memoir

Following the Bear.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

Mid-August, the mornings are cool, the leaves of the pin cherry tree sparkling with dew. I find a bruise on my bicep; the cancer’s returned? But no. I remember I snagged my arm on the garden fence. Mid-August suddenly and the tomatoes are ripening. Last year, watching the full solar eclipse in our yard, the eclipse’s heart revealed this world’s ineffable beauty: such pure gold. Likewise, surviving cancer (thus far) revealed for me that knife of mortality within me, within all of us, hidden, ever-present.

Mid-August, mid-afternoon I’m drinking lemonade on a bakery porch and staring across the street at a house nearly obscured by sunflowers and globe thistle. I’m curious as heck about this Italianate with ornate corner boards. Who built this and who lives here now, and is the yard’s intent to cultivate wildness, or is no one at home?

My companion and I are talking about hard stuff, a third novel I’ve sent off to my publisher, the book I’m drafting now, about disease and suffering and how to wring meaning from misery. I’m compelled to write this book; writing this book looms impossibly. The afternoon’s quite hot, but by late afternoon the air will settle and cool. Nights, I walk after sunset, the crickets and tree frogs clamorous. I keep thinking about that house (empty or not?) and the thin line between wild and domestic. Here, this border has blurred. Will I cut the pin cherries to widen the canopy of the walnut tree I planted? The rose bushes seek a crack in my house’s foundation.

Wiser now, or maybe simply tired, I care less about the wild honeysuckle and raspberry canes that fortress around my house. I’m no Rapunzel, squirreled away in a tower, waiting for her Prince Charming. The hungry bear tunnels through the undergrowth, showing me a way.

Summer night—
even the stars
are whispering

~ Issa

Our World for this Moment.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

In the Heidi book that I read over and over as a girl, Heidi’s invalid friend Clara visits the Swiss Mountains and becomes healed. These days, hiking in the New Mexico mountains, I keep thinking of this child’s book. In the high desert country, hiking through an aspen forest, I forget I’m in recovery, forget that scar on my abdomen, forget everything but the breeze against my cheeks, the desert sand and stone beneath my soles.

This is a family trip to see my aging father, with all the sweet and bittersweetness of family. Here’s hoping all of you are enjoying July wherever you might be. For me, too, these trips make the journey home happy.

“If you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it’s your world for a moment.”
― Georgia O’Keefe

In the great [and holy] darkness.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

In these sultry July days which I love, I walk in the evenings. Wildfire smoke from Canada renders the sun bloody. In the heat, there’s few folks out. I often follow the trail along the river to the pastures where cows graze. The air, fat with humidity, is redolent with wet earth and cowshit. The smell reminds me of those childhood camping trips and those journeys in my twenties when we explored the West, driving around with Rand McNally and pitching a tent in a forest or farmer’s field.

The world indeed might be going mad, the planet hurtling into fire and heat. On these July evenings, though, it’s me and those cows and the wildflowers blooming rampantly. In the night, rain patters. I leave the cats sleeping in their hot fur and slip outside. It’s so far along in the night that this village is sleeping, too early yet for milk trucks, too late for teenagers. I sit on the steps in the tiny cool bits of raindrops, tree frogs and crickets chorusing.

I’ve posted this poem before, but Hayden Carruth is always worth reading again, and this remains one of my favorites.

The Cows at Night

The moon was like a full cup tonight,
too heavy, and sank in the mist
soon after dark, leaving for light

faint stars and the silver leaves
of milkweed beside the road,
gleaming before my car.

Yet I like driving at night
in summer and in Vermont:
the brown road through the mist

of mountain-dark, among farms
so quiet, and the roadside willows
opening out where I saw

the cows. Always a shock
to remember them there, those
great breathings close in the dark.

I stopped, and took my flashlight
to the pasture fence. They turned
to me where they lay, sad

and beautiful faces in the dark,
and I counted them–forty
near and far in the pasture,

turning to me, sad and beautiful
like girls very long ago
who were innocent, and sad

because they were innocent,
and beautiful because they were
sad. I switched off my light.

But I did not want to go,
not yet, nor knew what to do
if I should stay, for how

in that great darkness could I explain
anything, anything at all.
I stood by the fence. And then

very gently it began to rain.

Living in the Edge.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 7 Comments

As part of my heal-from-cancer and keep-the-cancer-from-returning approach, I borrow my daughter’s yoga map on Thursday mornings and walk through the cemetery and along Little League field to the village. The studio is above the town’s coffee shop. The windows frame the town’s main intersection of routes 14 and 15, the Lamoille River, flanked by July’s burgeoning green.

As I lie on the polished maple floor, the sound of the traffic comes and goes. This calmness reminds me of those years I lived in Brattleboro, pre-internet, when the main source of my twenties’ activities was walking to the public library or a favorite bar, hiking, or hanging out with my roommates in the house we rented, running our mouths about the state of the world. There was a lot of laughter, a whole lot of discussion about morals and relativity.

This particular Thursday is the anniversary of the floods in 2023 and 2024, exactly a year apart. The class leader repeats a theme of in the edge, that fertile and sticky place between terrains. I think of this summer’s profuse wildflowers – trefoil and asters and Canada lilies – that spread between the river and the fields. Afterwards, I spread out my notebooks and papers and laptop in the coffee shop, plunge into a hard piece of work. I’ve no illusions that yoga will set me floating down any peaceful river. The edge, that complicated habitat, has long been my domain. Friends appear and tell me they’ve sold their house, are pulling up stakes and heading overseas. Around me, people come and go, talking and eating, figuring out or not figuring out parts of their lives.

Later, at home, the catbirds screech. A robin perches on the porch railing and studies me. The woodchucks scurry under the steps from den to woodpile, or have they slowed to a who-gives-a-damn saunter?

Winter, the edge terrain is a cold beast. July, I’m all in…

“Not so much a game
as a sphere,
a mystery.
Held up to light,
a small hole
into another dimension.” ~ Ruth Stone

“… hard wind and the rain that unsettled the creek…”

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 10 Comments

Evening, I linger on the porch swing, talking with my siblings as the long July day ebbs down to twilight. My neighbor texts me that a bear’s been seen in our neighborhood. As the gloaming, like a tide, washes in, I water the tomato plants. The white hydrangeas hover like magical pompoms in the dusk.

July, Vermont’s growing month. Walking with my neighbor, she points out the height of the wild grasses and flowers around her house. Already, this summer, taller than she’s ever seen. The heat and the rain have propelled immense growth. The box elders rub my house; I’ll need to ask another favor from someone with a saw.

I have not forgotten this winter when I drifted from one variation of cold to another, my body and mind fiercely bent to the intertwined goal of finishing cancer treatments and remaining alive. On the other side, what remains is what plagued me before, my own variation of hard wind and rain. And yet, a whole July hangs like a promise: sunshine all day, pink cottage roses, laughter with my neighbor about the burgeoning woodchucks.

In the late afternoon, I take a long walk in the town forest to the reservoir’s edge. Deer prints press into the mud. On this walk, I don’t see a soul. In the distance, children call to each other.

“Kitchen Sink”
Today she would change nothing,
not even the wallpaper peeling,
like dead bark. Nor, outside, the shadows
approaching the yard where ants
toil like women in their houses of sand.
Never mind that the sun will be setting.
When she was young she felt afraid
of hard wind and the rain that unsettled the creek.
But the earth never left her,
not once did the floods reach her feet.
The reward of a long life is faith
in what’s left. Dishes stacked on a strong table,
Jars of dried beans. Scraps of cloth,
And the ten thousand things of her own thoughts,
Incessant as creek water. She has been able
to lay up her treasures on earth,
as if heaven were here, worth believing.
In the water her hands reach
like roots grown accustomed to living,the roots of the cat-briar that hold to the hillside
and can never be torn free of this earth completely.

~ Kathryn Stripling Byer

“Quite Serious”

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 9 Comments

My neighbor runs out his back door, shouting and waving his arms. I’m working on my upstairs glassed-in porch. He cranks up the volume on VPR’s Morning Edition. I’m guessing he hopes the young woodchucks burrowing beneath his deck aren’t NPR fans.

Like my neighbor, I am a VPR fan. This morning, news of Iran dominates the air. As I labor to join noun to verb, I notice my heart beating at Steve Inskeep’s words. Eventually, I leave my cat sprawled on the windowsill and head downstairs to wash the dishes. I’ve listened to NPR my entire life. Heck, the radio was probably playing when my parents brought newborn me home from Presbyterian Hospital in Abuquerque. Little these days is good news.

This winter, I’ve written in this space about my obsessive struggle to remain among the living on this planet. Only now—two surgeries, six rounds of chemo, 11 hospitalizations later—do I realize the diciness of my determination to live. A few weeks ago, driving with my daughter, she showed me a lawn where she cried on a bench because I believed my mother would die. Every day now, as I begin by feeding my two cats and drinking coffee, I carry this winter, those months of spitting distance from my grave, within me. As at the beginning, my greatest worry was/is my daughters. So many months later, I understand how my life is connected intrinsically to so many others. That what lies before my eyes are the twig tips of stories.

In my younger, brasher years, I might have written about politics and conflict, but the Mideast is a place I’ve never been, with people I’ve never met, for whom I will never speak. Too, I’ve knocked around this planet long enough to know that violence changes the world, irredeemably. That the combination of deceit and anger and hubris wrecks destruction. And that cruelty wrought can never be undone. We hurtle onward. I keep listening.

June, and pink roses bloom against my house, planted by someone I never knew, perhaps the woman known as Grandma Bea buried in the adjacent cemetery’s crest. My daughters climb a mountain with a view of Vermont’s shimmering Lake Champlain and the emerald patchwork of farms stitched together. They return with a gift for me, a thorny rosebush with fragrant blossoms that fill my cupped hand. In the evening, shortly before dark, I walk in my bare feet, the long grass already cool with dew. High heat is predicted, the planet is surely burning up, but this ruby-and-gold sunset drags in a coolness. Lush, so lush this month. The butternut tree I planted stretches towards the apple someone else carefully cultivated and noted in pencil on the barn’s bottom wall. A record someone held dear.

In 1956, Allen Ginsburg wrote: “America this is quite serious.”