Stella found a cottonmouth snake outside in the yard today. It’s nesting in one of our wood piles.
Freaking out does not begin to describe how I feel about this.
I’ve been running errands for three hours with no end in sight, and I wonder if I am going to be home long enough today to do my laundry and housework.
I don’t think it’s a cancer thing. I haven’t been spinning my wheels — I just have a ton of stuff to do. This is a good thing, right? The way it’s supposed to be?
Good Friday marks the fourth anniversary of my first chemotherapy treatment.
Rather than ponder spiritual resurrection as it applies to life after cancer, I’ve been avoiding people and messing with my garden so that when the Easter bunny stops by my house, he’ll be inspired to leave me a lot of Swiss confectionary. I’m gunning for marzipan this year. Furthermore, as an Episcopalian, I find myself asking the question, “What do I wear to church on Easter Sunday?” I have a lovely new pearl-gray skirt that would look beautiful with my white high heeled sandals.
I know that I won’t break out the white sandals until Memorial Day. No matter how many people tell me it’s okay, I won’t feel comfortable.
My entire life has changed in ways that are completely beyond my control, and so I hang on to the things I can control, like someone clinging to a rock during a tsunami if that rock is stupid fashion rules from two centuries ago that people today use to make bad judgements about people who are different from themselves.
Besides, if I spend all my time thinking about white shoes, I won’t think about chemotherapy, or cancer, or death and the noli me tangeresque experience of resurrection. I don’t want to deal with the big things so I focus on the small ones. That’s okay for now. It’ll have to be.
My dog is stupid. She has a new stupid thing. She runs away. She slips out the front door and BAM freedom.
She doesn’t come when she is called.
We’ve always been able to catch up with her and drag her home by the collar — so far. But she is a rescue because my friend’s friend’s babysitter found her on the street — clearly the running away habit predates her home with us. Now she has a microchip and a collar with her name on it, but still, I worry. She looks ferocious, even if she isn’t (much) and I think only the most dedicated dog lover would tackle her and bring her home if she were found wandering.
She got away yesterday. I chased her down and tackled her, in the mud, and then I put the fear of all things undogly into her by yelling at her by the front door, so now she skulks away when we approach the door. I turned on the sprinklers and showed her the front yard, wet, but I could see the (small) gears of her mind turning (slowly) trying to figure out the best way to dodge the sprinklers and get away.
My friend was over for lunch today. Her contribution to the ongoing game of “guess the parentage” was to say that my dog is half wolf and half greyhound, two species known for roaming. I believe it.
If she gets lost I’m going to be crushed.
Stupid dog, playing fast and loose with my heart.
I’ve complained on this blog about the lack of an automatic sprinkler system in my big and beautiful yard. I’ve complained much more about it in my real life which I try not to do, because it’s whiney to complain about something as petty as dragging a hose around my beautiful yard, and I know I’m playing the world’s smallest violin for myself.
I do hate dragging the hose around, though, and I hate standing there, for hours, watering the garden and knowing it’s not really going to make much difference because if I really want my hose-watering to have an effect, it takes all day and is a giant pain in the neck, plus it wastes water.
A couple of people have recommended an alternative: the do-it-yourself sprinkler system.
My neighbor, who has a d-i-y sprinkler system, showed me how hers worked. My friend the rocket scientist who holds several advanced degrees, suggested that I just do the “redneck system,” which I think that is engineer-speak for “figure out what works and do that; ” at any rate, when I asked him “how,” that is what he said. My plumber friend told me that plumbing is all about solving problems.
I said to myself, “hmmmmmmmm, it is already in the nineties and I don’t want to spend two hours every day dragging the hose around the yard.”
I went to the do-it-yourself store and bought an excessive amount of soaker hoses and valves and connector hoses and stick-in-the-ground sprinkler heads. I hooked them up. They worked! Perfectly! I went back to the store and bought enough to do the entire yard. I hooked them up! They worked! Perfectly! Then I adjusted all the valves so that I can turn on the whole thing just by turning on the hose.
It’s a complicated system, but not unnecessarily so, because I have a complicated yard (it’s on a creek). I’m just thrilled because as summer comes, my garden will thrive, and I won’t waste water because it all goes where it is needed. I’m even more thrilled that I could figure out how to do it, and that I had the capacity to see the project through.
“My complex problem-solving skills are back,” I said to Chris. “I can do stuff.”
“Great,” he said. “Now go make me a sandwich.”
He did not really say that, but had he, I would have laughed. And he would have been right. I cannot imagine how hard it has been for him to have seen me go from problem-solving gal extraordinaire to “wife who can’t figure out how to put the laundry away.” I think he should be happier that I could do this, but I think he doesn’t want to jinx it, so he’s laying low. What is a huge deal for me is a pat on the head for him. Plus, he wants a sandwich. He’s been making his own, and mine too, for four years.
I also got a sumburn. On my neck.
Happy Friday y’all.
Georgia is sick and I am completely useless. I took her to the doctor and we’ve been watching movies all day.
I ought to be able to deal with a sick child, but I just can’t.
Chris and I scored (free) tickets to an open rehearsal of the Dallas Symphony’s upcoming performance of Handel’s Messiah.
I think the Dallas Symphony Orchestra is absolutely positively the very best thing about living in Dallas, and we go whenever we possibly can squeeze in the time. If there is a classical music joke to be had, Chris and I will make it. That’s why we absolutely must have a private box, but tonight was open seating so we sat in the orchestra.
It started with the line about “Oh we like sheep” . . . “Oh, yes we do . . .” Chris and I mouthed silently to each other.
We were good for a while, but then, at the very end, when the bass sang “And the trumpet shall sound! And the dead shall be raised! And we shall be changed [into zombies]!” and we very quietly in our seats pantomimed the zombie walk. It wasn’t crowded, and I don’t think the people sitting three rows away knew why we were soundlessly snickering, and I doubt they would be amused if they knew.
I love my husband, I absolutely positively do.
I’m well enough to write thank you notes for the first time in four years.
I’m not going all the way back to the beginning of this whole thing (yet) because to try to do so would be to doom myself to certain failure. I am, however, sending notes to all of my friends who pitched in during my most recent surgery.
Either I’m completely recovered, aliens have taken over my body and mind, or else I somehow drank the Texas Kool-Aid. My money’s on it being some combination of all of the above.
It’s the unspoken question I keep hearing as I endure surgery after breast reconstruction surgery: “Why are you putting yourself and your family through this? It’s not like breasts are essential to your life?”
It’s a good question and my answer is that plenty of women choose not to have breast reconstruction, but as for me, facing the possibility of life with no breasts, or, worse, one breast, I can say that I didn’t go through everything I went through to spend the rest of my life feeling like a part of me was missing.
Dance with the Reaper 