Vermont

Put on a dress of flowers…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

I spy a young fox on my front yard sniffing the trunk of the pear tree. Someone planted these two fruit trees long before I lived here. The smaller bends into the lilac hedge as if it’d prefer to be a lilac. This one, the taller, shoots high, its branches like an enormous hand raised in greeting.

The fox checks out the cohosh I planted this fall. Dawn is coloring up towards whatever day might emerge. I’m walking around my downstairs rooms, a dress in my hand, headed into work today, to sort out questions I both can and cannot answer, to talk with my office partner about town roads and FEMA, the drying up streams and lakes, about the merits of apple cider vinegar, and grownup kids. We’ll open the screen-less windows wide open in this 100-year-old former school, letting in the sunlight over the dusty sills. Hungry wasps fly in and out. An ordinary day of the things of this world, some humdrum, some irritating, some lovely as this balmy October weather. As for me, broken by cancer, limping back to whatever rude red health I can summon, I think, Put on a dress with flowers.

The fox crosses my neighbor’s pine-cone-strewn grass and disappears down our thin road. A fortuitous sign, I think, for this day.

“Ode” by Zoe Higgins

Here’s to everything undone today:
laundry left damp in the machine,
the relatives unrung, the kitchen
drawer not sorted; here’s to jeans
unpatched and buttons missing,
the dirty dishes, the novel
not yet started. To Christmas
cards unsent in March, to emails
marked unread. To friends unmet
and deadlines unaddressed;
to every item not crossed off the list;
to everything still left, ignored, put off:
it is enough.

Crossroads.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

I park at a dirt crossroads this weekend beside a former tavern and walk up the hill to the Old West Church. The sunny afternoon speckles through the roadside maples, and I meet others doing what I am, in pairs or singly, and we greet each other, cheerily. At the Old West Church, I hear two terrific poets, but on my walk back to the tavern the line that runs through my head is from a Franz Wright poem, There is but one heart in my body, have mercy/on me, an incantation.

I keep thinking of my dead mother on this radiant Sunday, my mother who pulled her last breath a year and a half ago, hardly a hopscotch jump ago. In my mind, I’m building the architecture of what I’ve tagged as this Cancer Atlas I’m writing, scaffolding this book’s bones. The book is about the here-and-now, about living (at least for now) through a terrible disease, about walking along Vermont’s autumn-gold back roads, about pulling up this summer’s frost-killed pepper plants that produced so bountifully this summer. And my mother? As I work, I think so often of her, this woman both generous and mercurial, the double blade I harbor in my own heart. Gracious, how much she’d enjoy this picturesque walk. She was a woman who loved old churches, was fascinated by adjacent cemeteries, who would have relished the art in the tavern.

At the tavern, I linger in an open doorway, talking with a curator, drinking iced tea from a half-pint jar. My mother would have drunk the wine, feasted on the cured meat and seeded crackers. Dust kicks up in the road. Old friends appear, and we joke about winter’s ferocity. It’s always a crossroads, isn’t it?

“We are created by being destroyed.”
― Franz Wright

Habits of the Heart.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

A radiantly sunny September afternoon, I’m at the northern edge of Caspian Lake, an afternoon with the slightest of breezes so the water shimmers and ripples. The summer people have all returned to other places, the local families at work or school, so it’s just me. For the longest time, I stand at the edge of the long dock and watch a bald eagle fly low over the water, then circle back and disappear into the woods.

Where do you find succor?

For years, with little girls, I spent hours with my friends at the public beach on the other side of the lake. Our worlds dispersed now, I haven’t walked there this summer. In no rush on a day that’s already been crammed with people and my to-do list, I take the longer trail back to the road. The usually wet forest is so parched the boardwalk bridges span over dry soil.

As the afternoon folds down, I take a walk along the river, the path I’ve been following all summer, watching the trout lilies give way to soapwort to the persistent asters. A pickup truck idles across the trail. A woman I knew years ago from a library kids’ group waits for me to pass, then ropes off the trail so she can move her cows from one pasture to another.

On my way home, I stop at the co-op for vinegar and coffee beans and cashews. A stranger says hello in the bulk aisle and reminds me he’d passed me on the trail, he on a bike and me walking in sandals. We talk about the moon and a star named Arcturus. When we part, he says, “See you on the trail — a metaphor for life.” Slow I am these days, as if I’m floating on my back in a warm pond, my eyes open to this flawless blue sky, the undulating water gulping in my ears. Autumn, this heartbeat of beauty, its own true metaphor.

… From this week’s New Yorker:

… what made America great—were “habits of the heart”: the everyday engagement of citizens that sustains institutions by holding leaders to account. Habits fade, but they can also be revived.

Moonrise, More.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments
Barn door view.

An old friend unexpectedly appears at my door one evening as I’m folding laundry. We sit on my back porch and drink hot honeyed tea and watch the just-beyond-full moon slowly rise. September, the night’s chill creeps in around us. I grab my hat and coat and brew more tea.

All this fall, I’ll be thinking of a year ago, when I was getting sicker and sicker, with no real understanding why until that terrible night in the ER when a scan revealed cancer, so much cancer. Heading towards a year later, I’m admiring the moon sail over the mountain ridge and up through the trees. We keep talking and talking. It’s not so much the words that stitch us together but our chuffing breath that hangs in clouds between us, a howling neighborhood dog, a rustle in the ravine of a wild creature.

After my friend leaves, I wander around the moonlit garden, hands in my coat pockets, the tall amaranth a shadowy forest beside the closed four o’clocks. Frost is not far in the offing.

Inside, a daughter has texted me….. where are you?… Outside, breathing in the moonlight. Still here.

Instructions on Not Giving Up

More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.

~ Ada Limón

“Listen, no one signed up for this lullaby…”

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 11 Comments

Incantation of the First Order 

Listen, no one signed up for this lullaby.  
No bleeped sheep or rosebuds or twitching stars  
will diminish the fear or save you from waking  

into the same day you dreamed of leaving—
mockingbird on back order, morning bells 
stuck on snooze—so you might as well  

get up and at it, pestilence be damned.  
Peril and risk having become relative, 
I’ll try to couch this in positive terms: 

Never! is the word of last resorts, 
Always! the fanatic’s rallying cry.  
To those inclined toward kindness, I say 

Come out of your houses drumming. All others,  
beware: I have discarded my smile but not my teeth.

~ Rita Dove

Lucky.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

August is exceptionally hot this year, the rivers so low they can be crossed by foot. In the woods, streams have dried to rock beds. In Montpelier, the state’s tiny capital, I walk by a store with bright bowls in the window and think, My mother would love this store. She passed over a year ago, and yet I still catch myself thinking that she might appear around a corner, her purse tucked under her arm, amused at me. Of course I’m not gone…

My father, the physicist, schooled his three kids early on about entropy. In a week where things repeatedly broke — the hot water heater leaking, the Jetta refusing to start in the rain — he made jokes that we were in a High Entropy Zone. So, this lovely August, with the chorusing crickets and the waning red moon — I’m determined to suck each day to its marrow. Sandwiched around work and the steadiness of washing dishes and so on, I’ve pushed aside space for swimming and ice cream, for lying under the apple tree and studying a spider spin her web. The entropy of living keeps on, as it does.

In the years when I was raising my own young daughters, our days zigzagged from bowls of blueberries to bath time. The days were endless, and the years rushed by. Now, my girls newly grown, I relish the silence and crave their company. Lucky I am, so lucky, to be alive this summer, this month, these days. All day long, I walk around with my tender heart cradled in my hands, wounded and raw from cancer, from weeks of hospitalization, from the knife of mortality pressed against my windpipe. August: the season of great loveliness, the intimation of winter. The reminder to love where and what we are.

Hitch Hiker at a Truck Stop

The hitch hiker asks to look at

the palms of my cold hands

and thanks me for unfolding them

on the frost-edged

picnic table between us.

While I look at his downcast eyes

trying to see if he sees,

nearby truckers stare

at his narrow face,

long blond hair.

He asks me if I garden,

rips a scrap of newspaper

and folds it up

into a tiny origami

package for anise seed.

Here, he says,

seed I gathered in Oregon,

plant it in Colorado.

I always have a garden, he adds,

I plant and leave to others.

He tells me he has no sex;

when you ride in the righthand seat,

you have to nod your head

without listening.

Face pressed to the window,

he can see the lacquered edges

of the earth.

So I imagine him 

practicing calligraphy

on truck windows,

recommending honey and vinegar

in a glass of water

every morning.

Mad, mad, mad.

A yellow warbler,

the moon at the bottom of the stream.

Out on the highway

he is raising his thumb again. ~ Mary Crow