First day of radiation

Hello from the desk of the Calico Pen. I sit here with a bulletin board on the wall that is covered with email greetings that I have received from many of you during the last few days. What a treat! The nights have been long, not hard, just a lot of introspection and thoughts and then each morning I check the emails and it is so good to know that I was not alone that night.

So....here's how it started. I noticed I had been a little more tired than usual. Not tired, but weary. I thought, "well, maybe I am working too much and maybe I am showing signs of old age," but Sandy reminded me that I was not old just a few weeks ago. Also I had a strange tingling in my right jaw a few times. Kinda felt like a carpal tunnel sensation. Then a week ago I was on the phone chatting with my friend Kathy and I suddenly lost the ability to make words. I could think them, but I couldn't say them. So, on her advice, I took a pill and went down stairs to tell Sydney I needed a ride to the hospital. By then the words were back. I'm thinking TIA, (little warnings of a stroke to come). Beuford, our bad beagle, escaped when we were getting into the truck, so Sydney had to run around the street to catch him while I waited in the truck for the BIG stroke!

At the hospital I had a CT and x-rays and after about three hours a very uncomfortable nurse said she had some very bad new for me. A mass in my brain and also my lung.

"O" I said, "that is bad news." There was a few minutes of feeling tearful, but being a private crier I didn't have any solitude until that night in the hospital. I watched the most beautiful full moon pass across my window and the morning sun turn the Rocky Mountain front into a pink heaven and I accepted the possibilities.

Of course, we go through life looking at death much the way we do the sun. Just a peek, or a glimpse, because it is too much all at once. When the time comes for me to say goodbye, I don't think I will be too sad at leaving those I love but the hard thing for me to contemplate is the loss of ME..

Last night I thought about all the millions of people who are here on earth now and who have passed through here and wondered what possible significance any one of us can have to the maker we call God. Then my thoughts went on to Universes and cosmos and DNA etc. Think of all the millions of cells in my body that make up this structure called Carol! Then extrapolate that to the universal matters...

So...this morning I woke early, worked on my book club reading, threw the bedspread in the washer and decided to tackle my spring cleaning before the puking begins. Yesterday I threw away every piece of clothing that did not flatter me. And last Friday I bought a skull cap, red with skulls on it, and some huge red hoop earrings. I think I might like not having hair, but maybe the eyebrows need to be a tatto.

A turn in the road for me.

I found out last week that I have a brain tumor and probably more stuff, so... I am thinking about a lot of things. I plan on blogging through this path, onto only God knows where, and I invite you to read my thoughts and stuff if you are comfortable with that. If not, thats ok too. I am in a peaceful state as of today, March 7th and I thank all of you for your concern. Be watching for deep thoughts, pisssed off days, days with blessings, days with sadness and pain and days with I hope a lot of grace.

Urban Moguls

The 2010 Winter Olympics reminded me that both the haves and the have-nots can hope for a place on the podium, but I suspect that those going home with a medal believed most in their impossible dreams. When I was growing up my dad told me there was no such word as can't, and when, at the age of seven I climbed on a yearling steer, I believed him.
These days I straddle urban moguls, snow berms left by city snowplows, with my walking stick that I winterized with an ice pick tip to retrieve the mail. The winter games, for this senior citizen, who still has a can-do philosophy offers no medals, only safe passage.
When I was a kid, my friends and I tested the thickness of the ice on the pond and when it was safe, we swapped poor fitting skates from the year before and ventured forth on wobbly ankles. When I outgrew the double-blade skates that strapped onto my shoes, I traded those for shoe-skates and learned to skate backwards and make figure eights on the ice.
We never heard a sled called a luge, but we constructed downhill snow chutes for our wooden sleds and I discovered if I threw my self belly-flop style on the sled I could go faster. I also discovered that when I put my tongue on the metal part of the sled it was stuck there. A friend held the sled up for me and walked to her house, with me and my tongue still attached, where her mother separated me from the sled with some warm water.
My quest for fame and medals as a skier was thwarted by my mother who DID believe in the word can't. Santa brought me skies and I soon was swooshing down a small hill in our neighborhood. Then I tried jumping from a wooden box to "catch some air" before going down the hill. My dad hooked a towrope to the back of his car and pulled me around our rural roads but my personal slalom ended when I had to let go of the rope and ski off the road to get out of the way of an oncoming car.
Years later, long past my rite of passage in AARP memembership, I found a pair of cross-country skis at a garage sale. I thought, "why not?" I hid the skis at our cabin and waited for a day when I was alone to try the skis. My dog knew something special was taking place and she barked happily as I clamped the binders on. With my poles in hand and 90-degree knees, I pushed both skis forward and fell on my butt where I stayed for a long time. I didn't know how to get the skis off and I could'nt stand up. I rolled around in the snow and my dog whined and licked at my face until I made my way to a fence post. When I was standing again, I tried pushing the skis one at a time and after awhile I could slowly make my way back and forth across the flat surface in our driveway without returning to the fence post.
A couple of weeks later, when we gathered at the cabin for a weekend with our family, I skied down to the main road to greet them. Everyone was amazed and the grandchildren were surprised that their old granny could do such a thing. Such are the lessons from the elders. Maybe there is no such word as can't.

How does one say goodbye to a lifelong companion? Or for that matter how can we possible go on with life alone? Of course, we do. But it is not life as we knew it. Pearly and I were together from the first grade at Emerson grade school in Great Falls. The first time I noticed her I only saw her peeking out. After a few shy peeks she came forward and I liked her right away. We shared all the usual childhood adventures. With her I learned to whistle and we won several bubble gum contests. The Montana State Fair was our favorite place and we gobbled carmel apples, cotton candy and sweet corn-on-the-cob between rodeos and carnivals. We were nearly separated when I was knocked unconscious while riding a yearling steer in a rodeo. We were even together for the holidays. On Halloween I filled a pillowcase with treats and we ate them until the Christmas stockings with peppermint candy canes arrived. Those were fun times.

When we entered high school there were new things to experience. Lipstick and French kissing! We graduated, married and had children. She was there through the jaw clenching pushes when the children came and when some of them died through the years she shared my lip biting grief.

We were just past forty when her health began to fail. I was there during the surgery and though she never fully recovered she didn't look frail or old until the last year. I noticed her color was kinda grey and she didn't have the shine of her youth. She no longer stood straight and I feared she would need assistance from her neighbors to even get up each day.

Then the infection took over and pain became a constant companion. I made the decision to pull the life support and Pearly died on the 15th of November,2004.

I am left with a painful gap that I doubt will ever heal completely. Others tell me I will eventually fill the empty hole with a different companion. But I know there can never be another in my life like my pearly front tooth.

February is national Children's Dental Health Month. Today is the time for children to get a head start on a lifetime of health teeth and gums.

RED hair!

Tis the season. Now it is the season for resolutions and I hereby resolve to never, ever, color my hair again.
I made that same resolution in 1968 and on several New Year celebrations after that. We all make mistakes; we try to learn from those mishaps and then go on to make new mistakes. Certainly, there is something wrong with one's thinking when the same behavior is repeated and a different outcome is expected. When I purchased the same over-the-counter hair color, went through the exact application process, the result the second time was the same embarrassing color, RED. Not the light, golden blond color promised on the box.
This last time, when I showed the red hair to my beautician, she suggested that I frost the red to tone the color down. The frosting, white wisps of hair scattered here and there in the bright red color, made me look like a Rhode Island hen. At my insistence, she cut off some of the mess but that left me looking more like a Rhode Island rooster, or an elderly marine.
The first time I tried to color my hair a light, golden-blond my attempts to get rid of the red hair with a hair cut left me with a worse mess, so I purchased a wig. my husband and I were going to a homecoming game in North Dakota where our son played on the football team. Our son's roommate was traveling with us and every time I turned to talk to him in the back seat, the wig remained in a forward position. The young man politely ignored my distress all the long way across eastern Montana. Once there, I put a stocking cap over the wig, and went to the football game and homecoming celebrations. My son didn't seem to notice.
That evening, at the motel, I closed my eyes and ran a hair clipper I had purchased right down the middle of my hair. My husband declined my offer to cut his hair so we would look the same.
The next morning when we met the boys for breakfast I didn't wear the wig. My son asked me if I had a chemo cut. I told him that I hadn't wanted to embarrass him and so I tried to wear a wig but it was just too uncomfortable. He asked me not to wear that ugly wig around the campus, so I wore the stocking cap until we left for home. Because I actually did have therapy for cancer that year, he assumed my hair loss was due to the therapy. I am only a little bit ashamed to admit that during the months my hair was growing back in, I let others think my hairdo was because of chemotherapy.
When I was quite young, my mother took me to a beauty parlor in search of Shirley Temple ringlets. The permanent machine looked like an upside-down chrome egg with the guts hanging out of the bottom. The guts were actually electric cords with curlers on the ends. The beautician wrapped my hair around those curlers and pulled the chrome egg down over my head and plugged it in. I could smell my hair cooking. The results were more like "chore girl" curls. Mother marched me to another beautician who cut the curls into little SOS-pad bunches.
After my hair grew out Mother purchased her own curling iron and each morning she curled my hair and sometimes burned my neck. Then Grandmother showed her how to use rags to create ringlets. Sections of my hair were wrapped around strips of rags and left that way overnight. In the morning, when the rags were removed I had little "slinkys" dangling around my collar. The boys at school loved to pull the coils and watch them bounce back into place.
By the time I entered high school I discovered that I actually had naturally wavy hair. The auburn color was nice and my hair hung past my waist.
Nevertheless, when I landed the leading role, a Shepard boy in the all-girl-school's Christmas pageant, I cut my hair and dyed it black.

My resolution for 2010 is to embrace my naturally gray hair and not obsess over the thinning spot on my crown....but....I wonder? If I got a hair extension, could it be dyed? Red, maybe?

Family rituals

This time of the yer it seems there just are not enough hour in the day or enough days in the month to do all that we want to do, or all that we "should" do.
The tribes will be gathering soon and, like the wind in our part of the country, some will blow in unannounced. We will welcome the newest babe, the matriarchs and patriarchs, and those in between, with the familiar rituals that our family has called "our way." And if we don't, the cry will go up,"But we've always done it that way!"
Rituals do lend to the uniqueness of a family and they help define their connectedness. Holidays provide opportunities for members of the family to participate in those rituals in ways that reaffirm their commitments.
Mothers often measure the passage of time with holiday memory markers. 1955? "Oh that was the year our oldest learned to walk. We had to put the tree in the playpen to keep him away from it."
"Remember how hard the winter of 1979 was? That was the year the kids told us we were going to be grandparents. The snowman they built during their Thanksgiving visit was still standing in the yard when the baby was born in the spring."
"Our next door neighbors, now close friends, moved here the year the kids painted the sugar cookies with undiluted food coloring. The carolers who stopped at our house for cocoa and cookies trooped next door to sing with multi-colored teeth."
Baby's first Christmas. The cradle-shaped ornament dated 1961, triggers memories of a little blond boy, all dressed up in a french-blue Eton suit, peacefully sleeping through midnight Mass.
The loss of a family member sometimes necessitates restructuring of familiar rituals. While our son was bedridden, the last year of his young life, he painted some stained glass Christmas ornaments. He thought he was my favorite child (they all thought that)and when he died I thought so too. A numbness surrounded our hearts and Christmas came that year with uncontrolled tears like the carelessly hung tinsel on the unwanted tree. Christmas afternoon we removed the wreath from the front door and our family drove to the barren cemetery to put it on the grave.
We have kept that ritual. The wreath, a symbol of the circle of life, has provided our family with a way to define a connectedness that cannot be broken by death.
Over the last two decades I have tucked one of those stained glass ornaments in the Christmas boxes so that all the siblings and their children, and soon the great-grandchildren will have one.
Sure holidays are a lot of work, but the memory markers, and the memory makers are what defines the particulars of the group of people called family.

Maturity

This year the season of maturity, or depending on how you look at it, the incipient decline into winter, arrived before the equinox party even got started. An early, record breaking, freeze set the leaves in their place on the apple tree. Because my days begin without my bifocals, the tree, which is full of gray, curled leaves, looks like the back of the perm-haired senior citizens who sit in front of me in church.
On these fall mornings, darker each day now; I pad into the kitchen in my furry for-fall-slippers. I pull up the window blind and with dismay not the minute changes that confirm what I already know. Winter is riding on heavy clouds and muscling her way across the autumn skies. In the yard, that for a short time was brilliant with autumn colors, the trees are bare. Their limbs that stretch skyward in a kind of supplication tremble from the threatening bitter winds.
The children's swing flips wildly in the wind and yet the apples that are black and mushy from the freeze cling to their rightful places. There was a time when the now ghastly appearing tree offered juicy red apples and there was another time, long ago, when voices from the swing cried, "higher, Daddy, higher."
Our weathered birdhouses, once hubs of activity, are now barren, abandoned - true empty nests. My husband ritualistically carries a large pot of bright red geraniums out to the porch each morning and back into the kitchen each evening trying to save the plant, a perhaps himself as well, from the inevitable winter kill.
Webster, that word master guy, defines nostalgia as "a wistful, sentimental yearning for the return of a past period, or an irrecoverable condition." This morning, as I waited for the wafts of fresh brewed coffee, I sighed with despair at my sepia-colored world until I watched a squirrel scurrying here and there searching for something to save for an uncertain future.
Perhaps the irrecoverable condition that fuels my nostalgia is my youth, and yet in the depths of my melancholy there is hope. It is said that hope springs eternal, and while I do not hope to ever be young again, I do tuck hope in with each tulip and each daffodil bulb that I put to rest in seemingly lifeless soil. I will leave the swing in its waiting place and save the birds houses from the ravages of winter so those "empty nests" will be there when spring arrives.
If maturity is defined as "the termination of a period that an obligation has to run," then rumors of my maturity are greatly exaggerated. I have obligations! There are fruitcakes to bake,gifts to wrap, cards to write and seasons of uncertainty to prepare for.