life

Dad, at 89.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

In the summer of 1980, my parents had the summer off. Dad was a college teacher, and my mother, an RN, was encouraged to take unpaid time as the hospital census was low. My parents owned a Jeep, and my dad loaded sleeping bags and two tents in an oilskin on the luggage rack, and secured the bulk with bungee cords. From New Hampshire, my parents headed west with their three kids.

Now, older than my parents were at that time, I wonder what the heck my parents were searching for. As a kid, of course, you simply go with the family flow, show up at the picnic table and eat chili from a plastic bowl. As a writer, I know that all life is propelled by desire, for that bowl of chili, for the wilderness my parents loved, for the far murkier desires that lurk in a human heart. We were never a Bobbsey Twin family (although good lord how I longed for that, a long-quelled desire), but three of us grew up and created our own complicated lives, never far from the wilderness.

Today, my old man is 89, a remarkable age. I woke thinking of him on one of those summer trips, back in the world before cell phones and internet, when no one knew where the five of us were, just us—dad, mom, the three kids—rattling around in that Jeep. Dad always packed tools, and he fixed our vehicle along the way. High up in the Wyoming mountains one summer, it was cold as heck. He got up before any of us, brewed coffee on the Coleman stove and made buttered toast. He unzipped the tent and handed in toast and hot coffee. Stay in your sleeping bags until it warms, he said. We’d been on the road for weeks by then. He was unshaven, bundled in a jacket, and he kept that makeshift hearth of the Coleman stove burning, feeding us toast. Happy birthday, dad. ❤️

And the Hayden Carruth poem that reminds me of my parents…

Birthday Cake

For breakfast I have eaten the last of your birthday cake that you
had left uneaten for five days
and would have left five more before throwing it away.
It is early March now. The winter of illness
is ending. Across the valley
patches of remaining snow make patterns among the hill farms,
among fields and knolls and woodlots,
like forms in a painting, as sure and significant as forms
in a painting. The cake was stale.
But I like stale cake, I even prefer it, which you don’t
understand, as I don’t understand how you can open
a new box of cereal when the old one is still unfinished.
So many differences. You a woman, I a man,
you still young at forty-two and I growing old at seventy.
Yet how much we love one another.
It seems a miracle. Not mystical, nothing occult,
just the ordinary improbability that occurs
over and over, the stupendousness
of life. Out on the highway on the pavement wet
with snow-melt, cars go whistling past. 
And our poetry, yours short-lined and sounding
beautifully vulgar and bluesy
in your woman’s bitterness, and mine almost 
anything, unpredictable, though people say
too ready a harkening back
to the useless expressiveness and ardor of another
era. But how lovely it was, that time
in my restless memory.
This is the season of mud and thrash, broken limbs and crushed briers
from the winter storms, wetness and rust,
the season of differences, articulable differences that signify
deeper and inarticulable and almost paleolithic
perplexities in our lives, and still
we love one another. We love this house
and this hillside by the highway in upstate New York.
I am too old to write love songs now. I no longer
assert that I love you, but that you love me,
confident in my amazement. The spring
will come soon. We will have more birthdays
with cakes and wine. This valley
will be full of flowers and birds.

Making more tracks than necessary…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 7 Comments

I’m standing on a dirt road, looking up at the blue sky unblemished by any smear of cloud as my friend wraps a scarf around her face, when a Subaru speeds over the crest. Jolted, I lurch to the roadside.

$750k in cancer treatments and I’m felled by wrong-place, wrong-time on an otherwise untraveled back road? Not this afternoon.

Bitter cold warnings jam the local news. In snow-drenched Vermont, February marks winter’s swing, where the daylight begins to rush back, the light tinged with warmth, suffused with this second-half-of-winter’s promise that seeds will stir again. In the meantime, I take off my mittens as we walk and talk about writing and people and the value of a precise query letter.

We step aside for intermittent vehicles, a silver pickup, a friend’s Prius, a Corolla with split exhaust. A year ago, I’d been sprung from a stay at Dartmouth-Hitchcock and returned to my cancer-and-chemo habits that shifted from bed to couch to what felt like a Herculean effort to open my notebook at the kitchen table and scrawl a few lines, my shaky pencil a balloonist’s line that tethered me to the world. What I didn’t know then was that the hard things I’d endured in my life, some of my making, some not so (sobriety, a divorce, selling a house and lighting out for new territory with my daughters, writing and selling books, the pandemic, the constant wear of subpar home economics), was training for the next 10 weeks. In what is now a blur of that back-and-forth from home to Dartmouth, at one point my oncologist’s eyes widened just the slightest; I wondered if my life was tapering to its end. Was my body about to be driven under?

But not last winter. Not this sunny afternoon, either. What rich luck to walk on a Vermont ridgeline road, the snowy mountains in the distance, finches in a roadside maple. To work, to share a plate of roasted salty Brussels sprouts with a friend, bake a chocolate cake for my daughter’s birthday.

I will never escape this cancer, whether I live a year more or thirty. Its fearsome and awesome power churns through my heart. How it revealed unequivocally to me the brutality and dearness of this world.

Meanwhile, as I cherish these days, these hours and minutes, the country where I live hemorrhages, the last moment of a man’s life pounding through the chaos, his words to a stranger, “Are you okay?” illuminating suppurating wounds. All the things, sadness and delight and such sorrow, the radiant sunlight. Each of us, moving along our paths: separate, together.

Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.
― Wendell Berry

The Goddamn Gray, the Brilliance of Language.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

A year ago, my daughter was driving me to the local ER, yet again, under the frigid winter sky. Wordless, I leaned my head against the side window of her Subaru, staring at the faraway pricks of stars vanishing and reappearing among the clouds. In the darkness, I fixated on one thought—the white hospital bed, the clear liquid drugs that would make the pain cease—and held to that, my lifeline. Cancer-and-chemo, in its infinite complexity, is a monotone landscape. In all those months, my existence was the blackness of pain, the temporary light of relief-from-pain, the crimson drug injected into my veins. Occasionally, a cardinal at a feeder, blood oranges, and then I couldn’t eat those, either, and I remained alive on Saltines and water.

I keep thinking of those below zero nights as I drive this night to the opposite end of town. There, with a friend in a place where I’ve never been, we eat drunken noodles and green curry, and then drive again through the darkness and the drifting snow that’s no threat, simply prettiness. At the Vermont Studio Center for the Arts, we settle into the dining hall with the residents. We’re greeted warmly, and the room is scented with the lingering remains of a savory dinner, of coffee and wine and the fragrance of flowers likely from the tables freshly scrubbed. This is a dear place, where I’ve been lucky to stay and work hard, meet friends and share stories about creativity, its hardness and joy.

Rigoberto González reads magnificently, his words, reminding me of when I was a teenager reading James Joyce for the first time, thinking yes, yes, this is what writing can do, push us into a place where we glimpse the world for a moment in all its shimmering and confounding complexity, its immense sorrow, utter fun, or the way a hand plucks a pebble from a river and holds it dripping and glistening to the sunlight.

At home, I stand in the darkness that is sodden with cold, a forerunner of the mighty freeze rushing this way. The crescent moon pushes against the clouds. In those underworld months, the goddamn gray occasionally scattershot with goldfinches exploding from bare branches, my fate might easily have veered another path. A storm and brutal cold loom over this nation submerged beneath political nefariousness.

This terrible disease, this exacting instructor, taught me brutal lessons. Among these, savor these draughts of warmth, recognize heart. Know this value. Do not disparage.

“Every person with a body should be given a guide to dying as soon as they are born.”
― Anne Boyer

Landscape, Here, There.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 7 Comments

Late afternoon, the January darkness chasing away the chickadees at the window feeder, a friend phones about a film at a nearby arts center. Turns out, the film is about the broken-upness of relationships in America. Post-lymphoma, post-chemo, my energy by day’s end is something I can cup in one hand, a diminishment never illuminated by a nap. Grateful for the nudge and the company, I fill my woodbox, feed my cats.

It’s been a day of plenty here—of yoga and work, of slush on the roads and mush falling from the sky, a softness that threatens to harden overnight to ice. Midafternoon, I drop my car for an oil change and open my laptop in the waiting room. A stranger sits down in the otherwise empty room and drops his tablet on the table between us. I’ve kept much of this blog off the political realm, although surely any reader perceives my alignment is not with the aggressor in power. The stranger begins talking in a way that’s not angry but maybe more mystified about what’s happening in the country, the prohibitions about who can come in, with real consequences.

He’s newly retired. When I ask what he did for work, he says you don’t want to know, but oh I do, and so he begins unspooling his life. He worked for the fed’s immigration service. Military service, 19 nineteen moves, a residency in Germany during the Cold War, four grown children, one of whom is estranged. He says again, as if baffled, she kind of went nuts over this Trump thing.

The windows reveal spitting snow. He’s at a crossroads, that weighty retirement time. What will he do now? He says he’d like to put his hands to some good, maybe a Habitat for Humanity project. I close my laptop. He grew up in very rural Vermont, and he shares an accident that happened to him as a teenager, how it defined his life. Midafternoon, the light is as sooty as twilight. As a writer, I’m always looking for junctures: which way will a character act now? But I know, of course, that we meet crossroads every day. Crab at the post office woman? Curse the town snow plow driver? And I know well my own fallibility and hesitation. But I also understand how our lives and choices are enfolded into our culture and nation, that, as we live by the law of gravity, we live also by the constrictions of time and place. As for the country…. an immense crossroads. A collective atlas is under dispute.

Driving home in the snow that may or may not amount to much besides a dusting of ambiance, my friend’s son phones from a Texas freeway, lanes choked with rushing traffic. My headlights slice through the darkness. On either side lie hayfields, snowed in for the winter. The stars are swallowed in dense clouds. A year ago, another phase of terrible things that happen to cancer patients was barely beginning in my life. I didn’t yet know that there would be so many rushing drives down the icy interstate to the ER, all those grim hours when my daughters and I wondered which was this was going to shake out. Disease is a fierce and demanding instructor. The first lesson I learned, as I smartened up quickly, was to ask What’s real? What’s happening? even when I didn’t want to know the terrain of the landscape.

Because here’s something else that’s true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is… no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship…

Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default-settings. They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing. And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default-settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. ~ David Foster Wallace

Brief Thaw.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

In the January thaw, a wind — balmy for winter — curls around my house, and all night long the chimes hung on the back porch jangle their melody. The chimes are the song of this house, in all the seasons of this northern climate.

Despite the thaw, the hours of these days are yet short. I wake ages before light bleeds over the horizon, my cats ready for breakfast, the woodstove in need of feeding, myself hungry for hot coffee and work. I gather what I can of my energy and cup this in my hands, gauging how the day lies ahead. Not so long ago, I could work, and work, and work. Offer me twenty dollars for a quick edit, and I’d jump. Post-cancer, post-chemo, not so.

Walking downtown, I pass the coffee shop. Two friends at a window table wave at me to come in, come in. Inside, I shrug off my coat that’s in need of washing and set my backpack on the floor. We talk books and woodpile status, politics and the amnesia of American consciousness. Above the coffee shop is the yoga studio with the gleaming maple floors, where I stand at the window, watching traffic ebb into the diner parking lot. The river bends through the village here, heads westward beneath the cover of ice towards Lake Champlain, whose waters flow north. In the alley between this brick building and the next, the wind cuts upward. Snow drifts towards the sky.

There are days when I think that everything I know is upended. That snow has no mind for gravity.

Before dawn, I carry out ashes and stand in the dark, icicles dripping, cold breath from the snow grabbing my wrists. In the thaw, the earth smells of rotting compost, woodsmoke from my house and my neighbors’, the assured promise of spring, yet far in the offing.

… I work with the consciousness of death at my shoulder, not constantly, but often enough to leave a mark upon all my life’s decisions and actions. And it does not matter whether this death comes next week or thirty years from now, this consciousness gives my life another breadth… — Andre Lorde

No Restitution.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

As a child, I went rarely to a physician: once for strep throat, secondly when I was eighteen for a required physical to enroll in college. I had a smallpox vaccine in sunny Santa Fe, surely one of the last in this country as my younger brother skipped this one. My mother brought her three kids to elementary school clinics for DPT and polio vaccines in gloomy Manchester, New Hampshire. We were healthy kids, and my mother, an RN, believed firmly in keeping healthy kids out of the medical system.

As a 21st century cancer patient and now survivor, I inhabit a different world. Through the Dartmouth-Hitchcock portal, I message my oncologist (my oncologist? this pairing of words still makes me cringe), who kindly replies. My recent bloodwork results are “unrevealing.” I’m reading Geraldine Brooks’ Caleb’s Crossing, a gift from a friend, set in the 1600s, and I study that “unrevealing” word, pondering its roots. I have a slightly-above-average vocabulary, and yet this disease has shoved me against so many words I’d never encountered. For instance, salpingectomy: removal of a fallopian tube.

Among much else, I’ve observed how my oncologist (again, that wincing) uses language: use words precisely for what is known and what is not known. The precision of oncologist and surgery saved my life; yet, I was never given the illusion that all is known. For now, on this cold morning, crossover between a full moon already waning and the rising sun barely quickening the horizon, I’m well. Which arrows to the heart of the human condition. The nascent day stretches long, an infinity of possibilities.

“There is no restitution for people like us, no return to days when our bodies were unscathed, our innocence intact. Recovery isn’t a gentle self-care spree that restores you to a pre-illness state. Though the word may suggest otherwise, recovery is not about salvaging the old at all. It’s about accepting that you must forsake a familiar self forever, in favor of one that is being newly born. It is an act of brute, terrifying discovery.”
― Suleika Jaouad (in all her awesomeness….)