Furled up

I am a flag on a still night; the dead oak leaves, curled and rusty, whose deafening rustle penetrates my storm windows on winter nights; a fern in the sweltering sun. Curled up; spent; exhausted; brittle and small. This latest illness has completely tapped whatever reserve I have left after a winter of rampant sickness in our home. I found myself deep in a "pity party" last night, blaming my current illness on cancer and my subsequent lack of functional lymph nodes, which mobilize the immune system. I have four left up under my ears, and they are the size of half-dollars, working so hard to make up for the team they've lost. My dear husband stayed home to tend hearth and humanity yesterday, and I spent the majority of the day in bed. It is never my wish to do so, as I know there will be a mountain to do the next day, feeling better or not, if I leave my work for 24 hours. This was no exception...and it dawned on me in the evening that I had fallen far behind on schoolwork. So, aching and arthritic, I dragged myself upstairs to spend two hours studying. In doing so, found an article in a medical journal that snapped my bad attitude back into a right perspective. There is so much deeper suffering happening all over this country, every day. Shame, shame for lamenting a few lost lymph nodes and bad head cold!

So, that is cleared up. As usual, I have no right to feel sorry for myself - and why waste time doing it, whether or not I'm in the right? That being said, I am left with the very visceral, physical, real truth that I am less now than I was last March: 8 lymph nodes and 2 parathyroid glands less, not to mention the dear, butterfly-shaped thyroid gland whose presence I miss daily! The latest pathology report from the University of Chicago showed that there were 2 parathyroid glands in the section of thyroid removed. This was news. Previous pathologists did not find them. This would explain my difficulty regulating calcium since the surgery, and confirms that I need to be on daily calcium supplementation. To learn more about the parathyroid glands, click here.

Brushing past

These musings have been rumbling in an unspoken corner of my mind for weeks, ever since I took these photos in my backyard after a February blizzard. How like the fingers of a woman, these branches. Buds of maroon fertility sit like painted nails on the fingertips of these branches, heralding the coming of spring, the warming of the earth and running of the sap for maple syrup. Hands outstretched, this little sapling offers me her gift, crystalline collection of heavy snow. Frigid offering. I snap that photo, and brush past in a hurry to the next one. Turning back, I notice her empty fingers. Offering spent, gift brushed aside. A moment of callous oblivion from my shoulder, and she holds that hand outstretched, barren.


This image has stayed with me. In conversation last night, I probed too deep in a friend's confusion. Oblivious, self-centered, wanting to win an argument or at least expose uncertainty. Brushing past without paying attention. Friendship can shrivel so quickly, relationship falter, love evaporate.

When I see hands full, outstretched to me, I pray I notice. I pray I pause. How then to fulfill that Proverb, as iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another (27:17)? How to sharpen each other without scarring each other, to be authentic, and truth-filled, yet not harsh and uncompromising? To put one of Jesus' last edicts into action, Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another. (John 13:34-35) I want to be motivated by love, expressing love.

When I go, let me not be the woman that brushes past the tree and never sees the gift. Let me be remembered as a woman who loved.

Holding hands

Today was a gray day, and perhaps that's why I feel so tired. Amy's hands are always in mine if my hands are available. She likes to hold the web between my thumb and forefinger. This is her ultimate comfort. This particular photo was taken the night she developed haemophilus B influenza and became so ill. I was looking through photos today, and this captured how I feel. Secure, comforted, but not myself.

There is no one like the God of Jeshurun, who rides on the heavens to help you and on the clouds in his majesty. The eternal God is your refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms. He will drive out your enemy before you, saying, 'Destroy him!' So Israel will live in safety alone; Jacob's spring is secure in a land of grain and new wine, where the heavens drop dew. ~ Deuteronomy 33:26-28

First tracks

Aaron and I made a habit of tallying first tracks from the earliest days of our friendship. Those early days were cold, dark ones. Huddled together, reporting the events of a child's day in terms of intake and output, medication boluses, infection, test results, statistics. A specter in the bed beside us, silent and shivering with the activity of machinery as, one after another, body functions were replaced with mechanized equivalent. We ran together to the snap of the air outdoors: on snowboards, we flew down hills filled with the cacophony of suburban youth. In his hometown, we sat on frosty picnic tables shooting handguns at straw bails. First tracks came when we arrived at the snowboard hill before the first crowds of schoolbus children; walking down a lake trail where no one dared go because the plow hadn't been through yet; climbing a hillside to see the view. Most memorable were the tracks we left on a sand dune, erased almost before they were completed. We were on our way to say goodbye to one of our patients and a dear family. Pioneers together in a forest of taboo...coworkers falling in love...nurses going to a funeral...white Midwesterners climbing a sand dune in the dark on a desolate Indian reservation.

First tracks through the snow of a state park, pulling a sled full of camping gear. Pioneers still, remembering how to be intrepid after a long hibernation in our world of child-raising and home-building. We tamped down the snow around the campsite, shoveled a bank to shelter our tent, stamped out a path to the pit toilet. Many tracks later, a campfire hissed and chortled alive from damp wood and a soggy firering. We regaled the tales of London's prospectors in Alaska, hailing those first flames as salvation from the cold.

He is a still man. A soul of peace, hands steady to their work, focused, intent, unwavering. Silent at times...sometimes maddeningly so to a woman of words.

What he celebrates with action, putting feet in place of words, may go unnoticed if I don't still my soul to his rhythm. The embers fly by in red streaks, carried up on a black night wind, and he stands like a rock behind them. Gazing. Being together, in this dark and silent woods, surrounded only by our own whispers and our own footfalls. A night to remember that they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder. (Matt. 19:6)

Thirty years of molding and shaping. I am still a pioneer, still a revolutionary, still counter-cultural. Snow is a friend, and my husband my stallwart co-conqueror in a land of giant foes.

It is good to remember.