nature

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

Calendar (and actual) spring…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 15 Comments

In my rinse-and-repeat pattern of this long winter, driving back from Dartmouth in the late morning, sunlight sprawling over the brown fields, the tree limbers along the interstate beginning the season’s cutting, I notice the Connecticut River has thawed. Unmutable sign the back of this mighty winter has cracked.

Home, my yard half-buried yet in twig-strewn snow, the ash buckets mark their winter resting place, a chaos of cinders that touch the edge of the quartz-pebbled rose garden my youngest and I made, years ago.

Later, a friend stops by with good cheer and belated and welcome Christmas presents. The sun is yet bright. We walk, slowly, slowly, on the short stretch of dead-end road before my house. I point to a robin perched in a pin cherry. She spies last summer’s hornet nest spun into the lilacs, a nest on the neighbor’s windowsill.

We were once neighbors ourselves. In mud season, we walked with our little kids up and down our back road, taking our time as the kids searched for frog eggs in the roadside ditches and tender green folds pushing up through matted brown leaves in the forest: the first spring beauties and trout lilies, bloodroot. Now, during my last hospitalization, her son repaired my daughter’s car, stayed for dinner and conversation.

Too snowy and wet to sit down, I lean against my car’s bumper. A robin chirps in the neighbors’ sugar maple, an expanse of curved trunk and branch and twig. Such a meager peep peep this rust-bellied hand-sized creature makes, prying winter away, thrusting our world towards nest building, egg laying, song.

“Against Panic” by Molly Fisk

You recall those times, I know you do, when the sun  

lifted its weight over a small rise to warm your face,   

when a parched day finally broke open, real rain   

sluicing down the sidewalk, rattling city maples   

and you so sure the end was here, life a house of cards   

tipped over, falling, hope’s last breath extinguished   

in a bitter wind. Oh, friend, search your memory again —   

beauty and relief are still there, only sleeping. 

Snow geese and cancer and macaroni and cheese.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 16 Comments

My friend walks into my kitchen. The windows are shrouded in the remains of last night’s darkness. She bends down and looks at my face, reminding me of those enervating conversations in ERs with doctors. After a careful moment, she pronounces, You look good. My house is warm; her sentence warms me more.

In the St. Johnsbury hospital, she drops me at the laboratory door. A receptionist sends me down the hall, in search of elevators. A woman in the waiting room follows rickety me in my winter boots, and repeats the directions. I wander down halls empty of people, interspersed with lit Christmas trees in what seem to me random corners and notches. Someone calls my name. I turn and look, and of course this is my friend, who for a fleeting moment I don’t recognize in her bundled coat, surgical mask.

Not far from the Canadian border, St.Johnsbury has a faded charm from its former heyday of logging and Fairbanks scales. This December morning, the day sputters, promising no sunlight, maybe a few rosy strands in the opening daybreak. In my strange fog, I wonder if the light mirrors Siberia. My blood is drawn and spun. Waiting for the verdict, I stare out the window, the layers of coal and washed-thin blue and last night’s pale snow. Beside me, a man introduces himself says he owns a garage and towing business. I pull down my mask and offer my name. My voice is so muted he can hardly hear me, but I ask him to tell me about his plowing so far this winter. While we wait, he obliges me. My hands, he says, will never be clean enough for hospitals.

Siberia, I think, Siberia, as the garage owner pinpoints roads. The daylight notches up a bit. Save for my friend, waiting elsewhere, I know no one here, but this winter landscape of snow and pale mountain, the livelihood of working with hands and backs and people, is familiar to me as my thumb knuckles, the loneliness of lingering over the morning’s last cup of cooling black coffee, pondering some decision that’s wormed itself in the day.

So disease, cancer, that forbidding word, burrows in. The disease is me; the blood is mine; the nurse explains numbers, says hematocrit, hemoglobin. Less than a handful of weeks into this journey, I know my blood courses with immutable facts, ragingly powerful chemistry. The blessing to leave is laid upon me.

Home again from distant Siberia — is it midmorning? afternoon’s mire? — my friend sweeps ashes from my wood stove and nourishes gleaming coals with birchbark and splinters, odd pieces of end wood. This day unfurls, somber and patient, settling into winter’s long haul. I offer a piece of my daughter’s gingerbread. For hours now, we’ve talked about migrating snow geese and cancer and macaroni and cheese. She asks if I would take her on a nighttime walk — I envision the throb of spring peepers, the redolent rotting slop of thawing earth — indeed, a pleasure I might give back, to one of my shepherds holding me steady as I wobble down my back steps.