travel

Vessels, Rooms, the Unbounded Sky.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 15 Comments

16 degrees on this sun-kissed Sunday, my cat considering the squirrels.

In cancer land, still putting my muscles together, I’m outdoors only with someone else these days, the long solitary walks yet a future promise, again. Early mornings, I brew coffee, fill the cats’ bowls with their breakfast. All day long, we’re filling and emptying things: water glasses and soup bowls and cat dishes (again), filling a notebook page with penciled words, a suitcase with my daughter’s clean clothes as she heads back to college, a new lightbulb in an empty socket.

Likewise, this disease has filled my body for months, now emptying; illness has slipped into every crevice in my family’s life, too, like the power of freeze in a river, rearranging the flow.

In a year that’s begun with so many families losing their homes on the other side of the country, the sunlight on this morning, a chilly walk this afternoon, the cold scraping at my cheeks – yes, yes – a scrap of gratitude for January Vermont sunlight. Here’s line from one of my favorite writers, Andre Dubus, who knew loss keenly.

“We receive and we lose, and we must try to achieve gratitude; and with that gratitude to embrace with whole hearts whatever of life that remains after the losses.”

In the cracks around kindness.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 28 Comments

Thaw, on this New Year’s Day, hovering near freezing, my neighbor’s yard under her great pines exposed to soggy grass, the fields on the hillside across the village bare as late April.

I pull on my coat and boots and stand on my porch. The tree branches are festooned with droplets. Cold will press in again this week.

Wednesday morning, holiday, my scrawled list penciled on a post-it on my kitchen table, waiting. I perch on the covered sand bucket and sip the coffee, my hands wrapped around the mug. My memory wanders back to the Maine coast where we spread my mother’s ashes last June. My mother loved domestic spaces. She would have been enchanted by the colored lights my kids strung over my barn, along the porch roof over my head. Likewise, in my house, she would have admired our tree with the red star topper, the room illuminated with tiny lights. Nearly housebound with cancer recovery, my household has been blessed with gifts of candles, savory meals, foil-wrapped chocolates, fragrant rose oil from Bulgaria. All this, too, would have intrigued my mother.

My mother loved the wild, too, for much of her life quick to pack up the car and head for the open road.

In Maine, we parked near the shore. The sweetness of rugosa roses buoyed along the breeze’s brine. In the curving, layered landscape of rock and the rhythmic crashing pound of the ocean like the planet’s beating heat, we returned her remains to the immense wild, the mysterious territory where she had, after all, emerged from.

A crossing over.

This second memory, too. Later that summer, visiting my old father in New Mexico, my young woman daughter and her friend fried eggs and buttered toast for breakfast. In their strappy sundresses, they sat at the round oak table, sipping coffee. The friend had never visited New Mexico; her eyes gleamed. My father gave them his credit card and told them to eat lunch in downtown Santa Fe, in the courtyard which had been a family compound, 200 years and more ago. Later, the girls returned with leftover enchiladas and stories of flowering trumpet vines and singing birds. We must go into the beautiful mountains.

Yesterday, this daughter walked me around the high school, the beginnings of my strength returning. In the hidden back, a path leads into the woods. She held my hand, admonished, “Not yet.”

On this misty, rainy New Year’s morning, a prayer to cultivate patience and mercy for these interwoven journeys…

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go…

— Naomi Shihab Nye

❤️

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 15 Comments

In the night, snow. My youngest ventures downstairs from her second-floor lair and feeds the wood stove, asks if I’m still reading, and don’t I think I should be getting some sleep… Around my knees, the cats yawn at her, nestling into their cat-dreams for a winter’s sleep. Outside, the town plow rumbles up our road, backs around, beeping, and disappears into the falling snow.

2024, a year that’s meant so much to so many. In our house, the year my mother died, the year I almost died, too. The inside-out year of reversal. In these quiet December days, getting better, getting stronger, getting weaker, moving along that jagged zigzag towards health, I’ve been lucky to read and think, to be warm and tended, to savor small sweets. Games of gin rummy. Poems Jo reads in her clear strong voice and sends every day. Brad’s photos of wintry Lake Champlain, luminescent portals of ice and drooping snow and runny sunsets. For so many of you, some whom I know well and have gone in and out of the depths of friendship and family, and some whom I hardly know, the circle around me has made all the difference.

When I first knew I had cancer, an acquaintance who had survived breast cancer told me it was the loneliest experience of her life. Like anyone, I’m well-acquainted with loneliness, have battled this shackled companion through divorce and betrayal. Where now has fate sent me? Illness was a forbidding shore where I never wanted to land my kayak, bend down in the cold murky waters and hoist my flimsy craft to safety. But illness is our common terrain, and those who dwell here – through happenstance or vocation – welcomed me in with compassion. As The Good Doctor told me, We are all patients. More plainly, perhaps, we are all mortal, conjoined.

Wishing you all some radiance from Vermont, prettied up this early morning beneath a downy snowfall….

“The Verge”

Reason is a fine thing, but remember there are other ways
to live: by instinct or passion, or even,
maybe, by revelation. Try it. Come around again to the verge –
that place of about-to-open, near where we comprehend
and laugh and see. Why shouldn’t something marvelous
happen to you? Take even an occasion like this:
A man reading at night looked up at the window to find
a moose looking in, interested and unafraid
with quiet dark eyes. He reports he has never been the same;
he finds the ungainly and miraculous everywhere.
He said it started the next night in the empty window
as he watched his reflection looking right back through.
He said he saw his own beauty, how even in his same old face
the quiet eyes were curious and ready to be true.

– Annie Lighthart

Hay strands for sheep, purring cat, Harry Potter chocolates for neighbors.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 11 Comments

Now in my fifties, I’d lulled myself into believing my risk-taking days were sewed up: those early 20s of getting in the old Volkswagen for journeys of thousands of miles, buy a decrepit hunting shack and convert it into a home, severe a marriage soured terribly and fear he might take your life in retribution — all that time of selling the maple sugaring equipment (who to trust, how to cut a hard deal?). So jaywalking suited me just fine. Waking long before dawn to feed the cats and drink milky coffee, write and watch the sun rise, that streaming beet juice.

As if I held all the cards in the risk-taking plans, anyway. Now that thread of riskiness has spread to those beloved around me, too. More and more, I understand my learning to craft a honed a sentence or the deep pleasure of watching a cardinal pause on a branch, are my steadying rituals of rooting me meaningfully in this world. I have friends whose lives center around sheep and chores and woolly affection, in ways that transformed their lives. Chicken and horse lovers. My sister-in-law with her two goats.

As I write from Room 101, I haven’t forgotten that the world spins on. Last night, I listened to VTDigger’s Dave Goodman’s follow-up conversation with Elizabeth Price, mother of Hisahm Awartani, one of the three young Palestinian men who was shot in Burlington, Vermont, a year ago. The Gaza war reigns. The American presidency shifts.

In Room 101, so many stories of people come my way — the night nurse who studied for two years in England, near the beach, transcontinental; how transport folks and nurses made their to live in New Hamsphire and Vermont, often from places around the country. What do you like here? What have you found? I keep asking, curious to know what roots people in their lives.

The smaller world spins on, too, with its things both miserable, joyous, and pleasurably mundane. Your own rituals of offering hay to sheep, fingertips to a cat’s purring head.

Last day of November, the month of cancer in my world. A year ago I bought Harry Potter chocolates for the neighbors’ boys and waited in the dusk for the three laughing boys to appear around my woodpile. The Good Doctor tells me I will go down, down, soon, and then rise to where I once felt well. What would that mean? I’m hanging on to this unrealized promise.

I repeat. When I go down, I will re-emerge.

The Moon is Cheese.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 7 Comments
Photo by Molly S.

My novel Call It Madness, slated for publication in a year and half (a small eternity away?), is arranged by places — or vessels in my mind. An apartment, an unheated farmhouse, the center of a frozen lake. To my way of thinking, places shape who we are.

Friday, wheeled on my back into a procedure room at Dartmouth-Hitchcock, I answered the usual name and date of birth and then a third question: why are you here today? A moment, a pause, and then I answered I was there for a specific biopsy.

Words are magical things, and magic is powerful. In the Dartmouth waiting room, laughing with my brother about memories from our childhood (he cheated at Monopoly, yes, I hit him over the head with a metal rod), the thought kept pulsing through my mind how much I didn’t want to be there (get out! walk out!), for this appointment I had worked so hard to finagle. But saying those words aloud sealed this very first step.

On the long drive home, the full Beaver Moon rose, lit the river and interstate, the ubiquitous Vermont hayfields still green in this lingering late autumn, the sky a blush of pink , reminding us, again, of the sheer luck of millennia of sunsets and the sailing moon, each dearly unique.

Later, later, lying on the couch, my brother and youngest sit opposite me, drinking beer and talking, eating the prized Club crackers that I never buy and a kind neighbor left. My brother disappears into the kitchen and returns.

“Cheese!” my daughter says, sparkling with happiness.

The world, keep on keeping on….

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

The young barista in my coffee shop muses with me about the small pleasures of November: the summer slam of tourists quieted, the sudden simplicity of stillness. On a balmy afternoon, I head out in search of places where I’ve loved and been loved, the sunny afternoon so warm the crickets have struck up their chorus again.

A few days later, I’m in the diner, eating breakfast with a friend whose mind works along my hard-bitten lines. Our booth’s window looks down into the river where the patched-up cement walls have fallen flat. We are in absolute agreement that this shifting world of thoughts and opinions, all the junk fed by media and social media, come to naught. It’s action that shifts the world. And the world, despite our fears, will keep on keeping on.

I put poetry as action, too. Here’s a few lines from the incomparable Mary Ruefle’s “Glory.”

... I met a psychic who told me my position in the universe
but could not find the candy she hid from her grandkids.
The ordinary fear of losing one’s mind. You rinse the sink,
walk out into the October sunshine, and look for it
by beginning to think. That’s when I saw the autumn aster,
the sedum blooming in a purple field. The psychic said
I must see the word glory emblazoned on my chest. Secretly
I was hoping for a better word. I would have chosen for myself
an ordinary one like orchid or paw...