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The Illusion of the Ordinary.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 10 Comments

A year ago, I entered the local ER with acute pain. I’d been there before with my kids for stitches and an allergic reaction, things that could be patched up and remedied. A year ago, an MD told me that a scan revealed metastatic cancer. It was the eve of a contentious election, the nation cracking apart. In my life, however, I suddenly had no time for beliefs or opinions. To survive, I had to lean on facts.

For years, I’d been running not so much as a lone wolf but a mangy coyote, hustling my single mama gig, utterly determined to nourish and protect. But there was no way I was going to weasel through this cancer alone. Almost immediately, I was forced to size up strangers — a surgeon, an oncologist, nurses — and do what I had never done before. I had to trust these strangers with my life. Divorce had school me to be wary; now, disease was forcing me to revise my life, rapidly, on the (incredibly painful) go.

A year later, I’m alive. Some was my stubbornness, the trait that enraged my mother — and yet she herself had taught me stubbornness. Back me into a corner, and, damn, will I fight. But that’s a scrap. The more profound reason I’m alive is that I had access to first world health care. I benefited from medicines and decades of trial-and-error, thanks to researchers and so many suffering patients before me. I had access to that small rural hospital who took me in, over and over, this winter, and to Dartmouth-Hitchcock, such a remarkable cancer center surrounded by New Hampshire woods. We drove down the interstate in multiple snowstorms, and always I was gladdened to see the crimson EMERGENGY sign that never turned off. Entering, I knew I would be treated with compassion, with unflagging skill.

I could not have been treated at Dartmouth without my daughters’ immediate willingness to relinquish nearly a year of their young lives to ferry me through the sheer wretchedness of chemo and the brutal complications, and to keep enduring when I finally broke. They had the patience to stay with me while I put myself together.

I was determined to endure all the chemo to gain the best chance of a cure — and I did, running and then limping and eventually crawling — but I received so much kindness from family, from friends old and new, from many of you here, and from strangers. People brought soup and pot roast, drove me to appointments and blood draws, took me outside on walks, carried in firewood and brewed tea, and insisted that I did not look so terrible at all when I couldn’t even sit up. My post office box filled with lovely cards that I taped on the wall over my bed. A friend texted me photographs nearly every day of the beautiful Vermont winter that I was missing; another dear friend texted me a poem she read every night. Boxes of books and cookies and stollen — such treasures. The end of the chemo was followed by a painful surgery. By then, I had no income, and a check from a friend carried me into the summer and recovery. All these well wishes — all this meant so much to me. Gratitude beyond gratitude.

On the day before this year anniversary, I walked down a dirt road as the darkness fell down. In the gloaming, I could see across the valley a tiny white square I knew was my house where my cats were hungry for dinner. The neighbors’ house glowed orange and yellow with their Halloween lights. An utterly ordinary November day.

What remains with me is a body weakened and damaged, but alive, and the steely secret that the ordinary is luminescent with the extraordinary. Here I was — this small woman stripped down to a t-shirt in a billowy warm November afternoon walking along an empty road. Overhead, a line of cacophonous geese arrowed through the sky. The road dipped down in a wet area, and the mud stunk of rank water and rotting leaves. Ahead of me, mist hovered. What luck! I thought. I strode into the mist. In the spring, Daphne plants grow in these roadside woods where someone too broke or too lazy keeps dumping household trash. By the time I was back at my car, I was in the solid dark, the stars and moon swallowed by clouds. Oh, this messy, unclear, uncertain, marvelous world. What luck.

Gifts at the Back Door.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

I arrive home in the dark and find one of my red deck chairs at my kitchen door, a white container set on its seat. It’s not late but dark already. On my way home from work, I’d walked along the river and walked further than usual. When I’d returned to my car, darkness had fallen.

I’ve been living in or nearby this village for thirty years. I’ve seen a share of miserable things — from addiction and homicides to petty cattiness — and its goodness, too. How, in times of trouble, folks appear with aid. No questions, often very few words. My god, the grace of this.

Scorched earth is how I consider myself these days, not so many days post-chemo, post-surgery, leering up on a year’s anniversary since I learned I had cancer. See how I write this? Past tense. And yet, transmogrified is a word I used with a friend. How this disease has transmogrified my being.

In the dark, I unlock my door, set down my backpack, a pile of library books, a bag of apples. My cats mewl for their cat supper. The container has soup, barley and beef and spinach. The woodstove has gone cold, my jacket drips rain on the floor and my cats’ dense fur, darkness presses against the windows. And yet, serendipitous soup. I take a spoon from the drawer. As for figuring out the rest of my life, or this week, or even this evening — I let that go.

From my library book stash, Sally Mann:

“As for me, I see both beauty and the dark side of the things; the loveliness of cornfields and full sails, but the ruin as the well…. The Japanese have a phrase for this dual perception: mono no aware. It means “beauty tinged with sadness,” for there cannot be any real beauty without the indolic whiff of decay. For me, living is the same thing as dying, and loving is the same thing as losing, and this does not make me a madwoman; I believe it can make me better at living, and better at loving, and, just possibly, better at seeing.”

Crossroads.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

I park at a dirt crossroads this weekend beside a former tavern and walk up the hill to the Old West Church. The sunny afternoon speckles through the roadside maples, and I meet others doing what I am, in pairs or singly, and we greet each other, cheerily. At the Old West Church, I hear two terrific poets, but on my walk back to the tavern the line that runs through my head is from a Franz Wright poem, There is but one heart in my body, have mercy/on me, an incantation.

I keep thinking of my dead mother on this radiant Sunday, my mother who pulled her last breath a year and a half ago, hardly a hopscotch jump ago. In my mind, I’m building the architecture of what I’ve tagged as this Cancer Atlas I’m writing, scaffolding this book’s bones. The book is about the here-and-now, about living (at least for now) through a terrible disease, about walking along Vermont’s autumn-gold back roads, about pulling up this summer’s frost-killed pepper plants that produced so bountifully this summer. And my mother? As I work, I think so often of her, this woman both generous and mercurial, the double blade I harbor in my own heart. Gracious, how much she’d enjoy this picturesque walk. She was a woman who loved old churches, was fascinated by adjacent cemeteries, who would have relished the art in the tavern.

At the tavern, I linger in an open doorway, talking with a curator, drinking iced tea from a half-pint jar. My mother would have drunk the wine, feasted on the cured meat and seeded crackers. Dust kicks up in the road. Old friends appear, and we joke about winter’s ferocity. It’s always a crossroads, isn’t it?

“We are created by being destroyed.”
― Franz Wright

This Glorious Autumn Light.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

My sister, a caner survivor, once told me that a cancer diagnosis was a great leveler. This was years before my own cancer experience, and, sure, I had an intellectual understanding of this. Lymphoma schooled me in many ways, among these that I live in my body. Such a simple, profound thing. I had never lived in a body that couldn’t walk up the stairs in my own house, not just because of a sprained ankle or a new baby in arms, but because of weakness in my bones and flesh. I had never considered that I might never be able to enter the bedroom whose walls I painted, where I have slept for so many years.

These days, after a summer devoted to learning how to eat and sleep again and to walk those stairs, outside as much as possible in this gloriously sunny, perishingly dry Vermont summer, I no longer embody the near-translucence of cancer-and-chemo patient. Such pleasure I have when people ask why I’ve cut my hair, and I can reply that I didn’t snip, I lost. The hair I’ve lost is now returning in a metaphor that I can’t ignore: softer but with my childhood cowlick.

Disease hasn’t magically transformed me; if anything, my thorns have proliferated. But here’s a thing: the world where I live is descending into spectacular autumn. Sure, some years the fall foliage bursts brighter than other years, but always, always, heartstopping in beauty. Autumn’s a reminder of my mortality, your mortality, the dearness of this fleeting world. A reminder to pause in our gardens, on our house steps, the sidewalk, whatever trail we may be following. Take a moment. Breathe in, out, in….

From Stephen Jay Gould’s essay “The Median Isn’t the Message”:

Of course I agree with the preacher of Ecclesiastes that there is a time to love and a time to die—and when my skein runs out I hope to face the end calmly and in my own way. For most situations, however, I prefer the more martial view that death is the ultimate enemy—and I find nothing reproachable in those who rage mightily against the dying of the light.

Lucky.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

August is exceptionally hot this year, the rivers so low they can be crossed by foot. In the woods, streams have dried to rock beds. In Montpelier, the state’s tiny capital, I walk by a store with bright bowls in the window and think, My mother would love this store. She passed over a year ago, and yet I still catch myself thinking that she might appear around a corner, her purse tucked under her arm, amused at me. Of course I’m not gone…

My father, the physicist, schooled his three kids early on about entropy. In a week where things repeatedly broke — the hot water heater leaking, the Jetta refusing to start in the rain — he made jokes that we were in a High Entropy Zone. So, this lovely August, with the chorusing crickets and the waning red moon — I’m determined to suck each day to its marrow. Sandwiched around work and the steadiness of washing dishes and so on, I’ve pushed aside space for swimming and ice cream, for lying under the apple tree and studying a spider spin her web. The entropy of living keeps on, as it does.

In the years when I was raising my own young daughters, our days zigzagged from bowls of blueberries to bath time. The days were endless, and the years rushed by. Now, my girls newly grown, I relish the silence and crave their company. Lucky I am, so lucky, to be alive this summer, this month, these days. All day long, I walk around with my tender heart cradled in my hands, wounded and raw from cancer, from weeks of hospitalization, from the knife of mortality pressed against my windpipe. August: the season of great loveliness, the intimation of winter. The reminder to love where and what we are.

Hitch Hiker at a Truck Stop

The hitch hiker asks to look at

the palms of my cold hands

and thanks me for unfolding them

on the frost-edged

picnic table between us.

While I look at his downcast eyes

trying to see if he sees,

nearby truckers stare

at his narrow face,

long blond hair.

He asks me if I garden,

rips a scrap of newspaper

and folds it up

into a tiny origami

package for anise seed.

Here, he says,

seed I gathered in Oregon,

plant it in Colorado.

I always have a garden, he adds,

I plant and leave to others.

He tells me he has no sex;

when you ride in the righthand seat,

you have to nod your head

without listening.

Face pressed to the window,

he can see the lacquered edges

of the earth.

So I imagine him 

practicing calligraphy

on truck windows,

recommending honey and vinegar

in a glass of water

every morning.

Mad, mad, mad.

A yellow warbler,

the moon at the bottom of the stream.

Out on the highway

he is raising his thumb again. ~ Mary Crow

Wildfire Smoke.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 18 Comments

Are these days hot or chilly? All afternoon, working on my back porch, I put on and take off my sweatshirt, step into the sun to make phone calls, lean against the cool clapboards with my laptop. For days now, the air has been smoky with wildfires far away in the north. In the mornings, I wake coughing, wondering how people are breathing, so much nearer these fires.

August, and the raucous summer abruptly quiets. Walking in the woods with a friend, she notes a bird singing — wood or hermit thrush? — but all else is quiet save for our conversation. I’ve been here before, the pause between high summer and early autumn, when the swimming’s still good and the sunset lingers long after supper, but the mornings are filled with cool mist, and the shadows are not warm.

In past years, the faintest shadow of Long Winter has filled me with dread. Again, I will lose my tan, carry my laptop to the kitchen table, maybe go mad talking to my cats. Or not. Twice a day, I water the nasturtiums hanging in baskets on my back porch, listen to the neighbor boys biking. These days are yet long.

From Sunday poetry readings at the local arts center…

Wavering

What makes you think you’re so different? 
That was my weaker self hanging around outside the door. 
The voices over the telephone were accusing, too. 
“Must you always be you?” (They had the advantage, 
More bold without faces. They swirled a few ice cubes 
With a suggestive pause.) For a moment 
I took my heart out and held it in my hands. 
Then I put it back. This is how it is in a competitive world. 
But, I will not eat my own heart. I will not.

~ Ruth Stone