family

Cat justice, homestyle.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

A friend stops by with a gift of a stunning orchid. My naughty cat, Acer, immediately jumps on the kitchen table, and I swat him away. He lies on the couch, glaring unhappily as we talk. Gorgeous flower bouquets have come my way, been lavishly admired, then sent home with others to enjoy without cat destruction.

But the orchid is so stunningly beautiful I want to keep her. Later, I set this flower on the bathroom counter and shut the door. Acer is still sulking on the couch, paws stretched out before him, the epitome of cat depression, really hamming it up for my youngest daughter who mollifies him with kitty treats.

The cat and I: we are at odds. This morning, I let him into the bathroom. He sits on the counter, hungry to the core of his being to shred these velvety petals. In this new cancer world, my constant checking of time — my furious need to get stuff done — has instantly vanished. The mock orange outside the window sways in the breeze. Mid-November, this gloom is as much brightness as we’re going to get today.

Acer has no need to explain his position to me; his furriness is tense with desire. I pet his head and explain my infatuation with the orchid, which doubtlessly Acer dismisses as a weak case. And the orchid herself? Surely she wants to keep her own amazing life, both svelte and voluptuous.

The outcome is nearly certain. I’ll have to let her go. But for now, the house is warming with the wood stove, daughter sleeping upstairs, and — accusations of cat injustice be damned — just the right amount of ethical challenge and beauty, for ten minutes or so.

Cancer, Election.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 9 Comments

In 2014, my sister was diagnosed with cancer (now healthily in remission), and I read The Emperor of All Maladies: a biography of cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee. My marriage also fell apart that year, and I remember reading this fat library book in my car at school pickups, waiting for a job interview in Burlington, on benches waiting for court appearances. It’s a hefty book, with a lot of reading hours.

Three weeks into this flipped-upside-down world, my former life is already receding. I’ve been so surprised and grateful for the effusion of calls and emails, friends stopping by with food and gifts and simply to talk, to share news of their own world and listen to mine. I realize now how carelessly I had ebbed into a cynical place these last few months while the cancer was growing in me, weakening me.

Sure, it’s true that people sometimes give into the uglier strands of lying and cattiness and gossip, of insecurity and strange ways of playing people against each other — and sometimes engage in far worse things. In my Shire of Vermont, I see my decent state struggling with what’s playing out in national politics — and the looming threats. Which made me think, again, as I lay in bed listening to the rain this morning, how our individual lives reflect the greater society. Don’t waste your few days on junk and despair, those adolescent tricks. And thank you, all, for surrounding me with such light.

From Philip Larkin:

What are days for?

Days are where we live.   

They come, they wake us   

Time and time over.

They are to be happy in:   

Where can we live but days?

The Moon is Cheese.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 7 Comments
Photo by Molly S.

My novel Call It Madness, slated for publication in a year and half (a small eternity away?), is arranged by places — or vessels in my mind. An apartment, an unheated farmhouse, the center of a frozen lake. To my way of thinking, places shape who we are.

Friday, wheeled on my back into a procedure room at Dartmouth-Hitchcock, I answered the usual name and date of birth and then a third question: why are you here today? A moment, a pause, and then I answered I was there for a specific biopsy.

Words are magical things, and magic is powerful. In the Dartmouth waiting room, laughing with my brother about memories from our childhood (he cheated at Monopoly, yes, I hit him over the head with a metal rod), the thought kept pulsing through my mind how much I didn’t want to be there (get out! walk out!), for this appointment I had worked so hard to finagle. But saying those words aloud sealed this very first step.

On the long drive home, the full Beaver Moon rose, lit the river and interstate, the ubiquitous Vermont hayfields still green in this lingering late autumn, the sky a blush of pink , reminding us, again, of the sheer luck of millennia of sunsets and the sailing moon, each dearly unique.

Later, later, lying on the couch, my brother and youngest sit opposite me, drinking beer and talking, eating the prized Club crackers that I never buy and a kind neighbor left. My brother disappears into the kitchen and returns.

“Cheese!” my daughter says, sparkling with happiness.

Lantern Light.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 10 Comments

My immense thanks for so much kindness and light sent my way this week…. It’s meant the world to me.

When my daughters were in a sweet little Waldorf nursery school, around this time every year the children made lanterns from canning jars covered with colored tissue paper. The whole school gathered for a vegetable stone soup and then set out for a walk with the lanterns. This is rural Vermont, remember; the nursery school was surrounded by forest and the deep night, and parents carried lighters and matches to relight anyone’s lantern that was snuffed out. In the dark, stumbling a bit, we walked, singing.

Martinmas. I was tugged right into the Waldorf world with its heady folklore and mummers plays, the stories within stories, my natural bent of mind.

A week into the cancer world, veritable novice, walking on November 11, I was thinking of all these powerful layers — Martinmas and Armistice Day and Veterans Day (after WWII and the Korean War) — and the hidden interconnectedness of so many things, String Theory, the magical enchantment of books with stories that seem disconnected and then — whoosh! — are magically revealed at the end.

Maybe this is only my own way of thinking of things, but this uninvited and unwanted cancer that has now joined my body and story could hardly be random. Here I am, on the edge of a journey of indeterminate length, still looking to put these hard pieces together.

And for November, with her lovely gloaming light, a few lines from Adrienne Rich:

… You’re what the autumn knew would happen
after the last collapse
of primary color
once the last absolutes were torn to pieces
you could begin

How you broke open, what sheathed you
until this moment…

Abrupt turn in the story…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 43 Comments
Photo credit Jo Dorr

For the past few months, I’ve wondered if I might want to take a different direction with my blog (head to Substack?, become more politically local?), but this blog will change, unbidden by me.

Monday, my daughter took me to the ER for severe abdominal pains. An elevated white blood cell count made the nurse reappear with bottles he filled with my blood and gave me the heads up that I might not be headed home that night. I was wearing my twenty year old Danskos and a wool sweater I’d knit years ago and have worn to felt. Slivers from the firewood I’d brought in were hooked on the sweater. My younger daughter and the older daughter’s boyfriend appeared. My girls texted my brother. The nurse kept coming and going, talking to me and my daughters.

I lay on my back for hours with very kind people around me, who gave me pain meds and noted a soaring fever. The ER doctor returned with the nurse who leaned against the cabinets. It was the briefest thing, but when the nurse walked in he looked deeply at my daughters and then at the floor. I knew then that I was not going to like what the ER doctor was about to tell me about that CT scan.

So, on election night, hospitalized with scepticemia from the cancer, a traveling nurse told me about the beaches in Alabama where he lives while he tidied up needles and tubes in my arm. We followed that up with a long conversation about housing costs. Home again on this frosty and promising-to-be-sunny morning, I’ve been humbled by the gifts of visitors and food and kindness that have poured into our little family house, which made me see what a shadowy unhappiness had been creeping into my being for these past few months.

With the hospital and my brother, a biopsy at Dartmouth was pushed. Things will change rapidly. In the meantime, I’m doing things like putting my electric bill on autopay and arranging immediate work leave. But more profoundly, this: this week centered me right back to who I am — mother/daughter/sister, friend, writer — and conversely narrowed and widened my lens, hammering home that day by day is where we are.

The other afternoon, my daughter Molly ran in the house and told us to hurry out to see a rainbow. November rainbows in Vermont are rare, indeed — rainbows in late fall of this glossiness and color even more so. I saw this as a harbinger.

Last, I was reminded of one of my favorite Jack Gilbert Poems, “A Brief for the Defense.” A few lines read:

… We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.

The world, keep on keeping on….

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

The young barista in my coffee shop muses with me about the small pleasures of November: the summer slam of tourists quieted, the sudden simplicity of stillness. On a balmy afternoon, I head out in search of places where I’ve loved and been loved, the sunny afternoon so warm the crickets have struck up their chorus again.

A few days later, I’m in the diner, eating breakfast with a friend whose mind works along my hard-bitten lines. Our booth’s window looks down into the river where the patched-up cement walls have fallen flat. We are in absolute agreement that this shifting world of thoughts and opinions, all the junk fed by media and social media, come to naught. It’s action that shifts the world. And the world, despite our fears, will keep on keeping on.

I put poetry as action, too. Here’s a few lines from the incomparable Mary Ruefle’s “Glory.”

... I met a psychic who told me my position in the universe
but could not find the candy she hid from her grandkids.
The ordinary fear of losing one’s mind. You rinse the sink,
walk out into the October sunshine, and look for it
by beginning to think. That’s when I saw the autumn aster,
the sedum blooming in a purple field. The psychic said
I must see the word glory emblazoned on my chest. Secretly
I was hoping for a better word. I would have chosen for myself
an ordinary one like orchid or paw...