Over his cup of tea this morning, Chris said, “We’re settled.” We were sitting on the deck gearing up our loins to face a morning’s hard work, Chris working in the yard and me sitting in the heat watching him.
Always the tone of surprise … he made his pronouncement with the tone of voice that someone would use who had just uncovered a stash gold doubloons, or dragon’s teeth. Moving is, and always has been, part of our lives — but not now. It’s not, “Oh no, we have to move,” but “Yay, we get to move.” It’s an adventure. When I read Laura Ingalls Wilder, in the Little House books, talking about her father’s yearning to push on to the edge of the expanding frontier, I feel the same thing, only with me, it’s not wanting to leave “civilization” behind so much as to reinvent myself again. A move is a fresh start, fo’ sho.’
But it’s not gonna happen.
It’s not an extraordinary thing. It’s a normal thing that just crept up on us: we like our house, we like our neighbors, we like our kids’ school, and we, separately and together, recognize that our lives are good here, and a move isn’t going to happen unless we force it, and we’re not going to force it.
That I might not only live, but live in the same place for the foreseeable future would have been unthinkable four years ago. My thought was always, “I’d better get better before we move.” Now that I’m better, and we’re not moving, I’m facing a new kind of adventure.
Of course the very fact of my publishing this post is going to set in motion a chain of events that will result in our relocating because that’s how life is — and that will be okay too. But I can’t count on it. It’s very unsettling, being settled.
Back when I was playing Warcraft, my kids had an unerring sense for when we were heading into a Boss fight.
They would be quiet for hours, playing with their toys, and then the second the we would start the event on the stairs of Zul-Farrak, or summon Nightbane, or start talking to The Lich King, they’d come running to see what was up. This happened with the sound turned off. It happened with the doors shut. It happened from across the house. It was eerie. I think it’s a pheromone I give off that says, “Mom’s doing something interesting, and it’s not about you!”
I know what you’re thinking. Thank goodness sexy time with Chris does not have this effect.
Today, I read the paper. I had a cup of tea. I worked in the yard, or at least sat out side while Chris worked in the yard. I piddled around for four hours. “Hey kids, you wanna …” I called upstairs. “No thanks.”
I sat down to write.
BAM. Babyswarm.
It’s like the time Itsrealtome said, “Goddamit Evita, once, just once, can’t you walk into this instance without aggroing every fucking mob?”
“Nope,” I said.
Cleaning up old stuff, I found a copy of the funeral program for my grandmother, Emily Litchfield Knapp, eleven years ago this September. In addition to the text of my eulogy, I found a copy of a poem by John Donne she had asked her daughter, my Aunt Lee, to read.
Bring us, O Lord God, at our last awakening
Into the house and gate of heaven,
To enter into that gate and dwell in that house
Where there shall be
No darkness nor dazzling, but one equal light;
No noise nor silence, but one equal music;
No fears nor hopes, but one equal possession;
No ends nor beginnings, but one equal eternity;
In the habitations of Thy glory and dominion,
World without end!
I do this thing with my kids during the summer. I call it “Camp Mom.” It’s in lieu of spending oodles of money on summer activities. Instead, I set a theme for a week and we do activities around that theme.
So far we’ve done Vacation Bible School Week, Pirate Week, Mom is puking so do whatever you want as long as it’s quiet week, and “You kids have no TV all week” week. Camp mom involves a lot of sleeping late and watching movies and playing Wii. Sometimes it’s a challenge to get Graham out of his pajamas.
I look at it as a lesson in “Be” as opposed to “Do.” I also look at it as a lesson in self-direction, and I look at it as an opportunity to force my children to clean up after themselves.
It’s Harry Potter Week around here this week. We’ve been watching Harry Potter I – VII in preparation for Friday’s movie premier of the final installment in the Harry Potter epic and, yes, I do have tickets.
My kids have been wearing their Harry Potter costumes and blasting each other (and the dog) with drinking-straw wands and spells in Latin. They ask, “What’s the spell for …” and usually I remember it from the books, but when they get creative, I remember enough Latin from high school and college to provide a suitable command. On the day of the premier, I’m going to surprise them with wall art decals from the Hogwarts Houses — Graham has a Gryffindor shield, Georgia a Ravenclaw one, Chris has Hufflepuff and I have Slytherin.
So far so good.
This afternoon, Graham asked, “Can we play with the Castillos?” The Castillos are toys like Legos, only they’re Spanish, not Danish, so they are much less well engineered but infinitely more artistic: when you make a castle with the Castillos, it looks like a castle. They’re also 35 years old and no longer manufactured. They were mine when I was a kid, and when I got cancer and my mother was desperate for anything that might help me survive, I mentioned to her that I’d really like the Castillos, that they would put me into a healthy cancer fighting mindset. I really did use cancer as a means to weasel the Castillos out of my own mother– there’s a prior post on this blog about me being in Slytherin, and the Castillos are evidence of it.
The Castillos are the best toy in my house, and they’re mine, and my kids know that.
I told Graham he could use the dining room table to build castles. Both kids have been at it all day, building on their own version of Hogwarts. It’s pretty awesome.
Today, I had something to do that I really had to finish, but tomorrow, in between errands and loads of laundry, I’m planning on spending it building castles on the table.
Chris, while I have watched, has spend the last several weekends building a raised bed to hide the footings of our deck. He finished it last weekend, and this weekend we bought a ton of dirt and filled it in. Then Chris planted some herbs along the front of the deck, and, where there was a perfect place for an ornamental tree, we put a possumhaw holly.
Sounds simple, right?
Nope.
“A perfect place for an ornamental tree.” Heh. That’s a challenge.
We’ve been going back and forth on what to put in that place since we bought the house. When we moved in, there was a bushy bush with a growth habit neither Chris nor I found attractive, but Iwaited until spring, to see if it would put forth enough of a show to make it worth it. Nope. Small blossoms that had a bad smell. Out it came, and we burned the stump and began in earnest, figuring out what to replace it with, which is why we, and by “we” I mean “Chris,” built the retaining wall and raised bed: to put the tree in and quell erosion.
We talked about Japanese maples, but the location gets too much sun. A peach then? But do we want rotting peaches all over our deck? A crabapple? Too big and bushy. A crepe myrtle? Silence. Chris says that crepe myrtles are “not his favorite.” A weeping cherry? Not pretty enough in the winter to have right by the deck. One tree was decreed too tall and narrow, another too horizontal, a third too boring. It’s this management philosophy that we have in our marriage: never compromise, because then no one is happy. Keep working until you find a solution that makes everyone happy.
It makes the people around us crazy, when we have a problem in need of a solution, we worry at it like two dogs sharing the same bone.
Last week, talking about another place in the yard, Chris said, “What about those hollies that lose their leaves in the winter and then their bare branches are covered with red berries?”
“OH!” I said. “That would be the perfect tree to put over by the deck! Yay you!”
This afternoon we went down to Redenta’s, which is the closest great nursery to us, to pick up a possumhaw holly. We looked around, and all the trees we saw were beautiful Japanese maples, when suddenly, a helpful saleswoman approached!
“Can I help you?”
“Well, we’re here to buy a tree.” We were in the middle of the Japanese maple section.
“Tell me about your location?”
“It gets a lot of sun. It’s right by our deck.”
“Well then you can’t put in a Japanese maple. It’s too bad you weren’t here last weekend. It was our big plant sale — 50% off of everything. We’re very low on trees.” Her face lit up. “There is one tree, though. It’s called a possumhaw holly…” and I said, “That’s exactly the tree we came here to buy!”
I’m so excited. I can’t wait until winter, well, for a lot of reasons, but also because I know it’s going to look terrific.
It was also totally cheap.
Don’t ask questions to which you do not want to know the answer.
No, I’m not all right. I had both boobs amputated and it still hurts. My kid comes up to give me a hug and I have to turn her cheek so she doesn’t poke me in the radiation-softened bone that used to be my sternum. I lie awake all night wondering if a stealth recurrence of cancer is going to give me a stroke in my sleep and leave me a vegetable.
I have osteoporosis, at 42.
My arm randomly swells up and hurts.
When I turn my neck a certain way, to look and see if I am about to hit a motorcycle in my blind spot as I change lanes, for example, the muscles in my neck feel like I tore them. Every time. Oh, and yeah, I had a year of PT and I do my exercises every day. I just need to learn to live with it.
I have frankenboobs. Every time I look in the mirror after a shower, I feel like I am about to throw up, and half the time, I do. You would too if you caught an eyeful of the monster that is me.
I have had muscles from my abdomen and my back removed, and I don’t know how it can be numb and itch and hurt all at the same time, but it does, relentlessly.
My immune system is shot to hell and my ability to recover from disease is shot to hell, and then people think I am an uptight bitch for leaving the room when a toddler has a green snotty nose.
I’ve learned to live with all these things because the key word, live, beats the alternative, but no, I am not alright, and when people corner me and grab both my hands in theirs and give me the look of sympathy and say, “Are you alright,” I lie and say, “Yes” because it’s polite. But it’s a lie.
I’m not all right, and I never will be all right, and I’m okay with that, but when well-wishers who think that cancer is the worst possible thing imaginable (it’s not) ask me if I’m alright as a way of alleviating their own uncomfortableness with my reality, it’s not alright. Don’t do it.
Learn to say something else.
If this blog had a category for “I am a terrible scientist” then this post would belong to that category. At least that’s what Chris said the other day, because he asked me, repeatedly, using every possible of the words in the question, “Do you have any record of what kind of grass seed you planted where? You planted rye, fescue, and zoysia, all three clumping fine-bladed grasses. Do you know what is working and what died?”
Nope.
As I have mentioned, our back yard is complicated. We have six terraces heading down to a creek bed, and all six terraces have different light. And now, all six have slightly different issues with the grass.
Three terraces have a decent cover of the St Augustine that was here when we bought the house. One terrace has a decent stand of fescue from seed I laid down in desperation in March, where I knew I had no St Augustine and where the winter rye had failed to take. Throughout both the front and back yards I have a few clumps of green grass of uncertain origin. It’s not attractive, and furthermore, to Chris’s immense frustration, we don’t know for certain what kind of grass it is. It could be remnants of the beautiful winter rye lawn that has (mostly) succumbed to the Texas heat. Or it could be the beginnings of zoysia, notoriously difficult to seed and slow to establish, but if I can make it work, a good summer grass.
All of the terraces have large swathes of rocky sand, and I don’t know whether to blame the dog or the lack of organic matter in the soil or light or system failures in irrigation. I think it’s the latter, because as I make improvements and adjustments to my d-i-y sprinkler system, the grass improves, but I also know it’s a combination of factors vexing me, more than just water. My plan is to focus on one terrace at a time, amending the soil by raking in compost and manure, laying new St Augustine sod where it is sunny, re-seeding the shady areas with both fescue and zoysia to see what takes, and planting shrubs. If I take on the whole lawn at once, I’ll give up in frustration, but breaking it up into manageable chunks means I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.
I need to get my head around the time it is going to take me to do this, and I need to learn to be comfortable with leaving a significant portion of my back yard in a non-perfect state for an extended period of time, at least another six months and more likely stretching into next spring. That’s a long time for me to live with imperfection, and it’s easy for me to become demoralized, so I keep giving myself pep talks.
I tell myself that my back yard does look extremely different from when we moved in exactly a year ago. We’ve planted a ton of ornamental trees, and they’re all thriving, and if they bloom next spring, it’s going to be breathtaking. I keep telling myself that, to slow down and wait, and I keep reminding myself that my goal for the first year was to focus on the front yard. Focus on the front yard. Breathe. Relax.
The front yard is more satisfying, because I have been focusing on it since last September. We took out a large (dying) tree, took out a bed of shrubs in one place and replaced it with lawn, put in a flower bed in another place, and planted four trees: a ginkgo, a maple, and two ornamental plums. All of the plants and trees are doing what I had hoped they would, and it makes me very happy. It’s very green, and I’d love to say, “done with the front,” but I can’t, not quite.
The grass is the last holdout.
It’s midsummer, and for most of the yard, the St Augustine that was here when we moved in has responded to all of the aeration and manure and compost and water and chemical fertilizer, carefully monitored to achieve as close to zero runoff as I could manage, and it looks great. But there remains a blob, about the shape of Britain, where zoysia? seed took, and there’s a war going on between the zoysia? and the St Augustine. St. Augustine is a fast growing grass that spreads by growing runners, shoots of grass that put down roots and spread, fast, which is a great thing, because it means my front lawn is probably going to be completely covered in St Augustine grass within a few weeks. It looks like it’s winning, but if you look carefully down into the grass all over the yard you will see that there are blades and small clumps of zoysia? throughout the entire lawn.
Zoysia is a notoriously slow-growing grass, but it’s persistent, and when it roots, the roots go deep.
I know I’m not going to get a zoysia lawn this year. I know I might never get one, that it’s possible that what I think is zoysia? is actually a remnant of winter rye. But I don’t think so. It’s too hot for rye, and too sunny. I think my zoysia seeds took, and they’re quietly growing in among the St Augustine, biding their time, and certainly not this year, and probably not next, nor yet the year after, but eventually, the zoysia grassroots will establish and grow, and instead of St Augustine, I’ll have a zoysia lawn, which is what I want.
You would think I’d be frustrated, but I’m not. I’m happy to sit on my front porch and sip a glass of iced tea, and watch the grass grow.
I got back from seeing Transformers 3 a few hours ago and wrote most of a post on it. Then I got word that my friends’ daughter, the one with cystic fibrosis, had died this afternoon. Suddenly, the words I had been writing, clever words about a clever summer action film became ashes in my mouth.
My friend is a good mother. She’s a great mother. She’s one of the people I have turned to for guidance in navigating the impossible intersection of motherhood and illness. And now her daughter is gone.
It’s wrong. It’s impossibly wrong. I want to run, and yell, and shake my fist at the sky in a meaningless gesture, meaningless because I know, as well as anyone can know, that life is capricious, and that fairness has nothing to do with it, and besides, what is my sorrow compared to my friend’s grief at the loss of her bright, talented, funny, beautiful daughter.
I feel powerless, because I am powerless, and I know in the fight against the Great Enemy, there is nothing I can do.
I know the feeling of frailty in the face of death because I have seen that face, often, staring back at me from the mirror. I know, and know well, the rituals we surround ourselves with to ease the burden of illness. Greeting cards. Casseroles. Phone calls and short visits, and gifts of cute t-shirts and funny books, and small stuffed animals, and they all help, but what they help with is the journey. Not the destination, the one at the other end of the valley that lies in Death’s shadow — that can’t be changed.
Except that it can.
Not forever, but for a time. You can buy time. Not for yourself, nor for anyone you know, but for someone’s daughter, son, brother, sister, father, mother. Someone loved as well as my friend’s daughter, whose life was longer because someone, years ago, gave her their lungs. My friend’s daughter, the one who just died, also lived as the recipient of an organ transplant.
You can do that.
You can, for a time, defy death. You can stick a Post-it note in your wallet that says, “I’m an organ donor.” You can print out this blog post and write on the back of it, in ink, “I’m an organ donor,” sign your name, and stick the folded paper in your wallet. Tell your spouse. Tell your roommate. Tell your children. Tell your doctor. Write it in Sharpie on the back of your driver’s license, “I’m an organ donor.” And tell your family. Talk it over with them. Talk about it with your doctor if you have questions.
It’s the ultimate gift and the ultimate weapon against death. And it’s one I can never give, yet another thing cancer has robbed from me.
Do it for yourself. Do it for your family, to ease their grief should the unthinkable happen. Do it for me, because I cannot. And do it for my friend, to honor her daughter.
Do it to take a stand in the face of death, to say, “This far, and no farther.”
Do it for life.
I have this problem. It’s embarrassing.
I throw up.
It’s a stress reaction, what they used to call nervous stomach and I can medicate it with Phenergan but I don’t like the side effects, and popping a pill after I’ve already lost my lunch seems pointless; usually, I just, well, you know, and that’s the end of it.
I’ve talked to my doctors about it, and there isn’t anything wrong with me that makes me throw up. The best guess is that I’ve spent so much time throwing up from pregnancy and pregnancy and chemotherapy and anesthesia that my nausea trigger is a hair trigger. Someone’s bad breath, a sudden loud noise, being awakened from a sound sleep, anything at all and *urp.*
Yesterday was one of those days, only it wasn’t just a one-shot deal. It was all day. We’d invited friends over, and I wasn’t about to cancel on them. Could I be a good hostess, skip dinner, and suddenly excuse myself every 40 minutes or so? I thought about it, thought about the time my friend found me hiding in the hallway of my kids’ school during an outdoor function, and sat with me, because she understood how I felt. I decided my friends would understand, and not care, and Chris, proving yet again that he is a saint, took over all the dinner preparation.
I greeted our guests at the door with the announcement, “I’m having a queasy kind of day, so y’all eat and I will lie on the couch and eavesdrop on the dinner conversation and randomly chime in.” And they laughed, and I did and we all had a great time.
Having had cancer limits my friendships to very cool and compassionate people. It’s not a bad thing.
I feel as though I’ve been digging out from beneath the pile of rubble that is living with illness, and can finally see the light of day. Specifically, I feel as though I’ve overcome the mountain of clutter that accumulated while I was ill: bottles of lotion, vitamins, canned beans and frozen vegetables. Shampoo, from the time when I kept buying different lotions and shampoos to see which smell I could tolerate, and because I could never remember what I was out of. The same with spices. I still have triplicate ginger and duplicate cumin, but not duplicate cinnamon any more, because I dumped out all I had into my garden in a mountain-wisdom inspired effort to drive away snakes — it appears to have worked. For a year, since we moved into our new, big house that has a place for everything, my mantra has been, “use it up,” and I have.
That paragraph conveys an image of a cluttered home, and that’s nowhere near my reality. People visiting my house, even my good friends who feel free to snoop in my cabinets and drawers, would not call my style of living “cluttered.” It’s not. It’s the opposite.
My home lies at the point where monastic, undecorated, and lived-in intersect. But even so, there is too much clutter for me.
Clutter breeds clutter. One piece of unopened junk mail out of place on a table will metastasize into three giant piles of clutter in the blink of an eye. I know if I leave one bottle of almost-empty conditioner in the shower, before I can turn around, there will be five, and three of them will have goo beneath. Odd socks in the laundry room metamorphose into wire hangers crowding the clothes in my closet, and I just know that when we’re all sleeping, my children’s stuffed animals, the ones not sitting cutely on the shelf, engage in a Hieronymous Boschesque orgy of reproduction beneath the sofa — how else can there be so many, staring mutely at me with their cute glassy eyes, imploring, “No, don’t throw us away!” I don’t, but I want to, because lurking clutter strikes a fear deep in my psyche that is beyond rational.
Outside, the piles of rubble that punctuated our back yard when we moved in have been reduced to remnants waiting to become planted beds. Inside, the last few household items I wasn’t quite sure what to do with when moved now have places. The drawers and closets, even the attics, are all tidy. The seemingly endless piles of unwashed and unfolded laundry have transformed into an ongoing process of washing, drying, folding, and putting away into drawers that miraculously have space.
I’ve gotten a handle on the whole thing, but still, when I see a mess, I become paralyzed with panic. It’s dysfunctional, but just one of many ways the fear of cancer recurrence creeps out of the edges of my unconsciousness to affect my life in ways I can’t begin to convey.
Dance with the Reaper 