remission

Solitary Sailboat.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

I make a difficult phone call to a family member. Late afternoon, the perennial sunflowers stretch above my head in my garden. I’ve walked barefoot from my house through the grass that’s already cooling in the shadows to my garden, the soil warm from the day’s sun and so dry it’s verging near dusty. Afterwards, there’s a second call, then a third. I find two zucchinis that need picking, an onion I’d forgotten beneath the tansy. I gather these.

I’ve had this worldview of cause and effect: make a decision, or not a decision, and the consequences creep up or roar upon you. No stasis in this world. A selfish view. Meanwhile, of course, the transient world churns along, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ceaseless waves, the pollinators feasting lustily on these sunflowers whose petals are already beginning their autumn wilt-and-drop.

September: a month jammed with color and sadness, the fleetingness of this life. Two years ago, disease was rampaging in my blood. I did not yet know this, while already my ailing body was sailing me into faraway seas. That journey was me in a solitary life raft, cold winter starlight drenching my eyes. Swimmers tossed over the edge of that rickety inflatable boat the things that kept me alive: medicines of all kinds, tiny bowls of hot soup, books and money, the hands that propped me up and guided me on walks, the company of voices. Meals and kindness that sustained my daughters, and so sustained me.

Overhead, the bluest of a Vermont sky. I answer my phone again. What luck, immensity of good fortune, to be enmeshed in wildly unknown world, relishing fatty marrow.

Into My Own

One of my wishes is that those dark trees,
So old and firm they scarcely show the breeze,
Were not, as ’twere, the merest mask of gloom,
But stretched away unto the edge of doom.

I should not be withheld but that some day
Into their vastness I should steal away,
Fearless of ever finding open land,
Or highway where the slow wheel pours the sand.

I do not see why I should e’er turn back,
Or those should not set forth upon my track
To overtake me, who should miss me here
And long to know if still I held them dear.

They would not find me changed from him they knew—
Only more sure of all I thought was true. ~ Robert Frost

Tangled Wild.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

A little rain falls when I’m done with work for the day, nearly seven in an evening filled with August’s sultriness. There’s no one in the electric department parking lot where I swap jeans for running shorts, and then head on the stony trail through the woods and down to the river.

August, the growing of weed and tended garden finished for this season. The apples are reddening. The blackberries that remain on the vine burst with juice, sweetness on the verge of rot.

I cross the river. Raindrops pebble its slow surface. I loop behind the old yellow barn that houses a warehouse of local cheese, then circle around the osprey nests where the Black River pools behind an old dam. My t-shirt is damp with sprinkles of rain and my sweat. Grateful I am to a friend who appeared with a glass cup of echinacea this week. In the spring, I’d mused that, a year out from cancer treatment, that was as far back as I would come. “Really?” she mused quietly. “You might question that.” Now here I am, running around the edges of this village, along this rain-kissed goldenrod.

Anne Sexton wrote about “the awful rowing towards God,” a poet I read in grad school, a woman crazed by not one simple cause. For so many years, I clenched my wooden oars, my rowboat with my children circling in eddies, plunged through rapids, in a journey breathcatching sometimes from fear and uncertainty, sometimes through the sheer awesomeness of the vaulting night sky, the companions of swimming dolphins.

Much as I chafe against a linear view of time, I see myself running around the brackish reservoir, then along the gentle slope back to my car and the mason jar of water I’ve left there to quench my thirst. I run with my whole story a whirlwind in my body and mind, known and unknown. Surely, as we rush headlong forwards, we’re always going backwards, too. And yet we row on, the work of this mortal life.

Oh, Anne Sexton, with her unhappy demise. Two years ago, I often ran along this path and discovered wild grapes down an embankment. The rain paused, I scramble through weeds. The grapes are there again this late summer. I gather these sweetly tart beauties in the hem of my t-shirt. Eating, I walk along the path, studying the soot-stained clouds. My friend with a new baby in a stroller appears around a bend. I offer this young mother a handful of grapes, and she spits seeds into the trailside milkweed. Sweaty from August and running, I bend down to admire the babe. Scuttling clouds are reflected in the child’s luminescent eyes, her smile quicksilver as a rainbow trout in a rushing mountain stream.

As the African says:
This is my tale which I have told,
if it be sweet, if it be not sweet…
This story ends with me still rowing. — Anne Sexton

Courage Crumbs.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

I began my Call It Madness book tour on a steamy June evening, traveled all summer around the state and into New Hampshire, and ended in Greensboro, a ten-minute drive north of where I live, on a late afternoon, the August day promising coolness as the day ended, a room full of people I know and some I don’t know. I was graced with affection and curiosity.

Along the way, I’ve been fortunate to have friends and family make this trek with me, take time from their lives — and sometimes I traveled alone — that well of solitude that both sustains and sometimes frightens me.

At this last reading, in the town where I walked around the lake, beginning to write Call It Madness in my mind, think through this story of a farm lost four generations ago and a young, rough-edged woman seeking her own salvation, the audience asked thoughtful questions. At one point, I heard myself say, when I had cancer, and of course that is not true. The pronunciation of cure, if I am so fortunate, is far yet in the future. But looking around the room, I knew pieces of so many people’s lives — losses of their own dear ones, of addiction and financial duress, of the persistence of juggling a creative life and earning a living.

This morning, reading David Biro‘s One Hundred Days, I chance upon his words (as a physician and patient of a rare blood disorder) that medicine is art and science. I benefitted from both: decades and decades of painstaking research provided me treatment and the complex art of my oncologist ushered me through the nightmare of that treatment. In the deepest nadir, he appeared at my bedside at a time when numbers meant nothing to me: before dawn or late evening, or maybe noon. I told him I didn’t think I could continue, and he simply studied me, silently, while I scraped down into that threadbare pocket of my courage and pulled out another crumb. He waited for my resolve to thicken.

Likewise — and yet utterly different — writing. Late August, the crickets singing down the end of summer, I’ve lucky to have a house of family and friends this weekend, and then perhaps some lying in the sun, reading my way through the stack of books I’ve acquired on my bookstore tour. I’d imagined my fifties as a decade of some calm after kid-rearing, divorce and the scramble to set my girls and myself steadily in a beloved house, on a financial footing where I was not always chewing a thumbnail. Instead: a life like a bouquet of sunflowers, staggeringly beautiful, the leaves’ edges fading.

After reading, I stood in the parking lot with a friend, our conversation continuing in the way of friends who have known each other for years. For this moment, I relished how I felt held in this Vermont village, one blossom in a handful of so much.

“At these moments sufferers desperately want to escape from their holes, the silence and loneliness, and return to the world we share with others…” David Biro

“… a definition of love…”

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

All afternoon, I work on my back deck. Hummingbirds dart at the hanging nasturtiums, rain sprinkling down around the porch roof. In the late afternoon, I swop jeans for shorts, tie on my shoes, and head out for a run. I run for maybe a mile, no more, then walk in circles, my hands on my hips. The mid-August world is a crazy abundance, hydrangeas and Queen Anne’s Lace reveling in their showiness.

I had thought I would never run again, that kind of energy and strength irremediably sapped by disease and treatment. Yet, this afternoon, I determine, Well, what you do know… Ahead lies a long evening of a Selectboard meeting in a particularly Vermont-vein: the nuts-and-bolts of the town’s daily business of salt and sheriff contracts, what to do about wastewater, and the passion projects of conserving land and eliminating streetlights. A microcosm of the country in a former schoolroom where everyone is on a first-name basis. Like it or not.

Long past nightfall, I’m home again, lying on the couch and reading Louise Erdrich, cats between my knees, the windows open and the crickets sizzling. Above, photo of myself with beloved daughters. After chemo, my hair returned in ringlets, the straight hair of my childhood replaced by exuberant happiness.

“Green Apples” by Ruth Stone

In August we carried the old horsehair mattress
To the back porch
And slept with our children in a row.
The wind came up the mountain into the orchard
Telling me something:
Saying something urgent.
I was happy.
The green apples fell on the sloping roof
And rattled down.
The wind was shaking me all night long;
Shaking me in my sleep
Like a definition of love,
Saying, this is the moment,
Here, now.

“The world is a complex fatigue.”

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

August appears, and I’m at work Saturday morning, trudging around a lake in a thickety forest with some of my favorite people in town, talking work and books and the edginess of this fleeting life, the puzzling conundrums of what people do.

Below, the Hayden Carruth poem I’ve posted before around August 1, during the years I’ve written in this space. Every year, when I read this poem again, different lines pop out. Here, “The world is a complex fatigue.” If I began a list of things I learned in my year (now, year and some) of surviving cancer and cancer treatments, gracious, I would keep writing and writing. The cats would not be fed this morning. The blueberries would not be picked.

But to return to August…. June, July, August, in my way of reckoning, these are Vermont’s high holy months, the long days of sweet roses and waving rudbeckia, the welcomeness of ice on your tongue, walking in twilight, the loveliness of sunlight chips and loons on pond water. Those worn clichés — savor every day, know your luck — are true of course, in the way that truth is multitudinous — in the way that Mac Barnett notes that Be Kind might be a given starting place, but not a plot. And human life, of course, is plot, plot, plot. Often, not of our own making.

Story, of course, is where I’m headed. These midsummer days, the glossiest greens already fading. As I’ve done for years, I hold to the strands that keep me sane in this world illusory and fragile and heartstoppingly thrumming with might far beyond any one or two or few of us… the chords of this mortal life. The gritty and sometimes joyous labor of writing, of walking in the world, the domesticity of family and friends. Brew coffee, weed the garden, ponder the sky.

AUGUST FIRST
by Hayden Carruth

Late night on the porch, thinking
of old poems. Another day’s
work, another evening’s,
done. A large moth, probably
Catocala, batters the screen,
but lazily, its strength spent,
its wings tattered. It perches
trembling on the sill. The sky
is hot dark summer, neither
moon nor stars, air unstirring,
darkness complete; and the brook
sounds low, a discourse fumbling
among obstinate stones. I
remember a poem I wrote
years ago when my wife and
I had been married twenty-
two days, an exuberant
poem of love, death, the white
snow, personal purity. now
I look without seeing at
a geranium on the sill;
and, still full of day and evening,
of what to do for money,
I wonder what became of
purity. The world is a
complex fatigue. The moth tries
once more, wavering desperately
up the screen, beating, insane,
behind the geranium. It is an
immense geranium,
the biggest I’ve ever seen,
with a stem like a small tree
branching, so that the two thick arms
rise against the blackness of
this summer sky, and hold up
ten blossom clusters, bright bursts
of color. What is it — coral,
mallow? Isn’t there a color
called “geranium”? No matter.
They are clusters of richness
held against the night in quiet
exultation, five on each branch,
upraised. I bought it myself
and gave it to my young wife
years ago, in a plastic cup
with a 19cent seedling
from the supermarket, now
so thick, leathery-stemmed,
and bountiful with blossom.
The moth rests again, clinging.
The brook talks. The night listens.

Singing a Love Song, Swimming.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 14 Comments

It’s nearly 8 in the evening by the time I step into #10 Pond, the sun slipped down around this narrow pond surrounded by mountains, my only company two teenage girls who stand on the shore talking about a mother’s car—these girls and a loon calling.

I part the still waters and swim out. Despite raging heat elsewhere on the globe, Vermont’s summer holds a chill, and by the time I swim back, I’m cold. On the shore, the girls have disappeared, and under the twilight sky it’s just shivering me toweling off water, pulling on a sweatshirt. All afternoon, I’ve thought of this water, of the sky turning from blue to black, of the mud beneath my bare feet, the loon chorus. It’s been a day of work and laughter, nothing rotten that I’d like to leave at the bottom of the pond; nonetheless, July moves along, the relentlessness of time. I crave these moments of water and sky, of reading beneath the apple tree’s shade, dinner near the garden, as much sun and wind and, yes, cold water as I can bear. Sustenance.

“But some nights, I must tell you,
I go down there after everyone has fallen asleep.
I swim back and forth in the echoing blackness.
I sing a love song as well as I can,
lost for a while in the home of the rain. ”
― Billy Collins