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Gifts at the Back Door.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

I arrive home in the dark and find one of my red deck chairs at my kitchen door, a white container set on its seat. It’s not late but dark already. On my way home from work, I’d walked along the river and walked further than usual. When I’d returned to my car, darkness had fallen.

I’ve been living in or nearby this village for thirty years. I’ve seen a share of miserable things — from addiction and homicides to petty cattiness — and its goodness, too. How, in times of trouble, folks appear with aid. No questions, often very few words. My god, the grace of this.

Scorched earth is how I consider myself these days, not so many days post-chemo, post-surgery, leering up on a year’s anniversary since I learned I had cancer. See how I write this? Past tense. And yet, transmogrified is a word I used with a friend. How this disease has transmogrified my being.

In the dark, I unlock my door, set down my backpack, a pile of library books, a bag of apples. My cats mewl for their cat supper. The container has soup, barley and beef and spinach. The woodstove has gone cold, my jacket drips rain on the floor and my cats’ dense fur, darkness presses against the windows. And yet, serendipitous soup. I take a spoon from the drawer. As for figuring out the rest of my life, or this week, or even this evening — I let that go.

From my library book stash, Sally Mann:

“As for me, I see both beauty and the dark side of the things; the loveliness of cornfields and full sails, but the ruin as the well…. The Japanese have a phrase for this dual perception: mono no aware. It means “beauty tinged with sadness,” for there cannot be any real beauty without the indolic whiff of decay. For me, living is the same thing as dying, and loving is the same thing as losing, and this does not make me a madwoman; I believe it can make me better at living, and better at loving, and, just possibly, better at seeing.”

“…music despite everything…”

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 9 Comments

A woman stops me on the sidewalk and offers me a chair. I discover it’s a fine reading chair and bring it home, much to my cat’s delight. Friends track me the hermitess down in the coffee shop where I’ve spread the pieces of my manuscript over a table. We drink cappuccinos and eat jam bars and talk shop. I’m hurtling through the book I’ve called a cancer atlas — how to endure the intertwined suffering of cancer-and-chemo and then what? I tease, write the ending for me, will you? although I’m already there, stitching together mosquito bites and spring ephemerals and sleeping alone in a cold tent while the rain soaks through the tent fly and floor. We share kale soup recipes and marvel at this long dry autumn, the poplars yet holding their gold leaves.

Ever present in my mind is the question I asked the oncologist when I’d finished chemo, endured the surgery, limped my way back to his office. “What now?” And his answer, “Go and live your life,” the old existential question. A koan, a place of delight to be able to ask this question.

On this No Kings Day, while my cats sprawl contentedly before my woodstove, I’m reminded of the dearness of living a human life. That the asking of the question how to live is a many-sided privilege.

We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come. ~ Jack Gilbert

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

Pie.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 14 Comments

I write an email to friends: Come eat pie and keep me company…

In northern Vermont, in the grips of drought, wells and springs dry up. Towns send pleas to be mindful about water usage. Dry, dry, in need of rain, nonetheless the sunny days unfold, day after day after day, and we revel in these, the longest span of perfectly perfect wonderful weather unmatched in anyone’s memory. Soon enough, the weather will shift.

Less and less I write on the back deck, that glass table I bought in the pandemic with stimulus money. Never much of desk user, I write at the kitchen table my brother made for me, or the couch beside the wood stove and my heat-glutted cats. In one evening, I sprawl on the couch and read Meredith Winn’s Uncertain Behavior, her story of bone cancer, passing parents, creativity.

In four-week bursts, I zoom into a writing circle through Dartmouth Hitchcock, all of us linked in some way through cancer, survivors or caregivers. At 5 p.m., I’m spent for the day, hardly a creative whisper stirring in my mind, and yet I manage to rise, so often astounded at the profound and beautiful and fearful words of my compatriots. These folks pull out the better side of me.

Some take stock of their lives (and how can you not, with the leer of death toothy around us), an apt exercise, as this autumn-gorgeous tapestry threads through with lifeless brown, the shadow of winter rising. But joy, too, and all the parts of our lives: raising kids and aging parents and chimney sweeping and sowing garlic for next summer’s table. I search for my leaf rake and check my email…. it’s apple pie season.

The thief left it behind:
the moon
at my window. ~Ryokan

Crazy-Making.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 20 Comments

Yesterday, my oldest and I made that drive again down I-91 that flanks that Connecticut River. My knitting in my lap, I counted exits, St. Johnsbury first exit, then the second, the third that heads east to New Hampshire’s White Mountains, the fourth Barnet, which I took when I stayed at Karmê Chöling. We talked about fall colors and a meatball recipe and family, of course, all the way down to exit 13, the Norwich and Hanover exit, where we stopped for coffee and scones, as if a good luck charm. Coffee and sweets, not a dash to ER. We watched the time, careful not to be late for what I hoped would be a mere routine check-in.

All summer this day has hovered in my mind — what will this day reveal? — but this past week this coming journey was as near to me as something I held in my hand as I went about my days, doing what needs to be done. The day before, talking with friends, the fear of this day erupts and I hear myself on the verge of screeching, nearly crying. All summer, I’ve relished my good life, learning to walk again and eat again, to read on my back porch in that hand-me-down butterfly chair. To marvel that I am not in pain. That I might sleep and reasonably expect I might wake in the morning exactly as I want, in the pre-dawn darkness drink milky coffee and write. That I will witness the unexpected autumn buds on a yellow rose bush open, these final velvety blossoms of the season.

At Dartmouth, we wait again in 3K, in the cancer center. I am no longer one of the pallid-gray-faced chemo patients, hobbling, enduring. How desperately I never want to return here. My oncologist gently reminds me that he’d assured me I’d pull through this winter, even as I was admitted again and again and again, a dozen times. Add to that, more ER visits.

Later, a friend asks about the scan’s sign-off, but the only rules that matter are what the hidden mysteries of my blood and flesh reveal. The markers are that the lymphoma has not returned. I know that the reaper’s scythe heads towards me as that inarguable blade poises over each of us. But not this day for me. Not yet.

Driving home, people crowd the interstate bridges with RESIST signs. As our car sails beneath the metal and steel, we wave. I’d told the oncologist that my wellness plan was four-fold: eat real food, walk, do my work, and try not to go crazy.

He said, This is crazy-making. Just do your best.

There is only one heart in my body, have mercy
on me…

Thank You for letting me live for a little as one of the
sane; thank You for letting me know what this is
like. Thank You for letting me look at your frightening
blue sky without fear, and your terrible world without
terror, and your loveless psychotic and hopelessly
lost
with this love

~ Franz Wright

“You got a God.”

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

Years ago, I ripped out a photo from the New Yorker of Marina Oswald taken the morning after her husband assassinated President Kennedy. She was hanging diapers on the clothesline, her face scrunched in misery. It was 1963, the realm of cloth diapers, and she had two babies. I tacked the photo on my wall.

No assassins in my household. Yet, as I described to a friend, I’m healing from chemo and surgery while the dailiness of life tugs me onward. In some ways, this is a relief; I’m utterly grateful to be in the world where I hand over my credit card for groceries, rise in the night when my daughter returns from work to ask about her hours. I order firewood, problem-solve our broken car scenarios. It’s triage and logistics, a math problem.

This May, a cold spring, snow yesterday all day in the New Hampshire White Mountains, I read through the mail. Make one phone call. A colleague stops by. My daughter makes grilled cheese, slices avocados, rims the edges of my plate with peanut butter cups. My brother texts, my sister calls, reminding me to eat, eat. In all this, I open the Grapes of Wrath, join hitchhiking Joad, and eventually sleep in the wood stove’s warmth. I dream of our lilacs who hold their buds closed against this cold, the Joad corn in the 1930’s, buried in feet of dust. Through my dream washes the rain against our windows, the purple and white violets studding our overgrown grass. Time and place and season sift like a jumbled dump cake.

When I wake, my cat Acer lies purring against my foot, contentedly grooming a dainty paw, supremely confident of an imminent dinner and another toasty night before the beloved hearth.

Memorial Day weekend, when we always invite friends and neighbors for an outdoor dinner. Not so, this year. The pieces in my life, my family’s lives, shift, rearrange, mend. Slow healing, slow domesticity.

From Steinbeck: “You got a God. Don’t make no difference if you don’ know what he looks like.”