writing

Tilt Your Head Up Towards the Sun.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 7 Comments

Happenstance or synchronicity? A remarkable thing happens: early afternoon, I’m walking around the 100-year-old building where I work, former schoolhouse, now town offices and a few random other activities. The building reflects a segment of rural Vermont: once built with pride, now crumbling, badly in need of care.

A balmy afternoon, I’m walking around the dusty parking lot. An impending cold is burrowing into my bones in the way of my post-chemo life, and I’m pushing back as I do, determined to finish this afternoon’s work. Someone I’ve met occasionally appears. It’s an exceptionally fine November afternoon, and I linger, talking, eating an apple. The conversation veers towards writing, and I mention I’m a cancer survivor. What do you know? Turns out, he worked on one of the drugs that saved my life. I repeat the drug’s name; he repeats it back to me.

I had a horrific reaction to this drug. Administered via IV, almost immediately a fist clenched my lungs and heart. The nurse cut it off instantly. For what felt like time-out-of-mind, I gasped, shook so hard the bed smashed into the wall, the nurses took my grown daughter of the room. The room was crammed with doctors and nurses who were bustling. I was so new to the cancer (just a few weeks before, I had been at work), that I begged not to have the drug. I’d taken all the other chemo drugs. Wasn’t that enough? It was explained, succinctly and clearly, that not one of these drugs was gratuitous. I know plenty of people who, for multiple reasons, distrust modern medicine. This was not my experience. Through the better part of a year at Dartmouth Hitchcock, the staff endeavored to make the treatment the most bearable for me, to keep me on the thin precipice between dying from cancer or perishing from complications.

Where I want to take this short writing is not back to the misery of enduring illness, but to the brilliance and goodness of people that lymphoma revealed to me. I survived, thus far, this disease because of the persistence of untold people who devoted their lives to medicine and the suffering of countless patients before me. I am also a woman who’s witnessed and written about the immoral and demonic actions of Big Pharma, particularly the Sackler family. This is all true. But in a nation driven to either/or, to the reductionism of labels and categories, this election offers the opportunity to pause, embrace again the better aspects of humanity, recalibrate ourselves to work that heals, rather than destroys.

We talked a little about Viktor Frankl. Then I thanked him, tossed my apple core into the forest, and headed back to work.

From Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s heartrending essay in The Best American Essays 2026.

How am I supposed to live? That’s my real question, maybe my only one. Am I supposed to enjoy the freedom that your survival and my grandparents’ survival has afforded me? Was I supposed to have more than these two children in response to the Holocaust, to replace myself and my husband and then replenish the supply of Jewish souls on this earth because the six million stories that were burned in ovens are real and more recent than I realized? … Was I supposed to do more than walk around unafraid and think to stop sometimes and tilt my head up toward the sun?

Cat, hand, breeze.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Morning after the election, I stop in the food co-op on my way to work. The air is balmy sweet as early September; the light is November thin. Cheeriness this morning.

My car’s hatch is jammed with castoffs. My youngest is a college senior, and only now am I tackling a shifting around of our upstairs. It’s not a large house (there’s two closets on the second floor), but her first college year I pretty much missed her terribly, wrote and worked and wept. Then a year of lymphoma, a year of recovery, which brings beaten me to now. Imprinted in my bones is the memory that, two years ago, I couldn’t walk up my stairs. (Things went down from there, then up, fortunately.)

I open the windows in her bedroom. The warm breeze that smells of apples and wet wood drifts around my little cat sitting on the windowsill. My little cat thinks cat thoughts, or maybe not thoughts at all, but something wiser: pure perception of the pleasure of moving air on whiskers, of wonderment at a rustling in the dried leaves below, maybe a squirrel foraging for dried seeds in the flowerbed.

When I first became a mother, I was surprised at how the parenting landscape shifted constantly. Just when I figured out that I needed to raise things like boxes of empty canning jars above the crawling baby, the baby began running (she skipped the shaky walking phase). Now, a kind of relief at the normality of what I’m doing: ordinary empty nesting (ache, ache) and not profound disease.

I am a woman who appreciates a plan, even if the plans are going to break. Paint the walls blue? My cat mews for a caress on his chin. He and I sit on the windowsill for a long while. I let the words go. Cat, hand, breeze: these become one.

Pre-election. Cows.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

November 2, and chatter is all about midterms and the lingering balmy and dry weather. Variables.

For whatever mysterious reason, I keep thinking of Hayden Carruth’s “Cows at Night” poem, which I’ve surely quoted here, perhaps numerous times over the years. This weekend, the moon waning, I drove home on a back road after dinner with friends. In the rural dark, I passed intermittent houses, windows glowing. Where I’d been was hot, so I drove with the sunroof open, in my thin sweater, the scent of woodsmoke drifting in with the breeze, my head filled with a killer live blues band. But where my road parts left, I kept driving, through the village mostly closed up, and to the town forest where I parked.

I’m mostly not afraid of the dark except when I’m terrified. I’ve lived a whole adult life to write this—mostly not afraid except when I tremble with fear—for the immeshed reasons of experience and will and desire that spiral into all our lives. In the thin starlight, I walked along the path, the woods redolent with fallen leaves. Where the path edged along a field, I paused and placed my hand against a white pine, listening, listening. Were the cows yet in the field? The night opened my eyes wide. Yes, indeed, the cows, shifting and chewing, steady.

The Cows at Night

The moon was like a full cup tonight,
too heavy, and sank in the mist
soon after dark, leaving for light

faint stars and the silver leaves
of milkweed beside the road,
gleaming before my car.

Yet I like driving at night
in summer and in Vermont:
the brown road through the mist

of mountain-dark, among farms
so quiet, and the roadside willows
opening out where I saw

the cows. Always a shock
to remember them there, those
great breathings close in the dark.

I stopped, and took my flashlight
to the pasture fence. They turned
to me where they lay, sad

and beautiful faces in the dark,
and I counted them–forty
near and far in the pasture,

turning to me, sad and beautiful
like girls very long ago
who were innocent, and sad

because they were innocent,
and beautiful because they were
sad. I switched off my light.

But I did not want to go,
not yet, nor knew what to do
if I should stay, for how

in that great darkness could I explain
anything, anything at all.
I stood by the fence. And then

very gently it began to rain.

How the River is Cut.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

I often write here about this season or that season—Siberian blue quill season or the beginning of the swimming season. It’s tamarack season now, great gold evergreen torches among bare branches. Yet, balmy, balmy. Busy, busy, at work, my desk between an open window and the door that leads into the hall where people come and go, all day long. Midday, I slip out wordlessly, walk to the lake where the quietness matches my mind. The summer people have all gone now.

In the evening, warm as spring with the darkening light true to November, a crazy mixed-upness, I restlessly walk around the village, my usual walking companions elsewhere, out of touch. The night falls quickly, and here’s another thing I’m grateful for: to generally not fear the dark. Lord knows, there’s plenty else we each fear.

On a bridge over the Lamoille River, I pause for the longest time, mesmerized by the gloaming light, the crickets still murmuring in a nearby field, by the swirl of people. For no particular reason at all but that low river flowing over stones, its hue shifting and flickering, I remember reading Norman Maclean so many years ago, as a young woman, the summer I lived in a tipi in a field of wild blueberries.

“Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.” ― Norman Maclean

Night Wanders.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Late autumn means shortening days which means a reacquaintance with darkness. In sooty twilight, I slip through the narrow path in the pines and into the cemetery, a letter in my hand. Quickly, night settles in.

At the bottom of the hill where this back street joins Main Street, an elderly man leans against the railings on a second-floor landing. The storefront has six apartments above it, and the tenants linger on the covered back stairs in all weather, all times of the year. I pause, and we talk about the balmy fall, the fattening half moon. Then I wish him a good evening and head along.

In the way of small towns, I know pieces of his story—he’s a veteran who served in a war that may seem forever ago, or perhaps just a few breathfuls of air in the past—and he may know snippets of my life, too. I drop my letter in the mailbox and circle through the village. Darkness settles in, and I follow the sidewalk home, not tromping through the woods and the cemetery. Save for passing cars, there’s no one out, house windows filled with people moving about their chores. Ordinary evening under the splendid night sky.

“To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don’t grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float.”
― Alan Watts

Ursa Major, companion.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

Pristine frost covers the picnic table this morning, the shriveled remains of the rudbeckia leaves, late autumn inexorable as hell. Pausing at the end of a walk yesterday, my friend asks if I can hear the crickets at my house. The scamper of squirrels, a few snips of birdsong, the bounce of the neighbors’ basketball: that’s about all.

In the evening, I check the dampers on my woodstove, zip up my coat, and walk a few streets over to meet neighbors. The night is dark as a pantry, the constellations already promising winter’s icy beauty. Walking, hands in my pockets, I’m thinking I need to find my mittens, and also I’m remembering a conversation with an acquaintance, a visual artist, who remarked that the winter is always a source of creativity for her, a place in sink into. True, I know, the double-edgedness of this season, remarkable for its beauty, its harshness.

My neighbors and friends pack into the Main Street art center, jammed with the eclecticism of Vermont: the elderly couples, the kids running upstairs, and everyone else in-between, in wool hats and sweaters like me. Later, walking home, the moon hangs as a boat with a curved bottom in the upper bare branches of trees. My boots with worn-to-holes soles and split leather strike the sidewalk. I’ve walked this stretch numberless times, and yet… the night is sparkling new, Ursa Major over my shoulder, my frosty breath a cloud that vanishes into the night.

“Some people make you feel better about living. Some people you meet and you feel this little lift in your heart, this ‘Ah’, because there’s something in them that’s brighter or lighter, something beautiful or better than you, and here’s the magic: instead of feeling worse, instead of feeling ‘why am I so ordinary?’, you feel just the opposite, you feel glad. In a weird way you feel better, because before this you hadn’t realised or you’d forgotten human beings could shine so.”
― Niall Williams