writing

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

“…music despite everything…”

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 9 Comments

A woman stops me on the sidewalk and offers me a chair. I discover it’s a fine reading chair and bring it home, much to my cat’s delight. Friends track me the hermitess down in the coffee shop where I’ve spread the pieces of my manuscript over a table. We drink cappuccinos and eat jam bars and talk shop. I’m hurtling through the book I’ve called a cancer atlas — how to endure the intertwined suffering of cancer-and-chemo and then what? I tease, write the ending for me, will you? although I’m already there, stitching together mosquito bites and spring ephemerals and sleeping alone in a cold tent while the rain soaks through the tent fly and floor. We share kale soup recipes and marvel at this long dry autumn, the poplars yet holding their gold leaves.

Ever present in my mind is the question I asked the oncologist when I’d finished chemo, endured the surgery, limped my way back to his office. “What now?” And his answer, “Go and live your life,” the old existential question. A koan, a place of delight to be able to ask this question.

On this No Kings Day, while my cats sprawl contentedly before my woodstove, I’m reminded of the dearness of living a human life. That the asking of the question how to live is a many-sided privilege.

We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come. ~ Jack Gilbert

Wonder…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 14 Comments

About a decade ago, when I was first navigating single parenting (so many unfun challenges!), I held to the notion that every time a door slammed in my face, I’d scramble through a window. In my novel that will be published next year, a character says Really? We’re taking life advice from The Sound of Music? But it’s a darn useful approach. Small and scrappy, I’ve been tumbling through windows for years, although admittedly wounding myself on broken glass sometimes.

These balmy autumn days, raking leaves over garden beds, I’ve had a whole sun-rich summer of remission, of cancer survivor, of figuring out how to walk and eat, work and sleep again, these simple things that often eluded me all winter. A summer of learning to live within the bounds of this alive-but-more-broken body. By chance, I meet an old friend who comments about my short hair, and I spill a snippet of my lymphoma which she had not heard. Our lives, connected through kids now grown up, have taken different paths. I’m on the edge of saying that I don’t know how I survived last winter, but I hold back.

Last night, I stepped out of our warm house where the cats are again sprawled in their favorite place before a toasty wood stove and walked out to the nighttime garden to look at the half moon, hung in the sky among the constellations like a profound mystery, cream tinged with autumn’s gold, loveliness incarnate. The cold held me. One of my earliest small-child memories is looking through my father’s telescope at the pocked moon, wondering, wondering…

Mid-October, and the crickets are still singing. The elements for my survival include so many of you here, who sent me letters and cookies, books and cards; access to medical care (a great privilege); friends and colleagues and my dear family… and my own scrappiness, my fierce desire not to slip away from this world and this patch of acreage, the half-moon sailing silently over my frost-gnawed garden.

“You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories.” ~ Anne Lamott

Pie.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 14 Comments

I write an email to friends: Come eat pie and keep me company…

In northern Vermont, in the grips of drought, wells and springs dry up. Towns send pleas to be mindful about water usage. Dry, dry, in need of rain, nonetheless the sunny days unfold, day after day after day, and we revel in these, the longest span of perfectly perfect wonderful weather unmatched in anyone’s memory. Soon enough, the weather will shift.

Less and less I write on the back deck, that glass table I bought in the pandemic with stimulus money. Never much of desk user, I write at the kitchen table my brother made for me, or the couch beside the wood stove and my heat-glutted cats. In one evening, I sprawl on the couch and read Meredith Winn’s Uncertain Behavior, her story of bone cancer, passing parents, creativity.

In four-week bursts, I zoom into a writing circle through Dartmouth Hitchcock, all of us linked in some way through cancer, survivors or caregivers. At 5 p.m., I’m spent for the day, hardly a creative whisper stirring in my mind, and yet I manage to rise, so often astounded at the profound and beautiful and fearful words of my compatriots. These folks pull out the better side of me.

Some take stock of their lives (and how can you not, with the leer of death toothy around us), an apt exercise, as this autumn-gorgeous tapestry threads through with lifeless brown, the shadow of winter rising. But joy, too, and all the parts of our lives: raising kids and aging parents and chimney sweeping and sowing garlic for next summer’s table. I search for my leaf rake and check my email…. it’s apple pie season.

The thief left it behind:
the moon
at my window. ~Ryokan

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

Touching the Earth.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

Right at the solstice, frost.

My garden planting this spring was a combination of friends who appeared and weeded and planted, of the sunflower seeds I sowed and the woodchucks ate and I replanted and the woodchucks devoured again, of volunteer calendula and love-lies-bleeding and towering gold sneezeweed, and the pepper plants from a friend that produced in enthusiastic abundance.

Hurray for the garden. These evenings when I light the first wood stove fires of the autumn, my cats chew shreds of birchbark, sprawl before the warm stove. Hurray, they purr in their cat way.

Season’s change again, so familiar and yet different, each day fresh and welcome. Season’s change for me, too, some days filled with friends and colleagues, other days I hole up and get my work done. Writing now about cancer, I imagine holding this keen awareness of my mortality, of the perishable world, in my hands: a tender-eared rabbit, a vicious rat, or maybe simply a handful of sunlight.

In the deep fall
don’t you imagine the leaves think how
comfortable it will be to touch
the earth instead of the
nothingness of air and the endless
freshets of wind? And don’t you think
the trees themselves, especially those with mossy,
warm caves, begin to think
of the birds that will come – six, a dozen – to sleep
inside their bodies? ~ Mary Oliver