Mirthless, indeed, I become, crabby with human lack and inhuman fate. Words, words, mine and others’, in a repeating loop. I text my nurse friend. On her lunch break, she appears, and then there’s laughter from nurses in my room. People come and go. I sign for more billing. (How much is this going to cost me, anyway?) The chaplain appears who’s read my book and wants to talk Flannery O’Connor and death. I’m not about to be funeral planning for myself anytime soon, but I plunge right into that death question. Indeed, this wretched cancer, my uninvited guest, perhaps the truest teacher of my life.

He asks, To know to savor every day?

Oh sure. But the disease has whittled me down to a glittering core, to ignore the petty fluff that not so long ago stung my eyes, and certainly my heart, too. What remains is real, both beautiful as those fireflies winking in the sultry midwest night, and ineffably, unbearably sorrowful.

I intend to live a long life; I’ll at least go on for some while, which is all any of us can say. In the meantime, this rarefied illness journey? Not lacking for writing material.

From Flannery O’Connor, The Habit of Being (1988):

In a sense sickness is a place, more instructive than a long trip to Europe, and it’s always a place where there’s no company, where nobody can follow. Sickness before death is a very appropriate thing and I think those who don’t have it miss one of God’s mercies.

What the living do.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 12 Comments

I’ve written about the strange and often terrifying world of cancer here over the past few months. In the past week, my eyelashes have thinned. At first, my eyelashes looked as though I had walked through a rainstorm. I’m not at all adverse to rain and lousy about remembering a jacket, so I often end up in a deluge. Last July, I explored trails on a friend’s property. Over the past years, she’d designed and cut narrow trails. I walked through what seemed like enchanting forests of moss, stands of cedar so dense the light darkened, around a former beaver pond filled in as swamp, and finally discovered great white pines. She had unearthed pieces of white quartz and marked the edges of the trail. Walking back, rain fell, hard. By the time I reached my Subaru, I was drenched. I wiped my face on a sweater I’d left on the passenger seat. In the rearview mirror, my eyelashes held crystals of raindrops, diminutive pieces of that forest’s quartz.

January, temperature hovering around ten degrees, rainfall is in no immediate forecast.

As an andidote to the national clamor, here’s a few lines poet Marie Howe wrote for her brother from “What the Living Do.”

Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.
And the Drano won’t work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up

waiting for the plumber I still haven’t called. This is the everyday we spoke of.
It’s winter again: the sky’s a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through

the open living-room windows because the heat’s on too high in here and I can’t turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,

I’ve been thinking: This is what the living do….

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.”