walking

Disease as Teacher.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

About a year ago, a friend asked to borrow knitting needles, a request I almost certainly ignored as I could hardly walk up the stairs in my house, and forget the effort of opening the closet door and searching through my needles. A year ago, my family moved my bed downstairs, and I wondered, Well, is that? Am I now confined to one floor like an old woman? I was not, thankfully.

Half a year out from chemo and surgery, my family moved my bed back upstairs. The first morning I wake, I stand at the window looking down at the mock orange planted decades ago. In June, this giant bush is covered with small white blossoms, but in November, the bush is mostly sticks, save for a few withered leaves.

Standing there staring down, I felt suffused with profound grief. Almost immediately, I chastised myself. Why grieve when I survived a terrible illness? When this might have easily gone otherwise? And yet, grief.

Nearing the holidays, I think often of my mother who died not so long ago. She and I had years ago separated our lives for reasons both silly and profound. Only at the end of her life did I begin to have empathy for her and see her not merely as my mother but a woman in her own right. So that morning, thinking of her, my grief is for her absence, for what might have been between her and my daughters and myself. So many years I invited her to holiday meals, and all those years, she refused to join us. How I would love to invite her this year. Surviving cancer (thus far) broke me in so many ways, shoved me right up against the fragility of the world, revealed my own meager strength, but it also allowed me to grieve the loss upon loss that is not endemic to me but woven integrally through our mortal lives. Cancer empowered me to hold that grief without rage, to acknowledge simply what is.

But sadness, of course, is one variation of the complex symphony of our lives. Yesterday, walking along a hillside dirt road in the November sunlight, hat pulled off my head and in my hand, eyes on the spine of the Green Mountains in the distance freshly covered with snow, pure joy suffused me at simply being in the world. Six months ago, my companion had walked with me from my house to Main Street. It wasn’t at all certain to me that I could manage that short walk there and back. Now, the two of us moved quickly through the world, talking poetry and plans. How remarkable is that?

What if we embraced the messy, evolving, surprising, out-of-control happening that is life and reckoned with its proximity and relationship to death? What if, instead of being afraid of even talking about death, we saw our lives in some ways as preparation for it? What if we were taught to ponder it and reflect on it and talk about it and enter it and rehearse it and try it on? What if our lives were precious only up to a point? What if we held them loosely and understood that there were no guarantees? So that when you got sick you weren’t a stage but in a process? And cancer, just like having your heart broken, or getting a new job, or going to school, were a teacher? — Eve Ensler

Such a World.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 11 Comments

Late afternoon, walking with a friend on the town forest trails and talking all-things-grownup-and-fascinating, her little girl runs ahead of us, stops suddenly, raises her arms in a Y over her head, and exclaims to the woods, “I love this place!”

Relish this.

Slowly, the rain is returning, the streams beginning to flow again. Puddles muck the trails in a few low places. Meanwhile, people ask, “How’s your water holding up?” Word travels of dried up wells. This morning, I stand on my porch in the dark, listening to rainfall patter through the leaves that linger on the trees around my house. The crests of the apple trees hang onto their crowns of gold. We’re at that dipping point, the swing of seasons, the earth yet warm, redolent with this summer’s abundance.

Such a moon —

the thief

pauses to sing. — Yosa Buson

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.

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.

Survive, Thrive.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

In search of a story about wool and weaving, about Colonial America and these sultry August days, I discover a trailhead for a nearby town forest. I return with my daughter. We drive on back dirt roads, the terrain unfamiliar to me. But the way the maples are nearly in the road, their leafy branches stretching over the road and touching, is the Vermont I first loved, so many years ago when I was 18.

We pass houses flanked by sunflowers and hydrangeas, gardens with six-foot high fences to keep deer from marauding the kale. Not so many decades ago, these were farm fields. In the forest, we follow a former road beside a stone wall. In New England, a forest moves in quickly, erasing the labor that once cleared this land.

August, the woods are quieting. In a break in the forest, we walk through a field of goldenrod, a strip of pink Joe Pye Weed at its edge. All summer, I’ve written sparsely in this space, intently picking up the stitches of my life: walking to mend lost muscle, relearning habits of sleeping and cooking and eating — such simple things I once did so easily. When an acquaintance’s dog leaped on me on a walking trail, I rushed deeper into the woods and wept. I’ve cried so little during this year of cancer, but there I was, ridiculously weeping beneath pines, so fearful of my own fragility, of breaking.

August, and I’d take a whole summer again, an impossibility. Instead, again, we’re in the edge between seasons, the days shortening, chilly at sunset and sunrise. My cats eye the unused wood stove and then eye me, wondering what my plans might be.

Survive, I think. I’m cooking fish and offer these plump tabbies a second course. Thrive, I add.

We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. ~ Jack Gilbert

Mad World, Abundant Wildflowers.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 15 Comments

For no particular reason, I walk on the path along the river which leads to the road where I once lived. In the meadows and beside the trail, the wildflowers blossom abundantly: yellow toadflax and pink asters, bluets and Black-eyed Susans, cinquefoil.

I dawdle at the dirt road. At a turnout, long ago I had a carpool meeting spot. Over the years, my daughters and I passed hours there. In the afternoons, I lingered with my friend, the girls lingered with their friends. The girls played in a brook. The fields have been used for hay, vegetables, seeds, THC. In the past few years, the flooding river dumped sand in these acres. Burdock and thistle claim this terrain now. These fields are for sale again.

A few pickups zoom by. When my ex and I were splitting up, we’d meet here, too. I’d run down the mountain road and leave the girls at home, baking cookies or riding bikes. In my then-husband’s truck, we’d argue about our lives. That autumn as an early dusk washed in, I leaned my head against the truck window and watched two coyotes running across the field. He kept talking and talking and I kept thinking about our daughters who would be hungry for dinner. Someone else lives in that house now. Our lives have long ago moved on.

A friend pulls up, and I get in her car. We talk about kids and aging parents, about money and oranges. The world around us is falling apart. What we see now might be just the cracks of a shifting society. Yet, our lives spin on. My friend and I keep talking and talking. Children grow up. The fields’ bounty changes. I no longer live a few stones’ throws down an empty road from this friend, but how I love her.

I walk back slowly on that trail, under the cool shading trees. Chicory, knapweed, Canada lily. In the covered railroad bridge, I pause in its interior dimness, light at either end. There’s no one around at all. I soak it in.

The heart’s actions
are neither the sentence nor its reprieve. 

Salt hay and thistles, above the cold granite. 
One bird singing back to another because it can’t not.

~ Jane Hirshfield