#healing

After an absence, return.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 28 Comments
Photo by Molly S.

A long while away from this space after a day last week that began easily enough in our kitchen with my daughter and transpired into another Dartmouth ER visit and a prolonged stay. Days and nights chopped into mosaic pieces. MDs and RNs, the revolving cast of the Dartmouth surgical team, my daughters, pain meds, ice chips, me sitting up and begging for a patch-up to get me to my next chemo appointment… Get me out of this chronic patient repeat.

Now, five of the six chemo treatments completed, I am in the final haul. While my in-box filled up (thank you for your patience), and I was moved from room to room by kind people, I kept thinking of this cancer in a narrative arc. I had hit the section of story where the impossible commences. Before, things looked grim. But now, as protagonist in my own story, the arc swerves sharply, the longed-for light-at-the-end of the tunnel snuffs out, the path is hidden.

I’m not a writer for naught, for make-believe or play. I’m a writer because I know our lives tread meaningful albeit sometimes horribly hard paths. Lean in, I counseled myself, my shoulders far skinnier now but just as fierce. Use math. Get to the fifth infusion. Get to the sixth. Count down the finite days to the end of this treatment, which is, thankfully, eradicating the cancer. In the mosaic: my two daughters, the plastic IV tubing, the doctors in their masks, the ER nurse who stayed long past his shift in the middle of the night, holding my hand and assuring me that, yes, indeed, I would endure.

This is my story, but also the human story, in all our infinite variations of human desire, choice, the immutability of fate.

Sunny morning in our kitchen, birdsong, the fierce thrust towards spring.

Four Feet of Mud.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 12 Comments

Friday afternoon, when the Fed Ex man drops off a package, I ask what he’s seen on his route, his perception of flood damage and how folks are faring. In places, he says, nearly nothing. In others, houses perch over streams.

This stranger keeps going — and I keep asking questions — about his experience in the national guard, a tour in Iraq, and then a month in New Orleans after Katrina.

We’re back in blistering July, and I’m sweaty and dirty from weeding in the garden. On our sandy hillside, this summer the grass flourishes, a benefit of months of rain. I’ve finally mowed the grass (hardly a top priority these days in our house), and that ineffable and sweetly delicious summer scent of cut grass washes around us.

Our conversation bends back to Vermont and our washed-out valleys, how Hardwick’s Walgreens had four feet of mud. He looks at me and ask how tall I am. It’s true; I’m not that much taller than four feet. For a moment, we stand there, two strangers, contemplating four feet of mud. Then he heads to his truck.

Which pieces of our world will go back together, and which won’t? It’s a metaphor for many of us, perhaps.

All the way I have come

all the way I am going

here in the summer field

— Buson

Wreckage, Human & Otherwise.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 19 Comments

There’s no one around the edges of town on Friday evening, save for a stranger in a brand-new leather jacket. He walks ahead of me.

Two weeks past the July flood, there’s stand-out heroes, and a lot of folks who stepped up in ways that are amazing, admirable, kind of jaw-dropping, honestly. But the flood unearthed all that pandemic misery, and so much more that we’d stuffed down, too. Similar — and yet, different, too. Piece by piece, my state is cleaning, hammering lives back together.

A young fox hurries along the jagged riverbank where lawn now meets abyss. The creature pauses, listens. I’m no threat, me with my hands sunk in my pockets, leaning back on my heels. The fox trots along.

The evening threatens more thunderstorms. I keep thinking of childbirth labor, how those waves of contractions bore me along mightily. Childbirth was the first time I’d understood so inherently that I’m as much a part of the universe as famed Helen of Troy, as that stranger walking ahead of me and disappearing around a broken-down scrapheap of a motel, as you reader, and my dear cats pawing a dropped ball of red yarn. Rain and more rain. Rising rivers. Even as the rain began pelting, I stood there, awestruck.