garden

First greens, gift.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

On this Mother’s Day, I pull on my coat and wander into the early spring garden with hot coffee. Blue dawn, the birds are at their singing nesting work already. My cats, satiated with breakfast, sleep on windowsills, dreaming perhaps of red-breasted robins prying worms from the rain-soft earth.

My mother died two springs ago. She’d lived a long life, crammed full, from joyous passion to bitter despair. In the same year, I suddenly stared at my own mortality. In those first days of the cancer realization, I railed that I wasn’t done, that to die while my youngest was yet a teenager, was out of the natural order. Or what I wanted to believe was the natural order. A belief which had, of course, no bearing on any natural law, whatsoever.

Severe illness returned me to childhood again. Too weak to boil water for oatmeal or tea, with hours upon days upon weeks upon months, lying in bed or on the couch, watching sunlight and shadows move across the maple floors in my house, the hospital tiles. There was an old tradition of slipping a knife beneath a laboring woman’s mattress to cut the labor pains. In those months I fought to remain alive, I slowly realized my mother and father had each slipped me a knife: my father gave me that writing and fortitude, my mother a wily stubbornness that was sometimes silly and often tenaciously sharp. Invaluable.

Yet here I am, lucky enough to have another act of my life unfolding. The daffodils I planted last October are blooming, brilliant yellow against the row of lilacs that are just beginning to bud. In my kitchen, I washed last night’s dishes, discovered a white quartz left as a gift on the table.

The First Green of Spring

Our walking in the swamp picking cowslip, marsh marigold,
this sweet first green of spring. Now sautéed in a pan melting
to a deeper green than ever they were alive, this green, this life,

harbinger of things to come. Now we sit at the table munching
on this message from the dawn which says we and the world
are alive again today, and this is the world’s birthday. And

even though we know we are growing old, we are dying, we
will never be young again, we also know we’re still right here
now, today, and, my oh my! don’t these greens taste good.

~ David Budbill

“In fear of death we lose out in life.”

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

Yesterday, an acquaintance I’ve known for years and who I like and admire, asked me how I am, and then remarked calmly, I don’t think you ever get out of stage 4 cancer. He’s a man of clear mind who’s now into his tenth decade in this life, and his words were not unkind and not unfeeling: the reverse, I reckon.

But there are things in our lives we never leave. My mother, at the end of her long life, returned to her childhood. My siblings and I knew little about her childhood. We never knew her father who died a few months after I was born. As she approached her death, she returned to his memory, trying to unknot whatever painfulness she had held her whole life.

How easy to slip down these holes of despair. But the rope of the past is multi-stranded. My mother both loved and hated my sauciness, which surely originated from her. In my garden, still frost-cloaked each April morning, I planted Russian sage last July when I was healing slowly, day by each day, from the brutality of surgery and cancer. Will these long-stemmed beauties return this year? Will the woodchucks devour the sunflowers? Will the roses bloom profusely and claw my fingertips with their thorns? My little satchel of possibilities.

In fear of death we lose out in life. We stuff an owl with arsenic and leave it totally
perfectly not alive in the study, like something coveted privately by Calypso, like the
greatest line ever written, embalmed with iron, staring down at us from the filing
cabinet, never read aloud. What makes us despair is the impermanence of beauty. — Bianca Stone

Moonrise, More.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments
Barn door view.

An old friend unexpectedly appears at my door one evening as I’m folding laundry. We sit on my back porch and drink hot honeyed tea and watch the just-beyond-full moon slowly rise. September, the night’s chill creeps in around us. I grab my hat and coat and brew more tea.

All this fall, I’ll be thinking of a year ago, when I was getting sicker and sicker, with no real understanding why until that terrible night in the ER when a scan revealed cancer, so much cancer. Heading towards a year later, I’m admiring the moon sail over the mountain ridge and up through the trees. We keep talking and talking. It’s not so much the words that stitch us together but our chuffing breath that hangs in clouds between us, a howling neighborhood dog, a rustle in the ravine of a wild creature.

After my friend leaves, I wander around the moonlit garden, hands in my coat pockets, the tall amaranth a shadowy forest beside the closed four o’clocks. Frost is not far in the offing.

Inside, a daughter has texted me….. where are you?… Outside, breathing in the moonlight. Still here.

Instructions on Not Giving Up

More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.

~ Ada Limón

Autumn’s Radiance, Fine Medicine.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 12 Comments

Before dawn, rain patters, a splatter through the open windows. The singing frogs are still at this hour. The rain moves through lightly. All summer: drought, drought, not likely to be relieved any time soon. In the town forest, beneath the soaring pines, the scent of the hot soil reminds me of the desert, a strange thing in northern Vermont. In the garden, the peppers, the sneezeweed, the Love Lies Bleeding relish the dry weather. By September, the garden will do whatever it’s going to do this year. Early autumn, colors burst. The hydrangea, so pink the large blossoms appear overly dyed, the coreopsis and compass flowers great bursts of little-kid-yellow, swaying with feasting bees.

Autumn, and I’m reliving last year’s descent into illness. A year ago, I was in a clinic’s office, asking what was wrong with me. I was sent away, and I went back to my toiling work, my sleepless nights. A month later, I returned again, thinner and weaker. Again, I was sent away. Shortly afterwards, I was in the ER and dosed with opioids. A scan revealed “unexpected severe neoplastic disease,” nothing that I’d conjured.

This fall, my novel heading towards an ARC for next summer’s publication, I reread my journal and the hospital notes and began writing a book about cancer. I’ve relied on my memory, that fickle creature, so rereading the notes from two hospitals is a vocabulary builder (so many medical words brand-new to me) and illuminating. This and then this happened. Our bodies and the world are known through numbers, like this drought, the inches of rain we need and the inches of rain to cure, a climatology record. Likewise, the hospital notes are records of lesions in centimeters and pulse in numbers and drugs in millimeters — my story’s elements. But, so, too, are the pears on our trees, plumper and sweeter than I’ve tasted in the eight years I’ve lived here. I pluck a weighty fruit from its branch, stand in the dusky-night yard, and watch the nearly full moon rise.

This week, driving to a friend’s house, I spy #10 Pond shimmering through the trees. The sheer unbidden beauty of the pond pulls me to a stop. I get out and stand on the dusty roadside, the crickets sizzling. A day like any other random day, a slip of a few afternoon hours. But here I am, still stitched into this evolving story.

“When I realized the storm
was inevitable, I made it
my medicine.” ~ Andrea Gibson

The Might of Flowers.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 10 Comments

My daughter suggests I get coffee before driving home. It’s midnight, balmy. Sprinklers water the grass outside the airport. After the New Mexican desert, the air is redolent with growth. Thinking gas station coffee will be sour, I pass, and buy lemonade instead.

In Burlington, the streetlights blink red, and I drive quickly through town. My daughter lives in a neighborhood where gardens and yards spread into the sidewalks. Hollyhocks lean out from the neighbors’ front porch. I’m reminded of my graduate school days in Bellingham, Washington, when the world seemed chockfull of flowers whose names I had yet to learn.

Then, it’s a long drive home through the darkness, with no traffic and the Daily podcast about The Great Gatsby. In this week, my garden has grown wildly, the hydrangeas pale globes in the dark. For a moment, I stand in the driveway, suitcase in my hand, staring up at the sky and breathing in the wet air. There’s that line in Gatsby about the impossibility of repeating the past — or Gatsby’s wager that, indeed, the past can be salvaged. Returning from New Mexico is always this complicated mixture of past and present. My birthplace, Northern New Mexico holds my earliest memories, of listening to the wind and squeezing red mud between my bare toes. Northern Vermont, where I’ve lived for decades now, is suffused with my bad past of a marriage gone awry, a story I can’t shake.

Yesterday afternoon, talking with a friend, I felt myself slipping into the past again, that sinkhole. But don’t we all have that? Heading into this summer, I believed that nurturing the flower gardens around my house would sweeten my life, balm the ravages of the cancer world. A few years back, I planted compass flowers, the six-foot high plants I wrote into the ending of my last book. The plants are now blooming their sunshiny joy. This morning, goldfinches layered in the leaves and petals. I crouched on the dewy grass, in the here and now, nowhere else.

“The need is not really for more brains, the need is now for a gentler, a more tolerant people than those who won for us against the ice, the tiger and the bear. The hand that hefted the ax, out of some old blind allegiance to the past fondles the machine gun as lovingly. It is a habit man will have to break to survive, but the roots go very deep.”
― Loren Eiseley

“… hard wind and the rain that unsettled the creek…”

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 10 Comments

Evening, I linger on the porch swing, talking with my siblings as the long July day ebbs down to twilight. My neighbor texts me that a bear’s been seen in our neighborhood. As the gloaming, like a tide, washes in, I water the tomato plants. The white hydrangeas hover like magical pompoms in the dusk.

July, Vermont’s growing month. Walking with my neighbor, she points out the height of the wild grasses and flowers around her house. Already, this summer, taller than she’s ever seen. The heat and the rain have propelled immense growth. The box elders rub my house; I’ll need to ask another favor from someone with a saw.

I have not forgotten this winter when I drifted from one variation of cold to another, my body and mind fiercely bent to the intertwined goal of finishing cancer treatments and remaining alive. On the other side, what remains is what plagued me before, my own variation of hard wind and rain. And yet, a whole July hangs like a promise: sunshine all day, pink cottage roses, laughter with my neighbor about the burgeoning woodchucks.

In the late afternoon, I take a long walk in the town forest to the reservoir’s edge. Deer prints press into the mud. On this walk, I don’t see a soul. In the distance, children call to each other.

“Kitchen Sink”
Today she would change nothing,
not even the wallpaper peeling,
like dead bark. Nor, outside, the shadows
approaching the yard where ants
toil like women in their houses of sand.
Never mind that the sun will be setting.
When she was young she felt afraid
of hard wind and the rain that unsettled the creek.
But the earth never left her,
not once did the floods reach her feet.
The reward of a long life is faith
in what’s left. Dishes stacked on a strong table,
Jars of dried beans. Scraps of cloth,
And the ten thousand things of her own thoughts,
Incessant as creek water. She has been able
to lay up her treasures on earth,
as if heaven were here, worth believing.
In the water her hands reach
like roots grown accustomed to living,the roots of the cat-briar that hold to the hillside
and can never be torn free of this earth completely.

~ Kathryn Stripling Byer