Brett Ann Stanciu's Blog, page 10

Vessels, Rooms, the Unbounded Sky.

16 degrees on this sun-kissed Sunday, my cat considering the squirrels.

In cancer land, still putting my muscles together, I’m outdoors only with someone else these days, the long solitary walks yet a future promise, again. Early mornings, I brew coffee, fill the cats’ bowls with their breakfast. All day long, we’re filling and emptying things: water glasses and soup bowls and cat dishes (again), filling a notebook page with penciled words, a suitcase with my daughter’s clean clothes as she heads back to college, a new lightbulb in an empty socket.

Likewise, this disease has filled my body for months, now emptying; illness has slipped into every crevice in my family’s life, too, like the power of freeze in a river, rearranging the flow.

In a year that’s begun with so many families losing their homes on the other side of the country, the sunlight on this morning, a chilly walk this afternoon, the cold scraping at my cheeks – yes, yes – a scrap of gratitude for January Vermont sunlight. Here’s line from one of my favorite writers, Andre Dubus, who knew loss keenly.

“We receive and we lose, and we must try to achieve gratitude; and with that gratitude to embrace with whole hearts whatever of life that remains after the losses.”

Three things of varying importance…

Because I’m writing from Vermont, first, the weather: cheek-slashing cold, furious wind.

Second, back at Dartmouth these past few days for a consult and an infusion. Checking in, my insurance card was denied. Denied because it’s January and the new year wasn’t set correctly, or denied because some system is broken? I imagine these numerous co-pays, from ninety-cents to $750, piling up in my electronic portal. I’ll kick that to Monday, begin to straighten that out then…

Halfway through my treatments, the Good Doctor gives me the heads up about what’s to come, including the shift from what I’m calling Cancer Land back to the Everyday World. Although I’m sure he hears this repeatedly, I say how otherworldly is this cancer journey. Rarefied isn’t precisely the word I’m looking for, as so much of disease isn’t lofty or grandiose but mundane and sometimes miserable. But the journey is like nothing else I’ve undertaken, laced through at times with impending death, elevating the stakes to the utter center point of what matters. There’s nothing trivial here.

Third (and certainly not last), I’m so grateful for the lovely mail in my P.O. Box – cards and books, seeds and poems, such as this one by Danusha Laméris.

Insha’Allah

I don’t know when it slipped into my speech

that soft word meaning, “if God wills it.”

… How lightly we learn to hold hope,

as if it were an animal that could turn around

and bite your hand. And still we carry it

the way a mother would, carefully,

from one day to the next.

Refusal that the World is Random.

Cancer or not, the everyday world proceeds. I renegotiate the dullard car insurance (why would I pay to insure myself when I’m not driving?). This morning, the cat, seeking the milk jug on the counter, leaps on the kibble container I didn’t properly close. Kibble mounds over the kitchen floor. For the briefest moment, both cats stare, unable to process their astounding luck: a landslide of food.

Among minor domestic changes which involved a ridiculous amount of discussion: we swapped one washing machine for another. I posted the old one (a workhorse from the previous century) for free on the local digital bulletin board. While I was heating up the pot roast my friend dropped off, a young man I’ve known since he before he lost his milk teeth asked if the washing machine was available.

He arrived not long afterwards. We stood in the kitchen, talking about infected wisdom teeth (his, removed) and cancer (mine, in process of removal) and the medical system and capitalism. He asked if I knew what gave me the cancer, what empowered one gene to divide and divide again and again.

I have my theories, my guesses about this answer, nothing hard and set chiseled into stone. But isn’t it often the way that a sudden shift in events is triggered by multiple strands of actions, working seen or unseen? Leaning against the door, rose-cheeked with cold, he posits that nothing happens without a reason, that the universe is never capricious. I set my wooden spoon on the counter.

Here’s a thing: two months — 60 days — into the cancer world, with two rushed ER visits and two dodges of the grave, two chemo sessions, a complete upheaval of my life, my family’s, my colleagues’ — I woke early one recent morning and realized cancer will be with me until I cross into the next realm. But likewise, what I’ve labored hardest and most tenaciously and (often) most joyously will be with me, too. Raising babies into women, writing books, sobriety, cutting off a troubled marriage and recreating my life. But aren’t we all that way? Shouldering along with us the stones of our lives we’ve chosen, and the rain that’s fallen from the heavens and soaked us, too?

Here’s a Vermont Public Radio interview with Vermont Almanac editors Dave Mance and Patrick White, about this unique books and the non-cliché Vermont world.

A few lines from Dave Mance’s preamble to a book packed with plenty more….

…. seek out things that are real and hard…. Gravitate towards things that are beautiful. Lean in to things you cannot understand…. Tell stories where trees are protagonists. Look at the lines on your palm and see that, like wood, your skin has grain.

In the cracks around kindness.

Thaw, on this New Year’s Day, hovering near freezing, my neighbor’s yard under her great pines exposed to soggy grass, the fields on the hillside across the village bare as late April.

I pull on my coat and boots and stand on my porch. The tree branches are festooned with droplets. Cold will press in again this week.

Wednesday morning, holiday, my scrawled list penciled on a post-it on my kitchen table, waiting. I perch on the covered sand bucket and sip the coffee, my hands wrapped around the mug. My memory wanders back to the Maine coast where we spread my mother’s ashes last June. My mother loved domestic spaces. She would have been enchanted by the colored lights my kids strung over my barn, along the porch roof over my head. Likewise, in my house, she would have admired our tree with the red star topper, the room illuminated with tiny lights. Nearly housebound with cancer recovery, my household has been blessed with gifts of candles, savory meals, foil-wrapped chocolates, fragrant rose oil from Bulgaria. All this, too, would have intrigued my mother.

My mother loved the wild, too, for much of her life quick to pack up the car and head for the open road.

In Maine, we parked near the shore. The sweetness of rugosa roses buoyed along the breeze’s brine. In the curving, layered landscape of rock and the rhythmic crashing pound of the ocean like the planet’s beating heat, we returned her remains to the immense wild, the mysterious territory where she had, after all, emerged from.

A crossing over.

This second memory, too. Later that summer, visiting my old father in New Mexico, my young woman daughter and her friend fried eggs and buttered toast for breakfast. In their strappy sundresses, they sat at the round oak table, sipping coffee. The friend had never visited New Mexico; her eyes gleamed. My father gave them his credit card and told them to eat lunch in downtown Santa Fe, in the courtyard which had been a family compound, 200 years and more ago. Later, the girls returned with leftover enchiladas and stories of flowering trumpet vines and singing birds. We must go into the beautiful mountains.

Yesterday, this daughter walked me around the high school, the beginnings of my strength returning. In the hidden back, a path leads into the woods. She held my hand, admonished, “Not yet.”

On this misty, rainy New Year’s morning, a prayer to cultivate patience and mercy for these interwoven journeys…

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go…

— Naomi Shihab Nye

In-Between Season.

My daughter drives me to the high school where a few cars are parked, likely basketball players getting in a few extra workouts. We walk for a slow bit on the sidewalk and then drive north, up along the Black River towards Eligo Lake. At the boat launch, she turns off. We sit. Someone’s been out on the ice.

We are in the in-between season, neither Christmas nor New Year’s, 2024 finally spun down to nearly nothing, a whole new year, beginning with that wintry January looming large.

I am in the in-between season, too. Were it not for antibiotics and chemo, I would have passed from this world, or surely be heading that way. I am in the holding season, enduring, enduring, the chemo (and I’ll admit how terrifying chemo is, crimson red, fluorescent orange) destroying the lymphoma, draining my strength — and yet I’m still me, mellowed in many ways, stripped of patience with foolishness in other ways.

The December this daughter was two, snow fell every day. In January, the snow kept falling. The garden fence, the sugarhouse, the driveway and road, vanished in windswept white. This was before the age of internet. I stirred batch after batch of homemade play-doh. She had a doll stroller with a striped seat and pushed her babies around the house. Outside, I pulled her on a sled though the woods We looked for tracks, caught perfect snowflakes on our mittens. That winter seemed eternal, too, but it was not.

In the cancer world, or not, we’re always in the in-between season, life ebbing and rising, children growing, the snow pillowy but for a moment before settling to ice, washing away in rain.

Everything Is Made Of Labor
Farnaz Fatemi

The inchworm’s trajectory:
pulse of impulse. The worm
is tender. It won’t live
long. Its green glows.
It found a place to go.
Arrange us with meaning,
the words plead. Find the thread
through the dark.

❤️

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

Lantern, Starlight.

In a half-sleep, I hear my daughter talking in the kitchen. Another odd parallel to pregnancy – sudden sleep, confused awakenings. Where am I?

She brings me a slender book, Pax by Annie Lighthart, gift from a friend. I rally up, read the book that afternoon as the wind lifts the Christmas lights around our house and barn and gently tap, taps, the clapboards. Solstice, winter’s toothy cold burrows in. My daughter’s whole life I’ve been the hearth keeper, the ash sweeper. The rotator of ash buckets, kindling boxes, the wakeful night-keeper layering the firebox with wood. Now, suddenly, her duty. She’s fed the fire for years, of course, but the ash shovel has been handed over. Fact, fact.

The solstice crossed, we enter winter’s long terrain. The neighbors’ dogs howl. Somewhere in the night, I lie awake, a single star a distant light in my window, pure as a teardrop.

LANTERN

Some evening, almost accidentally, you might yet understand
that you belong, are meant to be, are sheltered—

still foolish, but looking out the door with a contented heart.
This is what the king wants and the old man and woman

and even the busy young if you knew, and you have it
by no grace of your own, standing in the doorway

with loose empty hands. Now your heart lights your mind,
a little lantern bobbing within you,

giving out not thought or feeling but confluence,
something else. On what do you pour out this light?

The wet street is empty, one wren in the yard. Let us
redefine love and wreckage, time and weeds.

Pour out your lantern light on the grass, on the bird,
great and small worlds. Don’t go inside for a long, long time.

– Annie Lighthart –

Meeting the Red Devil.

In my foolish pre-cancer days, I pretty much covered up my ears when I heard about someone’s chemo treatment. That said, I’m not a complete jerk; my heart twinged, especially for parents of young children, and I offered sympathy, meals, a compassionate ear. But in some profoundly hidden place in my thinking, I tried to pretend that my garden squash and chard and those miles of walking would inoculate me. More likely, I was too cowardly to consider a possibility that hadn’t arrived.

This morning, I texted an acquaintance, I’ve now met the Red Devil, too. Looking forward to a long conversation over coffee this spring about your experience.

Yesterday, morning sunlight filled this Dartmouth-Hitchcock infusion room. Nuthatches and chickadees and juncos flitted around birdfeeders. Two wooden reindeer were linked by a red ribbon.

Without a port, the poison/healing infusion flowed into my vein. Remembering clearly my breathless and rigors! reaction to the rituximab, I burbled my fears to the nurse, who sought consult. She told me she only had good experiences with patients; I assured her I am a striving A+ patient. Then she worked her mojo and set up some black case that was never opened, assured me the nurses’ station was actually all of five feet where I was sitting, and then, drip, drip, drip, she released the poison that presumably will save my life into my vein. She stood talking to me and my daughter about the merits of studded snow tires and a recipe for gingerbread cookies, and then showed me that I was twenty minutes along with the rituximab. All was well.

Here’s the thing: there is no ease or comfort in this cancerland. The nurse is gowned and double-gloved to protect herself against these chemicals. I’ve read my chart thoroughly and know that innocuous word complications could rapidly spin my life into a dire Shackleton sea. And yet, in the warm rare-in-December sunlight, with my daughter and her stack of Christmas cards, my knitting, a novel I’d plucked from my shelf that I’d wanted to read, those downy birds flickering — a calm outside time’s relentlessness.

As for the Red Devil (the crimson of young Lucy’s magic potion in the Narnia books), the nurse injected a long fat vial into my arm. During this, she had me eat sherbet, pressing the icy substance against the roof of my mouth as the Red Devil would seek the tender places in my body and could erupt mouth sores. My daughter held the cup as I dug into the frozen substance. The nurse pushed the liquid slowly into arm, careful, careful not to burst the vein. The infusion would burn and destroy my arm, one of the nightmarish complications which would plague me for months, maybe years, to come. At the end, this confident nurse set down the empty vial and breathed deeply.

I thanked this woman for her steady hands.

Much later, 90 miles north by interstate and state roads, my daughter and her partner hold my hands as we walk up the path into my house. If I stumbled, I imagined them holding me between the two of them.

On the doorstep, my potter friend left a package with handmade yellow candles and a flower candle holder and a mug glazed the blue hues of the midsummer sky. So many happy days my kids spent in her studio — Mud Club, Clay Camp — and the cups of tea we’ve shared as mothers and crafters. A gift of light.

Losing hair, blue dawn, foreign objects in flesh.

Before dawn, brushing my hair I sing On the road again, just can’t wait to get on the road again, that old Willy Nelson song my mother loved. In the kitchen, making coffee, my daughter calls, Wait? You know that song? We played it everyday on our road trip last summer.

A thing to savor in this cancer: how my daughters and I discover these tiny things about each other.

My youngest cut the snarls from my hair that lingered from that hospital stay, when I couldn’t raise my arm to brush my long hair. Now, hanks of my hair slip out in my brush.

Outside, I stand for a moment, the waning moon hung over the neighbors’ roof, the emerging dawn a river-stone blue. A thaw’s set in, and the air is redolent with melting snow, a hint of loosening compost and soil. Raindrops hang from the three apple trees I planted.

We drive through the village, the coffee shop lit up where I’ve spent so many hours writing and talking, a young woman sweeping at the door. Colored lights string through the trees and over store windows. Out of town, day warms over farm fields and forests.

At the hospital, blood’s drawn for my chemo course this week. In my rudimentary cancer thinking, while doing the darnedest I can to forget about the orange fluids that will enter my body, I reckon that this week’s treatment means one third of the way through. If I can endure a third, I can endure half. If I can endure half, I can persevere to the finish. Talking with my daughter about December monochrome, I silently counsel myself to knock off my silly math. I’ve factored in no variables, and the variables are inviolate.

Before we leave, the nurse shows me a model of a port that may or may not be inserted in my chest. I hold the pad for needles, finger the plastic tube as she explains how it will lie under my chest. At the end, in the shape of a calla lily, is the opening that will drip the chemo beside my heart. The whole apparatus seems enormous to me, that plastic calla lily wider than my small finger. I hand it back to her. In the end, with the Good Doctor, how much of this will be my decision, and how much will be wisest course forward? In this age of truth/untruth, facts are powerful. I thank her, and we leave.

It’s a pleasure to be outside again, on this tiny road trip, my daughter at the wheel, drinking coffee. The fields and mountains and sky are layered quilt batting: blue and pearl and silver. Around the trees, rain’s pushed the snow away from the trunks, opening the earth again.

From Lauren Markham’s A Map of Future Ruins:

We don’t live steadily toward epiphany; our truest stories move back and forth in time, in space, in memory. Life is a mosaic, not a line.

A smidgen of writing.

The clocks cease meaning for me. To gird myself for an appointment, a call, I set an alarm, ask a daughter for a reminder. Counting backwards proves stupidly difficult: what hour to we need to leave? Write this on a sticky, please.

The flip side: I wake early one morning, kibble the cats, open my notebook and begin writing the pieces of this book I’m rewriting in my head. Daunted, I copy my draft into a folder. Someday whole sections might become another book, an essay, trash. Weeks before I heard the cancer diagnosis, I took a class with the remarkable Lauren Markham. All these weeks, these endless hours sleeping and half-dreaming, reading hungrily, much of this solitary but never lonely, much surrounded by skilled strangers who spill snippets of their own remarkable lives in the wee hours of the night, syringe in hand.

Now, aided perhaps by exhaustion, I envision the skeleton of this revised book, the joints that hold these stories together, beginning in a moldy basement, rising to a glass complex, surely, the endless firmament.

Neuropathy comes and goes, reappears in my fingertips. The knobby bones of my wrists and knees expand beyond my dwindling muscle mass. The prednisone prescription reappears for five chemo days, beginning next week. I try not to think of that, of the force these mighty drugs will weld over my body, how I will yield, pray for their power, try to keep to my feet at least marginally, moving my body, keeping in the everyday realm.

Like anyone, I’ve hard used this woman’s body I’ve been gifted, through pregnancies and nursing, decades of sugaring and the countless cords of firewood I lifted and burned each year, churning ice cream to sell with a baby on my back, fourteen years of peddling syrup spring to snowy autumn at farmers markets. The bleeding fissures on my fingers from washing wool filters. But so much pleasure, too, the ineffable joy of cuddling a daughter in my lap, of mountain climbing, intimacy, of lying on the dewy grass under the creamy rising moon. Women my age often complain about the indignity of hot flashes, but the real indignity for me has always been when the flush of my changing body courses through me in a male-centered meeting in my difficult work of budgeting for a town.

A rambly post here….. a variation of my inside-out world where the former rules are revealed as trite. Patience, patience. An hour of work. Half a cup of tea. Another half hour. December sunlight.