life

Go for a walk around the block?

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 16 Comments

March 7, my father’s 88th birthday today in what is doubtlessly sunny New Mexico. So much for my plans, months ago, to visit him on this day.

Here’s the thing about living such a long life — I could pick countless numbers of things to write about, but what I woke up thinking about this morning was how my dad would often say, “Let’s go for a walk around the block.” At any time of day, we’d set off. Sometimes just up the street and actually around the block, or other afternoons on hours-long rambles through the woods behind our neighborhood. We walked in sunny days, through sleet, through knee-deep snow, in the sweet spring rain. It’s a habit all three of his children have continued our whole lives, and his four grandchildren, too.

Sunny, here, in northern Vermont, too, a day of such optimism that the blue sky choruses the inevitable promise of spring. And for my father, one of our favorite poems from the unmatchable Hayden Carruth.

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.

Finding Jesus with the star sunglasses…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 10 Comments

Home again and somewhat shocked to see an ice floe leering off my back roof, not exactly the size of A23a Iceberg, but approximating it….

I’m under strict orders to drink broth, eat saltines, lie on the couch and read — the last two I’ve been perfecting for months now. As for the rest of the order (this is the only thing you should be doing, Brett), I’ve been quietly breaking rules for years. Now, intimate with cancer and my mortality, I push myself to obey the orders, stick with the plan, follow the course precisely.

The winter thaws. The iceberg chips, shifts. I step outside and lean against my house in my down jacket that is now limp and beaten down, a sad thing that, this quarantined winter, I’ve used so little. How will my thousand words a day fit into these orders? A grant deadline looms. When will I put on my clean shoes and that linen sweater I knitted and return to work? A cardinal perches on the railing.

In those 48 hours I spent in the Dartmouth ER, in a beige isolation room, an upbeat nurse with amazing eyelashes occasionally stopped in to cheer me and whoever of my daughters was there. On the TV, which we never turned on, she pointed out a tiny orange plastic duck, and told us someone had placed small figurines all over the hospital. “I found Jesus,” she said. “I know that’s weird, to go around a hospital saying I’ve found the Man, but really…” She reached in her pocket and pulled out an inch-high plastic Jesus in a long robe, black curls, gold star sunglasses. He smiled so widely his teeth gleamed.

In that same room, I spied a second duck, brought the ducks home with me and lined them up on the bathroom mirror beside the wooden blue elephant from the Metropolitan Museum my daughter gave me. Two tiny things that arrived in my pocket, after a week of manifold things, after months of many manifold more. All day, it will rain, the warmth softening that iceberg on my roof, falling on the deck and breaking the wood, or not. If it’s broken, we’ll repair it this summer. If not, we’ll move on to the next thing.

And utterly seasonally inappropriate, here’s a Galway Kinnell poem I’ve been loving:

Blackberry Eating

I love to go out in late September
among the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries
to eat blackberries for breakfast,
the stalks very prickly, a penalty
they earn for knowing the black art
of blackberry-making; and as I stand among them
lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries
fall almost unbidden to my tongue,
as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words
like strengths or squinched,
many-lettered, one-syllabled lumps,
which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well
in the silent, startled, icy, black language
of blackberry-eating in late September.

Small town, rural hospital, snapshot, tinge of the seventies.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 16 Comments

Driving into the Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center, the soaring buildings with their blue-green windows inspire confidence. They’re just so darn topnotch, cream of the crest, but (in the cancer journey) I also use the nearby hospital, too.

At the local hospital, not far from our house, we arrive again in the dark, the crimson EMERGENCY sign glowing. My daughter leaves me at the door and disappears around the corner to park. Inside, it’s the same receptionist, who nods a little sadly to see me again. In the waiting room, there’s no one but me and the Mountain Dew machine, my reflection in the windows.

Months into this cancer, I’m familiar with the process (don’t ever put your feet on the ER floor without shoes!) of questions and fluids and meds, a room far away from the day’s flu and Covid patients. Here’s what has changed: the ER doctor and I know each other now. My brilliant oncologist calls me and thinks aloud, what’s going on now? and orders an unusual set of tests. The ER doctor listens, nods, yes, let’s try that. My daughter’s boyfriend appears. The three of us talk about xc skiing and DOGE.

I’ve crammed my backpack with my laptop and notebook, two books, and a few clothes. In the middle of the night, I’m admitted. The woman who takes me upstairs knows a longtime friend of mine. She tells me about growing up in eastern Montana. Wherever you go, she tells me, the sky is infinite. Vermont’s so small, I feel like I could put it in my pocket.

Having lived in the West, too, I sometimes chafe against the pocket-sidedness of Vermont but mostly I love it. I keep thinking of this woman’s description for these few days again, in this rural hospital that’s about the size of double pocket in the front of hoodie sweatshirt. The census is so low here the rooms are all singles. Each of the rooms where I’ve stayed seems to be finished with unique salvaged materials. Beadboard cabinets in my last room, painted glossy cobalt, line one entire wall. In this room, the window is trimmed with wooden rosette corners, the sill plastic faux marble.

The medical world is hurry up and wait, but this hospital leans back towards the 1970s. I drink Shasta ginger ale and chat with the LNA about the cold and maple sugaring. Here’s what changed in me: I see these people throwing everything they have at me. The hospitalist who advised me, just a day after the cancer was discovered, do not stay in bed; be part of the world. The social worker stops in and asks my daughter about her job. The chaplain and I talk Dostoyevsky and cats. The nurses who have survived their own savage cancers share their stories and let me ask my questions. I have so many questions. The questions narrow down to one: how will I survive?

Then I ask to leave. My daughter stops at the pharmacy for another prescription and texts that it will be a few minutes. I open the door and lean against her winter-salted car. I’ve been at this crossroads in this unremarkable section of town so many times. Across the road was the department store Ames where I bought this daughter her first pink ball so we could roll it between us, the baby version of Catch. In the Price Chopper parking lot, I used to meet people to exchange boxes of wedding favors in leaf or heart-shaped bottles, tied up with ribbons, for checks. Afterwards, I’d take my girls into Price Chopper and buy ice cream. Behind the pharmacy is a home center, where I’ll never go again, after my ex-husband absconded with his customers’ money and stiffed the home center… how many tens of thousands of dollars I never knew. I’d severed that cord by then. On the other side of the crossroads stands the hardware store where the girls and I used our pandemic stimulus money to buy a glass table and red umbrella for our back porch. We use those things every summer, nearly everyday.

Behind Price Chopper, craggy Elmore Mountain looms, where I and the girls and their friends have camped and hiked and swam for years. The gentlest of snowfalls sifts down, swirling. My long-legged daughter crosses the lot, shades on despite the overcast sky, grinning.

Survivors.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 13 Comments

Friends appear at my kitchen door with a rose and gossip. Midwinter, and I’m happy to keep my cats sprawled belly up before the glowing wood stove. The creatures sleep on the hot metal floor guard, their fur gathering ashes and birch bark curls. The snow bends down my thorny rose bushes. My daughter texts with news of a robin sighting. We talk about the usual — town meeting day approaching, the strangeness of an administration determined to chop apart the country. In Vermont, we do our usual thing: heads together, we strategize how to endure, how to keep our hearts open.

The snow is no fresh news. The unbroken cold (and hardly that awful — I’ve seen 40 below, albeit just once and that was enough 40 below for this lifetime) is no news, either. The sun begins to return, the days spreading out at either end, although the icicles remain icy, dripless daggers.

For me, this winter is the most profound of my life, surely the most sacred. I’ve had my own lovely share of winters with my newborns nestled against my chest, of small children delighted with swirling snowflakes, of long skis through woods. On the night before the Presidential election, an ER doctor gently told me I had cancer. Months later, I’ve immersed myself in the mundaneness of insurance and how to navigate the multi-levered medical system. Beyond that, my life slowed, often to simply enduring an afternoon, a night….

I’m adding to my draft of this post, a day later, now hospitalized again. Let there be no mistaking one of the world’s realities: infection is a mighty (and frequently fatal) force. Now, my daughter and I have this down: fluids and pain meds, with the curve now of puzzling out with the oncologist why I’m back. I contracted Giardia last summer from swimming in unclean water. Although I’ve been treated, the question lingers… has this bizarrely lingered?

But I wanted to return to the beginning of this short piece, about the kindness of friends and strangers. Lymphoma is my disease to bear, my bone marrow and veins and intestines and organs. But now, I — who so long saw myself as a lone running wolf — have been humbled to realize I’ve never been apart from the world, all this time. All around me, strangers and loved ones alike hold me together.

From my friend Jo, who sends me an audio poem every night:

“Survivor”
Adele Kenny

A jay on the fence preaches to a
squirrel. I watch the squirrel quiver,
the way squirrels do – its whole
body flickers. I’m not sure why this
reminds me of when I was five and

something died in our drain spout.
Feather or fur, I watched my father
dig it out, knowing (as a child knows)
how much life matters. I have seen how
easily autumn shakes the yellow leaves,

how winter razes the shoals of heaven.
I have felt love’s thunder and moan, and
had my night on the wild river. I have
heard the cancer diagnosis with my name
in it. I know what mercy is and isn’t.

Morning breaks from sparrows’ wings
(life’s breezy business), and I’m still here,
still in love with the sorrows, the joys –
days like this, measured by memory, the
ticking crickets, the pulse in my wrist.

Lantern, Starlight.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

In a half-sleep, I hear my daughter talking in the kitchen. Another odd parallel to pregnancy – sudden sleep, confused awakenings. Where am I?

She brings me a slender book, Pax by Annie Lighthart, gift from a friend. I rally up, read the book that afternoon as the wind lifts the Christmas lights around our house and barn and gently tap, taps, the clapboards. Solstice, winter’s toothy cold burrows in. My daughter’s whole life I’ve been the hearth keeper, the ash sweeper. The rotator of ash buckets, kindling boxes, the wakeful night-keeper layering the firebox with wood. Now, suddenly, her duty. She’s fed the fire for years, of course, but the ash shovel has been handed over. Fact, fact.

The solstice crossed, we enter winter’s long terrain. The neighbors’ dogs howl. Somewhere in the night, I lie awake, a single star a distant light in my window, pure as a teardrop.

LANTERN

Some evening, almost accidentally, you might yet understand
that you belong, are meant to be, are sheltered—

still foolish, but looking out the door with a contented heart.
This is what the king wants and the old man and woman

and even the busy young if you knew, and you have it
by no grace of your own, standing in the doorway

with loose empty hands. Now your heart lights your mind,
a little lantern bobbing within you,

giving out not thought or feeling but confluence,
something else. On what do you pour out this light?

The wet street is empty, one wren in the yard. Let us
redefine love and wreckage, time and weeds.

Pour out your lantern light on the grass, on the bird,
great and small worlds. Don’t go inside for a long, long time.

– Annie Lighthart –

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.