Vermont

Finding Jesus with the star sunglasses…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 10 Comments

Home again and somewhat shocked to see an ice floe leering off my back roof, not exactly the size of A23a Iceberg, but approximating it….

I’m under strict orders to drink broth, eat saltines, lie on the couch and read — the last two I’ve been perfecting for months now. As for the rest of the order (this is the only thing you should be doing, Brett), I’ve been quietly breaking rules for years. Now, intimate with cancer and my mortality, I push myself to obey the orders, stick with the plan, follow the course precisely.

The winter thaws. The iceberg chips, shifts. I step outside and lean against my house in my down jacket that is now limp and beaten down, a sad thing that, this quarantined winter, I’ve used so little. How will my thousand words a day fit into these orders? A grant deadline looms. When will I put on my clean shoes and that linen sweater I knitted and return to work? A cardinal perches on the railing.

In those 48 hours I spent in the Dartmouth ER, in a beige isolation room, an upbeat nurse with amazing eyelashes occasionally stopped in to cheer me and whoever of my daughters was there. On the TV, which we never turned on, she pointed out a tiny orange plastic duck, and told us someone had placed small figurines all over the hospital. “I found Jesus,” she said. “I know that’s weird, to go around a hospital saying I’ve found the Man, but really…” She reached in her pocket and pulled out an inch-high plastic Jesus in a long robe, black curls, gold star sunglasses. He smiled so widely his teeth gleamed.

In that same room, I spied a second duck, brought the ducks home with me and lined them up on the bathroom mirror beside the wooden blue elephant from the Metropolitan Museum my daughter gave me. Two tiny things that arrived in my pocket, after a week of manifold things, after months of many manifold more. All day, it will rain, the warmth softening that iceberg on my roof, falling on the deck and breaking the wood, or not. If it’s broken, we’ll repair it this summer. If not, we’ll move on to the next thing.

And utterly seasonally inappropriate, here’s a Galway Kinnell poem I’ve been loving:

Blackberry Eating

I love to go out in late September
among the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries
to eat blackberries for breakfast,
the stalks very prickly, a penalty
they earn for knowing the black art
of blackberry-making; and as I stand among them
lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries
fall almost unbidden to my tongue,
as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words
like strengths or squinched,
many-lettered, one-syllabled lumps,
which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well
in the silent, startled, icy, black language
of blackberry-eating in late September.

Giving the slip….

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 23 Comments

Back again at Dartmouth, anyone entering my room dons a yellow gown, inadvertently hiding staff name tags. Two nurses enter yesterday and pause. My daughter and her boyfriend stand at my bed’s foot.

A nurse asks, Are you two the main medical team?

The three of us look at each other. In these days where not much has been funny at all, I’m tempted to roll with this, but my daughter jumps in and says, We’re family.

Oh, the nurse says, the Main Team. You looked so intent.

I add, Talking politics….

I’d been in the ER for two nights. The fact that I didn’t care is evidence of how lousy I felt. Due to my contagious infection, I’d been squirreled away. Wheeled through the hallways, I see how jammed this place is, people waiting in hallways, tucked into corners.

In these days, my daughters arrive with their cheery energy, with stories of their lives, their patience with me. I tell them my dream to start walking again…. A few warm days and I’m imagining the four feet of snow have vanished into mud. Not so.

My girls laugh. We’re going to have to Apple chip our mother so she doesn’t wander off….

No fear of my wandering in the (very near) future. But how I’m hungering for that. Just where, exactly, would I look for that chip? Under my boot sole? In the hem of my jacket? So I can give the slip when spring calls…..

Born in 1933…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 14 Comments

William Maxwell writes in his riveting short novel So Long, See you Tomorrow: “The reason life is so strange is that so often people have no choice.”

This strange world, indeed. My daughter drives us up Vermont’s long loneliness of I-91, the interstate running above the river. Villages are tucked into the blue and snow-sprinkled mountains, these tiny clusters dominated by spires of white clapboard churches. This has been a week of in-and-out of ERs and hospital rooms, of resurgence in energy and a low so low I’m unable to bother to speak. Now, the ride home, the passing through of this winter country, where the new snow (so pure white) piles high on tree branches. This northern land in midwinter is territory I know with a familiarity akin to the veins on the backs of my hands. A haven of cold, often slow-going, a muted palette of pale blue, sooty gray, evergreen nearly black.

We talk until we’re spun out from chatter. I lean my head against the cold Subaru window. In the last room where I stayed, my companion was a woman born in 1933. 1933 marked the end of Prohibition, the year stenciled on the green-glass-bottled Rolling Rock beer we drank in college. 1933, the year of Roosevelt’s New Deal. The woman’s voice was clear as a spring stream, often studded with small wry jokes. When she saw me, her face glowed in a smile. Of all the things I’ve learned from this week and scribbled into my notebook, this woman’s radiant smile and easy language sticks with me. A few times, I wandered her way, hoping to have some of her joy rub my way.

Tiny flames, ice.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 18 Comments

Bootstep by bootstep, my strength begins to return. It’s cold, darn darn cold, slicing at my eyes and cheeks. The cold and I are no strangers. I made maple syrup for years in an unheated outbuilding, raised my daughters in a house with scant heat, have spent decades of my life tromping beneath snowy trees in search of…. what? The usual things I suppose, by which I mean the unexpected. Or maybe just the sheer loveliness of a fresh snowfall.

Here’s my barometer for how I know I am improving, the cancer lessening. A long ago college friend appears at my house with the flu, explaining away his symptoms. At first, I don’t understand; what is he asking me? My old moxie rears up, fueled perhaps by the Red Devil chemo drugs. I’m taking in a poison to save my life, after all. As if it’s not enough to have cancer, I had to send him away, banish him from our hearth, point that what, whatever he thought he might be doing had nothing to do with me at all. It was all him. At this precise moment, there’s no space here for that, or for the flu.

Later that night, neighbors appeared with ice lanterns made from five-gallon buckets. I grabbed my coat and stood outside, talking, while they lit beeswax candles and shared news of town. When they left, the tiny flames glowed brightly in the starless night, sure evidence that fire can burn even surrounded by fat ice.

❤️

/ 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

Snow geese and cancer and macaroni and cheese.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 16 Comments

My friend walks into my kitchen. The windows are shrouded in the remains of last night’s darkness. She bends down and looks at my face, reminding me of those enervating conversations in ERs with doctors. After a careful moment, she pronounces, You look good. My house is warm; her sentence warms me more.

In the St. Johnsbury hospital, she drops me at the laboratory door. A receptionist sends me down the hall, in search of elevators. A woman in the waiting room follows rickety me in my winter boots, and repeats the directions. I wander down halls empty of people, interspersed with lit Christmas trees in what seem to me random corners and notches. Someone calls my name. I turn and look, and of course this is my friend, who for a fleeting moment I don’t recognize in her bundled coat, surgical mask.

Not far from the Canadian border, St.Johnsbury has a faded charm from its former heyday of logging and Fairbanks scales. This December morning, the day sputters, promising no sunlight, maybe a few rosy strands in the opening daybreak. In my strange fog, I wonder if the light mirrors Siberia. My blood is drawn and spun. Waiting for the verdict, I stare out the window, the layers of coal and washed-thin blue and last night’s pale snow. Beside me, a man introduces himself says he owns a garage and towing business. I pull down my mask and offer my name. My voice is so muted he can hardly hear me, but I ask him to tell me about his plowing so far this winter. While we wait, he obliges me. My hands, he says, will never be clean enough for hospitals.

Siberia, I think, Siberia, as the garage owner pinpoints roads. The daylight notches up a bit. Save for my friend, waiting elsewhere, I know no one here, but this winter landscape of snow and pale mountain, the livelihood of working with hands and backs and people, is familiar to me as my thumb knuckles, the loneliness of lingering over the morning’s last cup of cooling black coffee, pondering some decision that’s wormed itself in the day.

So disease, cancer, that forbidding word, burrows in. The disease is me; the blood is mine; the nurse explains numbers, says hematocrit, hemoglobin. Less than a handful of weeks into this journey, I know my blood courses with immutable facts, ragingly powerful chemistry. The blessing to leave is laid upon me.

Home again from distant Siberia — is it midmorning? afternoon’s mire? — my friend sweeps ashes from my wood stove and nourishes gleaming coals with birchbark and splinters, odd pieces of end wood. This day unfurls, somber and patient, settling into winter’s long haul. I offer a piece of my daughter’s gingerbread. For hours now, we’ve talked about migrating snow geese and cancer and macaroni and cheese. She asks if I would take her on a nighttime walk — I envision the throb of spring peepers, the redolent rotting slop of thawing earth — indeed, a pleasure I might give back, to one of my shepherds holding me steady as I wobble down my back steps.