writing

Start again…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 11 Comments

Twenty years ago, I wandered on an early morning walk. Mightily pregnant, I didn’t go far, merely down to our sugarhouse and through the white pines. I looped back through the garden. I was about to have a second baby — that very day — and, second time around, I knew those solitary walks would — for an undetermined time — be a distant memory.

In a break in the rainy weather, a friend walks me through the cemetery, past the little league field, and down the hill into town. At Front Seat Coffee, she buys cookies, and we sit in the courtyard, eating and talking, the courtyard where I’ve passed so many hours with my laptop. Slowly, we walk back up the hill. Three robins perch on the elementary school’s fence.

Six weeks ago, another friend walked me to the Galaxy Bookshop, the first walk I’d taken to town since last November. I picked up a copy of Dostoyevsky at the Galaxy, and finished the novel in Dartmouth, waiting for surgery. The surgeons teased me, Why such light reading?

One more lesson from cancer: how intensified the world becomes. Slip back, start again. Repeat, repeat. But isn’t that one way of the world? There’s plenty more ways — a crash, a sudden halt, a perilous nonstop descent — but often our lives are fits and starts.

I remind myself, Try to learn something.

This day dawns overcast, broody with the promise of rain, the world lush with spring green and birdsong. To keep myself and my cats happy, I light a fire in my stove, brew coffee, consider the day. As I recover, my old demons of uncertainty have woken, too. My walking companion counseled me to narrow my energy to the actual day. Help was recently sent fortuitously to me; this morning, as I mixed powdered sugar and butter for cake frosting, I reminded myself, Be grateful; use your luck wisely. Savor this day.

At Twenty-Eight

By Amy Fleury

It seems I get by on more luck than sense,

not the kind brought on by knuckle to wood,

breath on dice, or pennies found in the mud.

I shimmy and slip by on pure fool chance.

At turns charmed and cursed, a girl knows romance

as coffee, red wine, and books; solitude

she counts as daylight virtue and muted

evenings, the inventory of absence.

But this is no sorry spinster story,

just the way days string together a life.

Sometimes I eat soup right out of the pan.

Sometimes I don’t care if I will marry.

I dance in my kitchen on Friday nights,

singing like only a lucky girl can.

Wood.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 18 Comments

The wood man delivers cord wood not long after dawn. I’m in the kitchen with a manuscript spread over the table when I hear his truck beeping as he backs around the car my daughter left in the driveway’s middle late last night, returning from work. I lay clean spoons over my pages to keep them steady from my cat, who cares nothing about words or order.

The morning’s chilly, sunlight snagged in the crabapple blossoms, downy white.

I hand him a check, and we talk for a bit about maple sugaring and sap sugar content, about his mighty 17,000 taps, and burning wood. Can’t people remember to order their own firewood every year, anyway? He dumps the load and drives off into the rising day. Freshly split, the wood’s redolent with sweet sap, that forest scent.

Two weeks and one day out from surgery, each day I’m pulling along further. After a winter of chemo, I now have a gnash in my middle, a non-bikini scar, that renders all the more real this cancer. Nonetheless, I ordered a small $16 tree, a witch hazel. One daughter digs a hole, the other plants the tree. Healing, I’m required to restrain myself from stacking that wood, digging holes, tugging out last year’s Brussels sprout stalks that lingered all winter, blackening and rotting. My daughter rips up a stalk and shakes the soil loose. The plant’s tendril-like roots spread skyward.

Amazing, I say, what comes from a tiny seed, isn’t it?

She shakes it again, then tosses the stalk in the garden cart and moves on to the next plant.

“Tree”

It is foolish
to let a young redwood
grow next to a house.

Even in this 
one lifetime,
you will have to choose.

That great calm being,
this clutter of soup pots and books–

Already the first branch-tips brush at the window.
Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life.
― Jane Hirshfield

“You got a God.”

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

Years ago, I ripped out a photo from the New Yorker of Marina Oswald taken the morning after her husband assassinated President Kennedy. She was hanging diapers on the clothesline, her face scrunched in misery. It was 1963, the realm of cloth diapers, and she had two babies. I tacked the photo on my wall.

No assassins in my household. Yet, as I described to a friend, I’m healing from chemo and surgery while the dailiness of life tugs me onward. In some ways, this is a relief; I’m utterly grateful to be in the world where I hand over my credit card for groceries, rise in the night when my daughter returns from work to ask about her hours. I order firewood, problem-solve our broken car scenarios. It’s triage and logistics, a math problem.

This May, a cold spring, snow yesterday all day in the New Hampshire White Mountains, I read through the mail. Make one phone call. A colleague stops by. My daughter makes grilled cheese, slices avocados, rims the edges of my plate with peanut butter cups. My brother texts, my sister calls, reminding me to eat, eat. In all this, I open the Grapes of Wrath, join hitchhiking Joad, and eventually sleep in the wood stove’s warmth. I dream of our lilacs who hold their buds closed against this cold, the Joad corn in the 1930’s, buried in feet of dust. Through my dream washes the rain against our windows, the purple and white violets studding our overgrown grass. Time and place and season sift like a jumbled dump cake.

When I wake, my cat Acer lies purring against my foot, contentedly grooming a dainty paw, supremely confident of an imminent dinner and another toasty night before the beloved hearth.

Memorial Day weekend, when we always invite friends and neighbors for an outdoor dinner. Not so, this year. The pieces in my life, my family’s lives, shift, rearrange, mend. Slow healing, slow domesticity.

From Steinbeck: “You got a God. Don’t make no difference if you don’ know what he looks like.”

Mending…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 26 Comments

After nearly two weeks away, I return home to the trees in full leaf, the lawn gone wild with violets and strawberry blossoms. Drizzly, cold, my brother starts the wood stove. The cats uncurl themselves before the blaze, satiated. A cold May, but verdant, lushly and satisfyingly so.

In these post-surgery days, I limp from room to room, venture outside to tug down a lilac branch and breathe in. The weeds run rampart, but whatever… the garden, too, will be sorted and tidied.

I’ve written repeatedly about the lilacs around my house, but again, I reiterate my joy in the soaring bushes. When I was five, we lived in a small green rented house, its yard surrounded by chainlink fence. A lilac bush leaned over the fence from the backyard neighbors. My second-grade sister was in school afternoons, my toddler brother sleeping, and so, after kindergarten and lunch, I lay on the long grass, staring up through the quaking leaves. These bushes, so New Englandy quaint with lavender, violet, and white blossoms, remind me of those unbounded childhood hours. One o’clock, two o’clock? Who knew? Who cared? I had just learned how to tie my shoes.

Like the walking wounded, I hobble from couch to chair, through the long grass, out of the workaday world and, yet, far from being a child. In glorious remission, in recovery from surgery, I keep thinking of this poem below, as I begin, day by day, to mend my body and life.

“Da Capo”

Take the used-up heart like a pebble
and throw it far out.

Soon there is nothing left.
Soon the last ripple exhausts itself
in the weeds.

Returning home, slice carrots, onions, celery.
Glaze them in oil before adding
the lentils, water, and herbs.

Then the roasted chestnuts, a little pepper, the salt.
Finish with goat cheese and parsley. Eat.

You may do this, I tell you, it is permitted.
Begin again the story of your life.

— Jane Hirshfield

The Essentialness of Beauty.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 25 Comments

A numberless day in my hospital stay…. I’ve noted the passing days by the perennial garden below my window. Each of these gauzy rainy days, the greenery brushes out further. The crabapples bloom. On the hillside, emerald stretches over branches, a multifaceted palette of leaves.

As for me — survived this surgery (hurray, yes) — and I’m now cared for by family who cycle in and out, messages and emails and gifts from friends, kind and competent hospital staff. My great thanks to readers to have reached out to me, or simply read my words. Surgery, indeed, for a laywomen like myself, is an oddity. Scalpel to flesh cannot be an everyday occurrence in a life. I relied on the surgeon’s precision. Grateful, grateful, I am for these skills. Soon, I’ll be home again, in the everyday world of my bright kitchen, our cozy front porch, garden. The lilacs will bloom.

One of our house’s great gems is the lilac bushes that span three sides, in varying lengths. The first spring we lived here, I invited friends for dinner. They got out of their car and stood in the driveway, reveling in the lilacs’ perfume.

While here, I picked up a copy of Loving Frank, Nancy Horan’s fictionalized love story of Frank Lloyd Wright and Mameh Borthwick, which ended in a horrific tragedy. Here’s a line from the incomparable Wright worth thinking over: “The longer I live the more beautiful life becomes. If you foolishly ignore beauty, you will soon find yourself without it. Your life will be impoverished. But if you invest in beauty, it will remain with you all the days of your life.”

And another turn in the plot…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 40 Comments

My body falls apart again, and my daughter drives me to Dartmouth. “My car only goes to this ER,” she tells me when I hint at negotiating a closer ER. She asks her blunt and even-toned questions, “What are you afraid of?”

Among other things, I’m afraid of waiting, in pain, which is what happens, and I survive that, of course. The hours in the ER waiting room introduce us to an intimate slice of others’ lives. The man who drove a screwdriver into his hand and didn’t seek antibiotics (not a good choice), another who crammed his hand between his two fighting dogs (the hand lost), a woman with a damaged foot who phones her mother on speakerphone. Across the large room, listening, I wince at the painful distance in that relationship.

Eventually, I’m given a bed in what’s labeled Hall 3. Shift change, a kind nurse hustles to give me meds. In the hallway, we are yet in the swirling mix of others’ lives. A hall mate (not a roommate) who I never see but who’s recently widowed; his companion struggles to figure out his meds. Later, my daughter steps outside and sees a prisoner who’s a patient run through the parking lot, high drama. She leaves after midnight. “Drive safely,” I say, “text me when you’re home.”

In the night, the surgeons stop in, and again the next morning, when the surgeons and the Good Doctor my oncologist meet in my room. Like a rushing train, surgery is coming rapidly and unavoidably towards me. Much as I’d rather not, really rather not, I begin to accept this. I think: get my tools together to survive this. Print out my manuscript, collect books and a knitting project. In all these countless hours in varying hospital rooms and hallways, I’ve never been bored. Frustrated and weeping, laughing and curious, but never dull. Another thing to be grateful for.

I’d rather not, but here’s another bend in my story, as with my hall mate and waiting room companions…