journeys

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.

Coyote Calling

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

October already, again, the fall has bent around again, and before long, snow will fall again. What will we do? The same things, I suppose, we always do. Boil beans and onions and chilis for soup, keep the house warm, lace up the ski boots and slide over the fields.

At our old house, further along in the autumn, we’d walk down to the bus stop in the dark. The girls and I would listen to coyotes howling in the hills. Here, in town, we’ve heard coyotes, but rarely. It’s foxes we see here.

My daughter returns home from school enchanted with learning French, dreaming of distant lands. She has her summer tan yet, her hair sun-bleached.  She’s dreaming of her driver’s license, of flying to Africa, stuffing her backpack and hiking the French Alps…..

Meanwhile, this day is going by perfectly well-adjusted, as some days are, with the right amounts of sunlight and shade, and a light breeze scented with a perfume made from the mixture of fallen apples, corn stubble, dry oak leaves, and the faint odor of last night’s meandering skunk.

— Tom Hennen

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Road Trip

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

When I was in graduate school, my life was a series of road trips. With just two of us, often sleeping in the back of our Rabbit and cooking on our Coleman stove in rest areas, life was cheap and our lives were flexible. The open road beckoned with ceaseless appeal.

This weekend, my two daughters embarked on their first road trip together, heading off in the blue toyota they’ve christened Sammy to visit grandparents at the other end of the state, sending me a photo along the way of a giant ice cream sundae the younger girl devoured with enormous gusto.

On my own variation of a road trip, I spread out the pieces of my manuscript on the living room floor, and late that night, and much of the next morning, put my mind and literal hands to the harder parts of rewriting: plot, timeline, tension.

The next day, I linked up with a writer friend, traveling through Vermont’s stunning autumn mountains and valleys, and joined another woman in Manchester, Vermont, for a group reading. Although it’s a rare pleasure for me to visit with other writers, when my daughters walked into a pizza place, wearing leather jackets and smiling, I could not imagine ever being happier to see anyone.

That unending highway yet lures me with its mystique and unfolding adventures. At the end of the evening, while the younger girl slept sprawled on the backseat, my teenager and I drove home in the peerless dark, threading our way along rivers and through the mountains concealed in the night, talking, talking, talking.

In Barre, in the damp cold, I switched to my car parked alone in a lot beneath a radiant streetlight, and tailed my driving daughter for those final miles, that familiar way I’ve driven so many times, and now my daughter will, too, as pilot of her car rather than passenger. I followed my children all the way up the mountains, until we arrived home, safe and whole, together. I had kindled a fire in the wood stove earlier, and the house greeted us with warmth.

Here’s a few lines from one of the readers last night at Northshire Bookstore:

Whenever I’m feeling smug, as if I’ve hit a home run, I try to remind myself that I was born on third base. Third base for me was a Pennsylvania steel town where my dad labored at the mill, a union job with good wages and benefits. So, we had a decent home in a safe neighborhood where I went to a good school – third base…. I’ve witnessed enough bad luck to know that I am one of the truly lucky ones.

– David Mook, Corn-Pone ‘Pinions: Political Poems, Essays and Cartoons

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end of a long evening…. Manchester, Vermont