#cancersurvivor

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

Bare soil.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 18 Comments

Midnight, I’m sitting outside the local hospital in the balmy night, a few mosquitoes drifting in the streetlights. There’s no one around, save for the young woman in reception poking her phone, the peepers chattering in the wetland down the road. The night is so warm I’m reminded of summer’s open-ended days and nights, the pleasure I’ve taken these last few years sitting outside in the dark, listening to the nightsounds of rustlings and callings, human and wild.

The person who drew my blood just a few hours ago told my sister and me about the local library in nearby Johnson, Vermont. This evening, the library will be moved from where it was built and recently flooded to safer and higher ground near the elementary school. The town will shut down as the brick building is wheeled down Main Street and over a bridge spanning the Lamoille River. In the velvety darkness, I imagine the scene: the floodlights, the crews, the townspeople who will come out to admire and cheer. A small but certainly mighty miracle.

Around the building, I hear the rattle of my Subaru’s loosening heat shield. Then my sister appears in the driver’s seat. Along empty roads, she drives us home. In Wolcott village, I spy a fox rushing across the road. The animal pauses at the weedy edge, head turned towards us, perhaps wondering what we’re up to, too, this creature, like us, in no rush at all. Home again, the cats press against the kitchen glass doors, as if expecting a reckoning from me, an accounting of my absence.

What can I say to these tabbies? When a nurse apologized for dropping a plastic cap on my shoulder, I mused aloud that it wasn’t heavy — and isn’t that a line from Phish? Things are falling down on me, Heavy things I could not see… The nurse knew these lines, too. The heavy falling things are taking a pause, perhaps, in spring, as the earth reorients herself, through peeper song, unfurling leaf, the heady scent of rain on bare soil.