memoir

Ursa Major, companion.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Pristine frost covers the picnic table this morning, the shriveled remains of the rudbeckia leaves, late autumn inexorable as hell. Pausing at the end of a walk yesterday, my friend asks if I can hear the crickets at my house. The scamper of squirrels, a few snips of birdsong, the bounce of the neighbors’ basketball: that’s about all.

In the evening, I check the dampers on my woodstove, zip up my coat, and walk a few streets over to meet neighbors. The night is dark as a pantry, the constellations already promising winter’s icy beauty. Walking, hands in my pockets, I’m thinking I need to find my mittens, and also I’m remembering a conversation with an acquaintance, a visual artist, who remarked that the winter is always a source of creativity for her, a place in sink into. True, I know, the double-edgedness of this season, remarkable for its beauty, its harshness.

My neighbors and friends pack into the Main Street art center, jammed with the eclecticism of Vermont: the elderly couples, the kids running upstairs, and everyone else in-between, in wool hats and sweaters like me. Later, walking home, the moon hangs as a boat with a curved bottom in the upper bare branches of trees. My boots with worn-to-holes soles and split leather strike the sidewalk. I’ve walked this stretch numberless times, and yet… the night is sparkling new, Ursa Major over my shoulder, my frosty breath a cloud that vanishes into the night.

“Some people make you feel better about living. Some people you meet and you feel this little lift in your heart, this ‘Ah’, because there’s something in them that’s brighter or lighter, something beautiful or better than you, and here’s the magic: instead of feeling worse, instead of feeling ‘why am I so ordinary?’, you feel just the opposite, you feel glad. In a weird way you feel better, because before this you hadn’t realised or you’d forgotten human beings could shine so.”
― Niall Williams

More things in heaven and earth…. Eve of Midterms.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Two years ago, the country churned towards an angry Presidential election. Now, mid-terms in a foliage season remarkable for vivid yellows, dazzling oranges, the natural world a common good exterior to government.

Two years ago, I (and, hence, my family) entered the medical system’s mighty beast of Ivy League Dartmouth Hitchcock. Just recently, I heard word of a long-ago friend and a stage 4 cancer diagnosis, and reflexively I thought how awful, that’s likely the end. Yet I had stage 4, a rotten diagnosis. Two years ago, kind strangers rallied around me, advising me to tidy up, consider your affairs.

My affairs?? Had I become a character in a middling English novel? I had a closet shelf of my kids’ high school handwritten math notebooks, the back side of my house needed painting, no directives and certainly no exit plan, a novel under contract, another book about class in Vermont I hadn’t yet written. I’d left my shoes at work. I’d been going about my life — working and writing, my heart divided in throbbing currents of love and loyalty, of rage and hurt, fear and desire.

Entering this darkening season now, as the days shrink and the nights lengthen, the trees drop their leaves and stick season emerges—the metaphor of light reigns. In that winter of illness, daughters and I had so many speeding drives down the icy interstate, and, always, the glowing red of EMERGENCY was a welcoming beacon, the promise of succor. Bit by bit, we figured out how to navigate the system, how to enter and ask for help, parse the complex layers of staff hierarchy, to learn names and procedures, numbers, billing, to ask questions, to understand when answers were impossible. To gauge risk. To endure, and endure, and endure more.

In all this, to know awe for the skill and art of complex medicine, to be supremely grateful for this first world privilege, and to be awed for so much light that surrounded my tiny family — from friends and strangers, from so much that arrived to me through this writing space: cards and sweets, books, letters, messages, poems.

Two years later, heading into another election, yes, of course, absolutely, politics matter. People in powerful positions weld decisions that affect everyday lives. But there’s that Hamlet line: There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy… In this quiet hour, the wind knocking an overgrown rose bush against my window, the woodstove crackling, profound satisfaction to be yet in the chaotic story of this world.

“I used to think healing meant ridding the body and the heart of anything that hurt. It meant putting your pain behind you, leaving it in the past. But I’m learning that’s not how it works. Healing is figuring out how to coexist with the pain that will always live inside of you, without pretending it isn’t there or allowing it to hijack your day. It is learning to confront ghosts and to carry what lingers.”
― Suleika Jaouad

Scrap of a love story: “…the only things you know…”

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

Asters I planted in my garden, withstanding first frosts.

More indicative, perhaps, would be this:

Darkness lies deeply on each end of the day, cats rising hours before dawn to eat, myself to weld that fork and open my laptop. Afternoons wind down into early darkness. A friend and I walk through spits of rain, wander along Main Street, jammed with locals and leaf peepers, negotiate the two empty stools at a long bar, where she drinks beer and I drink club soda, eating the pip of lemons.

What does time matter? It might be six or ten, maybe nearing midnight. Night presses against the wide windows, as if hungry.

Later, walking home, the air touches my face with its scents of diesel and rotting leaves, woodsmoke. Every year, this pause. The need to gather coats, who needs new boots? and where are the mittens?, the price of snow tires, the aligning of ash buckets, the necessity of socks. All that long winter I was sick, I couldn’t navigate the porch steps and the ice by myself, darkness relegated to my windows. Only in those rushing nighttime drives to Dartmouth Hitchcock did I know the constellations arced overhead, Ursa Major, the gleaming Pleiades, the scrap of cold on my lips. How I missed this.

And a favorite Maggie Smith poem:

First Fall

I’m your guide here. In the evening-dark

morning streets, I point and name.

Look, the sycamores, their mottled,

paint-by-number bark. Look, the leaves

rusting at the edges.

I walk through Schiller Park with you

on my chest. Stars smolder well

into daylight. Look, the pond, the ducks,

the dogs chasing prized sticks.

Fall is when the only things you know

because I’ve named them

begin to end. Soon I’ll have another

season to offer you: frost soft

on the window. The first time you see

something die, you won’t know it might

come back. I’m desperate for you

to love the world because I brought you here.

“…hear your whole existence…”

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

I hole up at my kitchen table to work, then go for a run in the late afternoon, then circle back to work. This work is a spreadsheet where I’m sewing and ripping out and stitching again numbers and more numbers. Numbers that signify things and actions. I use my same writing approach: ask questions (what does this mean?), be precise, question myself, care about what I’m doing.

Early October. I veer off my running path and wander along the seam of fallow field and riverbank. Geese wing south, honking. Inexorable.

I grew up in New Hampshire. Autumn, how apples on the trees smell both sweet and rotting, reminds me of childhood, when time meant nothing. Now, one of my oldest friends arrives for dinner, and she shares her retirement plan, a number not-so-far in the distance. She taught me the name of the flower closed gentian. I haven’t seen her in weeks, yet she sits down, and we pick up, talking. Inexorable, the motion of this material world.

In this dry spell, the river runs low, unkempt, crammed with human debris. Wild and human intersect: shorn cornfield, wild asters, bridges, the eagles I’ve spied here, all summer. I keep thinking not of those numbers and the mathematical patterns of addition and subtraction, multiplication and division, but of a recent New Yorker essay about writing and illness, the flimsiness of words in the wake of wrenching pain. Words upon words. The signifier and the signified. I crouch down and tie my shoe. Overhead, all that sky. Underfoot, the immensity of earth. I’ve five things I think I should be doing. The geese slice through the afternoon, then vanish, leaving me in this dusty field. The slow spin of this planet.

Wait, for now.
Distrust everything if you have to.
But trust the hours. Haven’t they
carried you everywhere, up to now?

…. Be there to hear it, it will be the only time,
most of all to hear your whole existence,
rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.

— Galway Kinnell

Intertwining: Beauty and Broken.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

Three afternoons in a row, I run along the rail trail and pause at this ox bow in the river. The Lamoille is beginning to gather its water might here, a handful of miles from its northern headwaters at Horse Pond. The dry air smells of pine needles heating in the sunlight, a scent that reminds me of camping in childhood. My parents, rich with wanderlust, never hesitated to tie sleeping bags and tents on our old green Jeep’s luggage rack, pack a family duffel bag, and head out for a month or two of open air living. Those days, a dollar would get us a night in a national forest.

This run is a flat span, nothing remarkable in distance, a path through evergreens, along farms, across a few dirt roads. Late afternoon, I’ve seen no one here but little yellow butterflies, the crows of course gleaning in the cornfields, three swimming otters. The tourist at the trailhead with his watercolors and brush.

I’m a collection of shoulders, hip bones, ankles, a jostle of organs and tendons and my own unceasing thoughts, curious to see this river in the foliage that shifts and mutates each afternoon. Again, disease taught me how strength can fetter me, fetter you, more fiercely to this mortal world.

Returning, sweaty, I pause at the bridge where the man is painting. Each afternoon, we admire this season’s extraordinary beauty: gold and crimson. “Little patch of Vermont wild,” he says.

The night before, under a waning moon, a friend and I walked along this trail. The night folded around us. The starlight thin threads on the running river. How far will we go? we asked each other. Owls called. The night spread around us, infinite. Forever, I thought.

….. and thanks to another walking companion who introduced me to Lyanda Lynn Haupt:

“Hope is not a remedy or even a substitute for the despair and anxiety we face in the modern world, but a companion to these things. Mature hope involves a willingness to allow that brokenness and beauty sometimes intertwine.”

Solitary Sailboat.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

I make a difficult phone call to a family member. Late afternoon, the perennial sunflowers stretch above my head in my garden. I’ve walked barefoot from my house through the grass that’s already cooling in the shadows to my garden, the soil warm from the day’s sun and so dry it’s verging near dusty. Afterwards, there’s a second call, then a third. I find two zucchinis that need picking, an onion I’d forgotten beneath the tansy. I gather these.

I’ve had this worldview of cause and effect: make a decision, or not a decision, and the consequences creep up or roar upon you. No stasis in this world. A selfish view. Meanwhile, of course, the transient world churns along, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ceaseless waves, the pollinators feasting lustily on these sunflowers whose petals are already beginning their autumn wilt-and-drop.

September: a month jammed with color and sadness, the fleetingness of this life. Two years ago, disease was rampaging in my blood. I did not yet know this, while already my ailing body was sailing me into faraway seas. That journey was me in a solitary life raft, cold winter starlight drenching my eyes. Swimmers tossed over the edge of that rickety inflatable boat the things that kept me alive: medicines of all kinds, tiny bowls of hot soup, books and money, the hands that propped me up and guided me on walks, the company of voices. Meals and kindness that sustained my daughters, and so sustained me.

Overhead, the bluest of a Vermont sky. I answer my phone again. What luck, immensity of good fortune, to be enmeshed in wildly unknown world, relishing fatty marrow.

Into My Own

One of my wishes is that those dark trees,
So old and firm they scarcely show the breeze,
Were not, as ’twere, the merest mask of gloom,
But stretched away unto the edge of doom.

I should not be withheld but that some day
Into their vastness I should steal away,
Fearless of ever finding open land,
Or highway where the slow wheel pours the sand.

I do not see why I should e’er turn back,
Or those should not set forth upon my track
To overtake me, who should miss me here
And long to know if still I held them dear.

They would not find me changed from him they knew—
Only more sure of all I thought was true. ~ Robert Frost