#remission

Brief Thaw.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

In the January thaw, a wind — balmy for winter — curls around my house, and all night long the chimes hung on the back porch jangle their melody. The chimes are the song of this house, in all the seasons of this northern climate.

Despite the thaw, the hours of these days are yet short. I wake ages before light bleeds over the horizon, my cats ready for breakfast, the woodstove in need of feeding, myself hungry for hot coffee and work. I gather what I can of my energy and cup this in my hands, gauging how the day lies ahead. Not so long ago, I could work, and work, and work. Offer me twenty dollars for a quick edit, and I’d jump. Post-cancer, post-chemo, not so.

Walking downtown, I pass the coffee shop. Two friends at a window table wave at me to come in, come in. Inside, I shrug off my coat that’s in need of washing and set my backpack on the floor. We talk books and woodpile status, politics and the amnesia of American consciousness. Above the coffee shop is the yoga studio with the gleaming maple floors, where I stand at the window, watching traffic ebb into the diner parking lot. The river bends through the village here, heads westward beneath the cover of ice towards Lake Champlain, whose waters flow north. In the alley between this brick building and the next, the wind cuts upward. Snow drifts towards the sky.

There are days when I think that everything I know is upended. That snow has no mind for gravity.

Before dawn, I carry out ashes and stand in the dark, icicles dripping, cold breath from the snow grabbing my wrists. In the thaw, the earth smells of rotting compost, woodsmoke from my house and my neighbors’, the assured promise of spring, yet far in the offing.

… I work with the consciousness of death at my shoulder, not constantly, but often enough to leave a mark upon all my life’s decisions and actions. And it does not matter whether this death comes next week or thirty years from now, this consciousness gives my life another breadth… — Andre Lorde

“As you walk, you make your own road…”

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

[Traveler, your footprints]

By Antonia Machado 

Translated by Mary G. Berg and Dennis Maloney

Traveler, your footprints

are the only road, nothing else.

Traveler, there is no road;

you make your own path as you walk.

As you walk, you make your own road,

and when you look back

you see the path

you will never travel again.

Traveler, there is no road;

only a ship’s wake on the sea.

Town Plow, Wind Chimes.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

Orange lights from the town plow sweep through my house, followed by the truck’s backup beeping. While I’ve been reading, the rain has fattened to snow. I stand in my kitchen, listening to the truck, wind jangling chimes hung on my back porch. All last winter, enduring through broken-sleep cancer, the plow’s whirling lights and safety backup were constants, a reminder that I was not the only one awake in town.

Again, winter.

I switch on the porch light and stand outside. Snow falls in infinite ways. This is not lacy and lazy flakes but dense wet bits. Quickly, quickly, the snow streams down. A new set of chimes this winter — not a replacement but a fresh voice for counterpoint — would be wise. This place no longer smells of broken leaf, damp earth, fragile fallen leaves turning to rot. Unstoppable, the falling snow shimmers in the lamplight, background of childhood delight.

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

Peering Through a Window.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 9 Comments

As a grad student, I lived for a few years in Bellingham, Washington, where the sunny summers (I kid you not) were a steady 75 degrees. The winters were New England dark, but lacked the drama of the deep cold, how (save for the conifers), the green gives way to sooty gray, flat white.

November, and I remind myself that I love Vermont in myriad ways, and one of those is how the seasons’ shift reflects our changing lives, too. In my walks along the river, it’s just me and two deer, a flock of starlings. The wildflowers have withered to dry stalks.

I have a bone scan at the local hospital (no major deal, a routine baseline). Afterwards, I walk around this building in the mid-afternoon light that’s already darkening towards dusk. Cold drizzle. Exactly a year ago, I was a patient here, and I find the window of the room where I stayed. That first morning, a social worker and nurse came into my room. The social worker gently suggested I write a will, stat. The nurse empathized with my diagnosis. Was I dismissive? She said, I have stage 4 cancer, and here I am, working again. It was not a comeuppance, but a widening.

A friend stops by with dinner. I slice apples and bake crisp. November, season of hearth.

The sick are ourselves, was a thing his father [also a country doctor] had said. When you stop understanding that, take your name off the wall and throw your bag in the river. It was advice he had only sometimes forgotten. ~ Niall Williams, Time of the Child