nature

100 Daffodils.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

In this balmy late autumn, I walk with new acquaintances in an oak forest where I’ve never wandered. Oaks are sparse in the woods where I generally walk, these lovely-leaved beauties, the ground beneath them strewn with acorns, some broken, their centers chewed out.

I’m with other women who are unwillingly on a journey similar to mine — cancer and chemo, the shock of our worlds slashed apart. Our conversation drifts to the kindness of friends and strangers, and the flip side of kindness — a kind of harshness: why can’t you get on with your life since the chemo is finished? (a raw impossibility) and didn’t you eat enough kale? For the record, when my daughters were young, I grew three kinds of kale in my garden, fifty plants to carry us through the winter, fenced from the foraging deer. All that kale, so carefully tended, and yet, here’s the luck of your draw: cancer.

It’s a rare kind of privilege to walk with these women, listening, offering snippets of my own story. On this cloudy afternoon, these woods are light-filled through the barren branches, the poplars and beeches still shimmering patches of gold. One woman ventures, “All nature has scars.”

Every year, I dread this season of dwindling light, the creeping-in edgy cold, the giant fist of winter readying. And yet every late autumn, the falling leaves enchant, the wood stove’s warmth soothes, the moon gleams its crescent cut-out in the starry sky.

Writing this book about cancer has pushed me to read and gather facts and history, the scientific low-down. And yet, simultaneously, I appreciate more and more the great mystery of this universe. A friend counsels me that I can hold two things in one hand: knowledge and uncertainty. But these, too, are beyond numbers; this world’s mysteries are multitudes. My sister once remarked that cancer is the great leveler: it’s humbling. On a recent chilly morning, I planted one hundred daffodil bulbs: a meager offering to this sweet place where I live. The story behind these spring beauties will surely sink down and vanish into the sandy soil.

Auto Mirror

In the rear-view mirror suddenly
I saw the bulk of the Beauvais Cathedral;
great things dwell in small ones
for a moment.

Adam Zagajewski, translated from the Polish by Czeslaw Milosz and Robert Hass

Wonder…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 14 Comments

About a decade ago, when I was first navigating single parenting (so many unfun challenges!), I held to the notion that every time a door slammed in my face, I’d scramble through a window. In my novel that will be published next year, a character says Really? We’re taking life advice from The Sound of Music? But it’s a darn useful approach. Small and scrappy, I’ve been tumbling through windows for years, although admittedly wounding myself on broken glass sometimes.

These balmy autumn days, raking leaves over garden beds, I’ve had a whole sun-rich summer of remission, of cancer survivor, of figuring out how to walk and eat, work and sleep again, these simple things that often eluded me all winter. A summer of learning to live within the bounds of this alive-but-more-broken body. By chance, I meet an old friend who comments about my short hair, and I spill a snippet of my lymphoma which she had not heard. Our lives, connected through kids now grown up, have taken different paths. I’m on the edge of saying that I don’t know how I survived last winter, but I hold back.

Last night, I stepped out of our warm house where the cats are again sprawled in their favorite place before a toasty wood stove and walked out to the nighttime garden to look at the half moon, hung in the sky among the constellations like a profound mystery, cream tinged with autumn’s gold, loveliness incarnate. The cold held me. One of my earliest small-child memories is looking through my father’s telescope at the pocked moon, wondering, wondering…

Mid-October, and the crickets are still singing. The elements for my survival include so many of you here, who sent me letters and cookies, books and cards; access to medical care (a great privilege); friends and colleagues and my dear family… and my own scrappiness, my fierce desire not to slip away from this world and this patch of acreage, the half-moon sailing silently over my frost-gnawed garden.

“You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories.” ~ Anne Lamott

Habits of the Heart.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

A radiantly sunny September afternoon, I’m at the northern edge of Caspian Lake, an afternoon with the slightest of breezes so the water shimmers and ripples. The summer people have all returned to other places, the local families at work or school, so it’s just me. For the longest time, I stand at the edge of the long dock and watch a bald eagle fly low over the water, then circle back and disappear into the woods.

Where do you find succor?

For years, with little girls, I spent hours with my friends at the public beach on the other side of the lake. Our worlds dispersed now, I haven’t walked there this summer. In no rush on a day that’s already been crammed with people and my to-do list, I take the longer trail back to the road. The usually wet forest is so parched the boardwalk bridges span over dry soil.

As the afternoon folds down, I take a walk along the river, the path I’ve been following all summer, watching the trout lilies give way to soapwort to the persistent asters. A pickup truck idles across the trail. A woman I knew years ago from a library kids’ group waits for me to pass, then ropes off the trail so she can move her cows from one pasture to another.

On my way home, I stop at the co-op for vinegar and coffee beans and cashews. A stranger says hello in the bulk aisle and reminds me he’d passed me on the trail, he on a bike and me walking in sandals. We talk about the moon and a star named Arcturus. When we part, he says, “See you on the trail — a metaphor for life.” Slow I am these days, as if I’m floating on my back in a warm pond, my eyes open to this flawless blue sky, the undulating water gulping in my ears. Autumn, this heartbeat of beauty, its own true metaphor.

… From this week’s New Yorker:

… what made America great—were “habits of the heart”: the everyday engagement of citizens that sustains institutions by holding leaders to account. Habits fade, but they can also be revived.

Moonrise, More.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments
Barn door view.

An old friend unexpectedly appears at my door one evening as I’m folding laundry. We sit on my back porch and drink hot honeyed tea and watch the just-beyond-full moon slowly rise. September, the night’s chill creeps in around us. I grab my hat and coat and brew more tea.

All this fall, I’ll be thinking of a year ago, when I was getting sicker and sicker, with no real understanding why until that terrible night in the ER when a scan revealed cancer, so much cancer. Heading towards a year later, I’m admiring the moon sail over the mountain ridge and up through the trees. We keep talking and talking. It’s not so much the words that stitch us together but our chuffing breath that hangs in clouds between us, a howling neighborhood dog, a rustle in the ravine of a wild creature.

After my friend leaves, I wander around the moonlit garden, hands in my coat pockets, the tall amaranth a shadowy forest beside the closed four o’clocks. Frost is not far in the offing.

Inside, a daughter has texted me….. where are you?… Outside, breathing in the moonlight. Still here.

Instructions on Not Giving Up

More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.

~ Ada Limón

Autumn’s Radiance, Fine Medicine.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 12 Comments

Before dawn, rain patters, a splatter through the open windows. The singing frogs are still at this hour. The rain moves through lightly. All summer: drought, drought, not likely to be relieved any time soon. In the town forest, beneath the soaring pines, the scent of the hot soil reminds me of the desert, a strange thing in northern Vermont. In the garden, the peppers, the sneezeweed, the Love Lies Bleeding relish the dry weather. By September, the garden will do whatever it’s going to do this year. Early autumn, colors burst. The hydrangea, so pink the large blossoms appear overly dyed, the coreopsis and compass flowers great bursts of little-kid-yellow, swaying with feasting bees.

Autumn, and I’m reliving last year’s descent into illness. A year ago, I was in a clinic’s office, asking what was wrong with me. I was sent away, and I went back to my toiling work, my sleepless nights. A month later, I returned again, thinner and weaker. Again, I was sent away. Shortly afterwards, I was in the ER and dosed with opioids. A scan revealed “unexpected severe neoplastic disease,” nothing that I’d conjured.

This fall, my novel heading towards an ARC for next summer’s publication, I reread my journal and the hospital notes and began writing a book about cancer. I’ve relied on my memory, that fickle creature, so rereading the notes from two hospitals is a vocabulary builder (so many medical words brand-new to me) and illuminating. This and then this happened. Our bodies and the world are known through numbers, like this drought, the inches of rain we need and the inches of rain to cure, a climatology record. Likewise, the hospital notes are records of lesions in centimeters and pulse in numbers and drugs in millimeters — my story’s elements. But, so, too, are the pears on our trees, plumper and sweeter than I’ve tasted in the eight years I’ve lived here. I pluck a weighty fruit from its branch, stand in the dusky-night yard, and watch the nearly full moon rise.

This week, driving to a friend’s house, I spy #10 Pond shimmering through the trees. The sheer unbidden beauty of the pond pulls me to a stop. I get out and stand on the dusty roadside, the crickets sizzling. A day like any other random day, a slip of a few afternoon hours. But here I am, still stitched into this evolving story.

“When I realized the storm
was inevitable, I made it
my medicine.” ~ Andrea Gibson

Lists, Loons.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 14 Comments

My kitchen table, notebook, car console is littered with yellow post-its, my hand-scrawled lists of work things, schedules, BUTTER written on several versions, COFFEE BEANS, sandwiched between AT&T — my reminder to figure out the phone bill.

How good to have a list again — more, multiple lists — my daily roadmap under constant revision. An acquaintance tells me about a weekend of work and he’s looking forward to Monday. Of course, he says, on Monday I’ll look forward to Tuesday. On Tuesday… Isn’t my list a variation of this?

In contrast, I consider the loons who swim near us, diving under the pond’s still surface, reappearing, vanishing. Four sleek birds: two parents, two juveniles, the loon nuclear family charming us with their haunting songs, the younger ones still halting and squeaking.

Sunday evening, I stack my crumpled post-its into a pile and shove this in the recycling bin. To circumvent my churning thoughts, I email myself a Monday morning list. Autumn’s moving in, the majesty of these long summer days clipped shorter and shorter at each end, the daybreaks dewy and cool…. I pull on my sweatshirt and Danskos and lie on the picnic table’s bench, fingers in the unmown grass. The lilac leaves are withered brown with thirst. The woodchucks have been eaten by the foxes, or they’ve packed their own valises and headed out for new territory. Dusk creeps in, and still I’m there, the wood and my bones and flesh keeping some kind of wordless company. That afternoon’s loons and the swifts darting overhead, the crickets sizzling, and myself, too, each of us in our own language. At last, the rain patters down, drip-dropping, ubiquitous.

“How lightly we learn to hold hope,
as if it were an animal that could turn around
and bite your hand. And still we carry it
the way a mother would, carefully,
from one day to the next.” ~ Danusha Laméris