nature

Survive, Thrive.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

In search of a story about wool and weaving, about Colonial America and these sultry August days, I discover a trailhead for a nearby town forest. I return with my daughter. We drive on back dirt roads, the terrain unfamiliar to me. But the way the maples are nearly in the road, their leafy branches stretching over the road and touching, is the Vermont I first loved, so many years ago when I was 18.

We pass houses flanked by sunflowers and hydrangeas, gardens with six-foot high fences to keep deer from marauding the kale. Not so many decades ago, these were farm fields. In the forest, we follow a former road beside a stone wall. In New England, a forest moves in quickly, erasing the labor that once cleared this land.

August, the woods are quieting. In a break in the forest, we walk through a field of goldenrod, a strip of pink Joe Pye Weed at its edge. All summer, I’ve written sparsely in this space, intently picking up the stitches of my life: walking to mend lost muscle, relearning habits of sleeping and cooking and eating — such simple things I once did so easily. When an acquaintance’s dog leaped on me on a walking trail, I rushed deeper into the woods and wept. I’ve cried so little during this year of cancer, but there I was, ridiculously weeping beneath pines, so fearful of my own fragility, of breaking.

August, and I’d take a whole summer again, an impossibility. Instead, again, we’re in the edge between seasons, the days shortening, chilly at sunset and sunrise. My cats eye the unused wood stove and then eye me, wondering what my plans might be.

Survive, I think. I’m cooking fish and offer these plump tabbies a second course. Thrive, I add.

We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. ~ Jack Gilbert

Mad World, Abundant Wildflowers.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 15 Comments

For no particular reason, I walk on the path along the river which leads to the road where I once lived. In the meadows and beside the trail, the wildflowers blossom abundantly: yellow toadflax and pink asters, bluets and Black-eyed Susans, cinquefoil.

I dawdle at the dirt road. At a turnout, long ago I had a carpool meeting spot. Over the years, my daughters and I passed hours there. In the afternoons, I lingered with my friend, the girls lingered with their friends. The girls played in a brook. The fields have been used for hay, vegetables, seeds, THC. In the past few years, the flooding river dumped sand in these acres. Burdock and thistle claim this terrain now. These fields are for sale again.

A few pickups zoom by. When my ex and I were splitting up, we’d meet here, too. I’d run down the mountain road and leave the girls at home, baking cookies or riding bikes. In my then-husband’s truck, we’d argue about our lives. That autumn as an early dusk washed in, I leaned my head against the truck window and watched two coyotes running across the field. He kept talking and talking and I kept thinking about our daughters who would be hungry for dinner. Someone else lives in that house now. Our lives have long ago moved on.

A friend pulls up, and I get in her car. We talk about kids and aging parents, about money and oranges. The world around us is falling apart. What we see now might be just the cracks of a shifting society. Yet, our lives spin on. My friend and I keep talking and talking. Children grow up. The fields’ bounty changes. I no longer live a few stones’ throws down an empty road from this friend, but how I love her.

I walk back slowly on that trail, under the cool shading trees. Chicory, knapweed, Canada lily. In the covered railroad bridge, I pause in its interior dimness, light at either end. There’s no one around at all. I soak it in.

The heart’s actions
are neither the sentence nor its reprieve. 

Salt hay and thistles, above the cold granite. 
One bird singing back to another because it can’t not.

~ Jane Hirshfield

Do Two Things at Once.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 9 Comments

Walking on a trail beside the Lamoille River, my daughter points out a snapping turtle, a giant creature, its head tucked in, watchful. Her partner reminds us that he grew up in a village where snappers took over the elementary school playground to plant their spring eggs. An inherent element of that school’s curriculum was try to get along with other beings.

The irises and rhododendron bloom profusely. Rain falls, chilly, for much of the day. In the late afternoon, the sun emerges. I cut back the hostas alongside my house to stave off the wet and rot. By late afternoon, I’m finished with my work and chores. I hang out on the porch, read, drink my cocktails of ice water and lemon. Listen to Nina Totenberg.

A month out from surgery, six weeks from chemo, I met a friend for coffee. We talk cancer and community, about the joys of traveling overseas and shifting perspective. Myself, I will be traveling near to home this summer, most of it by foot. Each day, I walk more and more, reclaiming my strength. As next year’s woodpile is transported into my barn (thank you, thank you, kind wood mover), I imagine planting a garden on that emptied place. As a younger woman, I believed vegetable gardening would change my world. I wasn’t wrong; Red Russian kale and bull’s blood beets fed my growing children for years. But blossoms and bushes and trees nourish the wild (and me, too).

I live on a hillside where hungry young woodchucks run rampart. Not so long ago, I considered the chucks my enemies. Now, having endured the scorched-earth transformation of chemo and cancer, I worry far less about these sleek-furred creatures. By summer’s end, I know the foxes thin this population. In the meantime, I slowly go about that repetitive work of weeding and mulching, and the visioning research of transforming lawn into wildflowers.

My coffee companion reminds me to take my time and take risks. Who wants to take risks after surviving cancer treatments? Answer: why not, why not? Dig more gardens. Contemplate the woodchucks. Plant coreopsis to replace the hollyhocks holes from the woodchucks’ foraging… Do two things at once: go with the flow and keep paddling.

White peonies blooming along the porch
send out light
while the rest of the yard grows dim.

Outrageous flowers as big as human
heads! They’re staggered
by their own luxuriance: I had
to prop them up with stakes and twine.

The moist air intensifies their scent,
and the moon moves around the barn
to find out what it’s coming from.

In the darkening June evening
I draw a blossom near, and bending close
search it as a woman searches
a loved one’s face.

~ Jane Kenyon, “Peonies at Dusk”

Wood.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 18 Comments

The wood man delivers cord wood not long after dawn. I’m in the kitchen with a manuscript spread over the table when I hear his truck beeping as he backs around the car my daughter left in the driveway’s middle late last night, returning from work. I lay clean spoons over my pages to keep them steady from my cat, who cares nothing about words or order.

The morning’s chilly, sunlight snagged in the crabapple blossoms, downy white.

I hand him a check, and we talk for a bit about maple sugaring and sap sugar content, about his mighty 17,000 taps, and burning wood. Can’t people remember to order their own firewood every year, anyway? He dumps the load and drives off into the rising day. Freshly split, the wood’s redolent with sweet sap, that forest scent.

Two weeks and one day out from surgery, each day I’m pulling along further. After a winter of chemo, I now have a gnash in my middle, a non-bikini scar, that renders all the more real this cancer. Nonetheless, I ordered a small $16 tree, a witch hazel. One daughter digs a hole, the other plants the tree. Healing, I’m required to restrain myself from stacking that wood, digging holes, tugging out last year’s Brussels sprout stalks that lingered all winter, blackening and rotting. My daughter rips up a stalk and shakes the soil loose. The plant’s tendril-like roots spread skyward.

Amazing, I say, what comes from a tiny seed, isn’t it?

She shakes it again, then tosses the stalk in the garden cart and moves on to the next plant.

“Tree”

It is foolish
to let a young redwood
grow next to a house.

Even in this 
one lifetime,
you will have to choose.

That great calm being,
this clutter of soup pots and books–

Already the first branch-tips brush at the window.
Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life.
― Jane Hirshfield

Mending…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 26 Comments

After nearly two weeks away, I return home to the trees in full leaf, the lawn gone wild with violets and strawberry blossoms. Drizzly, cold, my brother starts the wood stove. The cats uncurl themselves before the blaze, satiated. A cold May, but verdant, lushly and satisfyingly so.

In these post-surgery days, I limp from room to room, venture outside to tug down a lilac branch and breathe in. The weeds run rampart, but whatever… the garden, too, will be sorted and tidied.

I’ve written repeatedly about the lilacs around my house, but again, I reiterate my joy in the soaring bushes. When I was five, we lived in a small green rented house, its yard surrounded by chainlink fence. A lilac bush leaned over the fence from the backyard neighbors. My second-grade sister was in school afternoons, my toddler brother sleeping, and so, after kindergarten and lunch, I lay on the long grass, staring up through the quaking leaves. These bushes, so New Englandy quaint with lavender, violet, and white blossoms, remind me of those unbounded childhood hours. One o’clock, two o’clock? Who knew? Who cared? I had just learned how to tie my shoes.

Like the walking wounded, I hobble from couch to chair, through the long grass, out of the workaday world and, yet, far from being a child. In glorious remission, in recovery from surgery, I keep thinking of this poem below, as I begin, day by day, to mend my body and life.

“Da Capo”

Take the used-up heart like a pebble
and throw it far out.

Soon there is nothing left.
Soon the last ripple exhausts itself
in the weeds.

Returning home, slice carrots, onions, celery.
Glaze them in oil before adding
the lentils, water, and herbs.

Then the roasted chestnuts, a little pepper, the salt.
Finish with goat cheese and parsley. Eat.

You may do this, I tell you, it is permitted.
Begin again the story of your life.

— Jane Hirshfield

Backaches and all.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 18 Comments

Snow returns to Vermont; I remember an April 1st years ago when the snow fell so mightily our sugarhouse was hidden. I worried our toddler might get lost in the drifts.

These (early spring) afternoons, I walk around my garden where last autumn’s sunflower stalks still stand. The robins, those cheery birds, cluster. Redwing blackbirds sing joyously.

I’m nearly at my last chemo session – yes, counting down day by day, my simple math calculations and not-so-simple life. Mornings, I pull myself together to work; afternoons, I lie on the couch with my cat and read. The town library orders me interlibrary books. Recently, Blue, an illustrated memoir of St. Bart’s that I read in a few hours, a sojourn into a Caribbean vacation with a sweet family. I will be traveling nowhere outside the country, anytime soon, although I dream…

Where I am now is different terrain. My house has sheltered me (and my family) so warmly and kindly during this winter of disease. Now, I see where our house needs tending – paint on the barn, boards hammered back on the porch where the ice crashed. Every spring and summer, too, I plant more in the gardens, cultivating good living for birds and pollinators, not necessarily the woodchucks who come, unbidden. There will be no wars on my patch of hillside.

The bigger work for me now is healing; how happily I’ll shed medical appointments, the world of sickness, and savor my long walks again. My oncologist told me last fall that someday I’d forget I ever had lymphoma, and I’d forget him, too. Maybe someday if dementia drills into me (many many years from now). I would need to live a long long life if I were to forget this year.

In these winter months of cancer suffering, I’ve longed for many things, but prominent among these desires is to imbue this cancer with meaning. So now, as I’m beginning to contemplate my next steps, the spring and recovery phase, I’m determined to not slip into old habits or careless living. I mean nothing sentimental about this, as if plastering a gratitude sticker on my life will fix up my world.

Which way this will go is yet to be determined. Certainly, planting more perennials.

Stacking wood today

I thought how much I loved this life,

Backaches and all.

~ John Straley