#books

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.”

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.

❤️

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 15 Comments

In the night, snow. My youngest ventures downstairs from her second-floor lair and feeds the wood stove, asks if I’m still reading, and don’t I think I should be getting some sleep… Around my knees, the cats yawn at her, nestling into their cat-dreams for a winter’s sleep. Outside, the town plow rumbles up our road, backs around, beeping, and disappears into the falling snow.

2024, a year that’s meant so much to so many. In our house, the year my mother died, the year I almost died, too. The inside-out year of reversal. In these quiet December days, getting better, getting stronger, getting weaker, moving along that jagged zigzag towards health, I’ve been lucky to read and think, to be warm and tended, to savor small sweets. Games of gin rummy. Poems Jo reads in her clear strong voice and sends every day. Brad’s photos of wintry Lake Champlain, luminescent portals of ice and drooping snow and runny sunsets. For so many of you, some whom I know well and have gone in and out of the depths of friendship and family, and some whom I hardly know, the circle around me has made all the difference.

When I first knew I had cancer, an acquaintance who had survived breast cancer told me it was the loneliest experience of her life. Like anyone, I’m well-acquainted with loneliness, have battled this shackled companion through divorce and betrayal. Where now has fate sent me? Illness was a forbidding shore where I never wanted to land my kayak, bend down in the cold murky waters and hoist my flimsy craft to safety. But illness is our common terrain, and those who dwell here – through happenstance or vocation – welcomed me in with compassion. As The Good Doctor told me, We are all patients. More plainly, perhaps, we are all mortal, conjoined.

Wishing you all some radiance from Vermont, prettied up this early morning beneath a downy snowfall….

“The Verge”

Reason is a fine thing, but remember there are other ways
to live: by instinct or passion, or even,
maybe, by revelation. Try it. Come around again to the verge –
that place of about-to-open, near where we comprehend
and laugh and see. Why shouldn’t something marvelous
happen to you? Take even an occasion like this:
A man reading at night looked up at the window to find
a moose looking in, interested and unafraid
with quiet dark eyes. He reports he has never been the same;
he finds the ungainly and miraculous everywhere.
He said it started the next night in the empty window
as he watched his reflection looking right back through.
He said he saw his own beauty, how even in his same old face
the quiet eyes were curious and ready to be true.

– Annie Lighthart