Strange gift.

February 25, 2026 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

A year ago, I couldn’t manage the three steps onto my back porch without holding a daughter’s hand. A reversal of those early parenting years when I held my toddlers’ teeny fingers as my children learned to walk and then, quickly, to run. A year later, my oldest and her partner load up our skis, and we head out for a seven-mile trek. I once thought idly of skiing, a mere pastime, nothing more. Now, it feels nothing less than miraculous.

A year ago, my daughters and the partner propped me together through the darkest months of my life. In those months while I endured chemo, little bits of lights and happiness trickled towards me, as if falling down an ancient stone-walled well. Sunlight in my living room, in the hospital halls, (never in the subterranean ER), flash of cardinals, the boxes of books and gifts of miso and cards and checks that kept me alive.

Post-ski, I feed my mewling cats and eat blood oranges, then lie on the couch and read Jonathan Buckley’s One Boat. I’m relaxed as if I’ve swum with a friend in a Vermont pond, and then we linger on the shore, talking about nothing and everything. But it’s February yet and snowfall is circling again. We’d skied from hayfields down into the forest and circled around and around. At one moment, I’d hit fatigue, where I wondered if I would emerge from these deeply snowy woods. It’s a place I’m now beginning to know intimately, where I know the life I clutch so fiercely can so easily slip away. I was reminded recently of Robert Frost’s lines that “the best way out is through,” a minute guide for human life. On this day, all the human things.

Shift in POV.

February 22, 2026 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

My daughter sends word and photos of walking on Lake Champlain, frozen hard. I send word back, Be mindful! For those of us who love to swim and lounge on lakes and ponds, walking on the ice in the dead of winter is exhilarating, a flip in view in these cold months.

11 degrees this morning when I rise in the dark and shovel ashes from the woodstove while the cats mewl a protest for breakfast. I’m still thinking of those photos, and how it feels to have the cold air descend on your cheeks and walk that border between hypothermic water and all that sky. In a troubled winter I worked in a nearby town, I’d walk on the lake’s ice at noon and lie down and stare up at the sky. There were a few ice fishing shanties, never a sign of anyone, just me and the crows, all ice and the limitless sky and whatever the heavens had to offer. Sometimes spitting snow, sometimes endless blue, sunlight without warmth.

Heart of February. The skiing is excellent. A friend who I’ve known forever picks me up, and we walk along an ice-and-sand-strewn road. Below, the valley where the Black River and Route 14 is hidden in the folds of mountains. We look across and muse at the snow we can see on the mountains’ forest floor, how the bare trees reach up towards the sky.

Full moon:
my ramshackle hut
is what it is. — Issa

Plunging through….

February 19, 2026 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

I drive a friend home, and we linger in my car, talking. She asks me what makes an individual an individual. Early evening, darkness wraps around us, my headlights off, the day’s dripping icicles frozen again. The juncos and cardinals and finches that nip at my feeders have settled silently for the night. I am at the place of near-wordlessness again. I’ll be home again soon, too tired to brew tea, longing to lie down and let sleep wash over me for the night.

Nonetheless, we talk about memories and habits, the nature babies carry into this world, the inescapability of genetics. I lean forward and rest my forehead on the steering wheel.

Cancer, that relentless instructor, reshaped my appreciate for the common noun and verb—for the tangible—drove me inescapably into my body, far from ideology into the ineffable appreciation of swallowing water, the comfort of visiting friends, sunlight on my face.

In northern Vermont, we are again in the prolonged season of start-and-stop-and-start again, the loosening from ice on back roads, the freeze again, the steadily warming and lengthening light. On this road, I meet an acquaintance and his sweet little dog. We walk together for a bit, speculating about schools and consolidation and possibilities that perhaps will never transpire. Meanwhile, the dog sets her small muddy paws on my knee. I crouch down and rub her velvety ears. The cold breathes from the dirt road, the turning earth’s exhalation.

“… this life is not a gate, but the horse plunging through it.” — Jane Hirshfield

Making more tracks than necessary…

February 6, 2026 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 7 Comments

I’m standing on a dirt road, looking up at the blue sky unblemished by any smear of cloud as my friend wraps a scarf around her face, when a Subaru speeds over the crest. Jolted, I lurch to the roadside.

$750k in cancer treatments and I’m felled by wrong-place, wrong-time on an otherwise untraveled back road? Not this afternoon.

Bitter cold warnings jam the local news. In snow-drenched Vermont, February marks winter’s swing, where the daylight begins to rush back, the light tinged with warmth, suffused with this second-half-of-winter’s promise that seeds will stir again. In the meantime, I take off my mittens as we walk and talk about writing and people and the value of a precise query letter.

We step aside for intermittent vehicles, a silver pickup, a friend’s Prius, a Corolla with split exhaust. A year ago, I’d been sprung from a stay at Dartmouth-Hitchcock and returned to my cancer-and-chemo habits that shifted from bed to couch to what felt like a Herculean effort to open my notebook at the kitchen table and scrawl a few lines, my shaky pencil a balloonist’s line that tethered me to the world. What I didn’t know then was that the hard things I’d endured in my life, some of my making, some not so (sobriety, a divorce, selling a house and lighting out for new territory with my daughters, writing and selling books, the pandemic, the constant wear of subpar home economics), was training for the next 10 weeks. In what is now a blur of that back-and-forth from home to Dartmouth, at one point my oncologist’s eyes widened just the slightest; I wondered if my life was tapering to its end. Was my body about to be driven under?

But not last winter. Not this sunny afternoon, either. What rich luck to walk on a Vermont ridgeline road, the snowy mountains in the distance, finches in a roadside maple. To work, to share a plate of roasted salty Brussels sprouts with a friend, bake a chocolate cake for my daughter’s birthday.

I will never escape this cancer, whether I live a year more or thirty. Its fearsome and awesome power churns through my heart. How it revealed unequivocally to me the brutality and dearness of this world.

Meanwhile, as I cherish these days, these hours and minutes, the country where I live hemorrhages, the last moment of a man’s life pounding through the chaos, his words to a stranger, “Are you okay?” illuminating suppurating wounds. All the things, sadness and delight and such sorrow, the radiant sunlight. Each of us, moving along our paths: separate, together.

Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.
― Wendell Berry

The taste of fallen leaves, pond water, crumbly earth…

February 3, 2026 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

In any lifetime, there are dividing events, the Before, the After. In my years, the most recent schism is Before Cancer and Everything Else. But the most profound? Before Motherhood, and the clanging, crying, joyous Everafterward, my truest realm. Happiest of birthdays; spring is in the offing, darling.

A child is born and doesn't know what day it is.
The particular joy in my heart she cannot imagine.
The taste of apricots is in store for her. — Nan Cohen

Cold.

January 31, 2026 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

The cold lingers. A friend texts about walking, proposed temperature 5 degrees. It’s a balmy 3, the sun dazzling on fresh snow. A year ago, I sat miserably in her car, hardly able to walk around the high school — did I manage that loop twice? This end-of-January, we walk and talk. Later, sprawled before my woodstove, revising a manuscript that my cat uses as a nest, twilight and then darkness press against the windows. I have not forgotten how easily a body breaks, how rapidly the world shifts from wellness to suffering.

The world propels through flux, and while I’m (at least momentarily) emerging towards fuller health, so much human darkness deepens. My college student daughter phones from Burlington — Vermont’s big city on our own Great Lake — the streets jammed with protestors. The mayor issues a statement as officials prepare for an ICE invasion. “Stay steady,” she urges.

Under the moon hanging in the sky, we head downtown to the coffee shop to admire photographs of the northern lights. The photographer plays a short film of footage shot in locations the audience knows well, roads and lakes and a ridgeline above the village. Turns out, he wrote the music, too, weaving in calling coyotes and chirping crickets, loon songs. It’s no antidote, no balm, but a radiant reminder of the vast universe, of how the horizon shifts from black to pink to green, that we are driven by love of beauty, too. A steadiness.

On Frozen Fields

1 
We walk across the snow, 
The stars can be faint, 
The moon can be eating itself out, 
There can be meteors flaring to death on earth, 
The Northern Lights can be blooming and seething 
And tearing themselves apart all night, 
We walk arm in arm, and we are happy. 

2 
You in whose ultimate madness we live, 
You flinging yourself out into the emptiness, 
You - like us - great an instant, 

O only universe we know, forgive us. ~ Galway Kinnell