R and R

Bed Hair 1

Last night, I slept for 10 and a half hours: 9, the night before that. Vacation has settled around me, and I am content with my days. It's so crazy to wake up when I want, go to bed when I want, eat when I want, drink when I want, etc. How did I ever get bored during summer vacation?

A nagging voice in my head keeps telling me to get up and be PRODUCTIVE. You only get so many days, you know. There's a toilet to scrub, food to make, and drawers and cupboards to organize.  The list of things I should do is endless. The list of things I want to do is endless too: write a novel (bodice ripper or fantasy?), knit/crochet a sweater, make Christmas presents, read books, work out and on and on and on.

Mostly, I am eating too much blissful food, sleeping, cuddling with my dogs, playing video games, fostering a third dog, hanging out with D and E, and baking.

Bed hair 2

My OT told me to just enjoy it. She said, "Do what you want to do. Don't keep busy. Don't feel like you have to be PRODUCTIVE."  I needed to hear that, as I had felt guilty for my week of relaxing that I had already taken.

At the beginning of the big C, 8.75 years ago, D and I moved to Texas. We had some sort of party and a very sweet friend of the family told me about his relative who beat cancer. He told me about how each day the relative woke up and lived it like it would be the last. The relative was positive and inspired people. The relative spent all day, go, go, going. "That's what you have to do to stay here," he said. In these words, I heard his deep, abiding love for this person and his deep, abiding fear.

I feel this pressure in my chest to take each moment and make it meaningful. It spurs me on to make a mark and live life fully. Life is a gift, and it shouldn't be wasted. I think the worrying symptoms I was feeling two weeks ago were exhaustion. What if part of living is learning that resting with your family in your home by the Christmas tree is just as important as the flurry of activity?  What if it's the breath in, and it's just as important as the exhale?

Here's to this holiday season, and here's to vacation. The darkest of winter is the time of rebirth. 

"Farewell the moon, welcome the sun." Johnny Cunningham, "A Winter's Talisman.

Night time stroll during the first snow

My life with bread

During my first trip riding my chemo chair, we lived at my parents house in Texas. It was summer. The hot sticky heat and my chemo body did not get along. I'd go from the house to a gifted car, and the world would spin as my limbs grew heavy: my body's vain attempt to faint away from the sweltering sun. The heat never really stops. It takes a deep breath in in the morning, and it exhales sauna well past midnight.

Random card I picked sort of spooky

In Texas, summer is like Winter everywhere else. Few people go out. They stay in. I stayed in, unless I was working or spending time with family and friends (particularly Rose and her mother). I watched too much "Scrubs," I read Janet Evanovich and Terry Pratchett. I wrote buckets of poetry. Apparently, I also used tarot cards. (I have no memories of the cards...but D swears he'd come home from work, and I'd be puzzling over the Fool, the five of cups, the up side down empress, and the jack of wands.)

Eventually, I figured out that I needed something creative to do. I needed to learn something new. I risked my mind rotting as my body rested. I needed a goal, a skill, something I could fuss over and perfect in my spaceship away from murky heat. Somehow, someway, I started baking. Everyone would be off at work, and I would bake. I made loaf, after loaf, after loaf of bread. When I mastered the instant yeast variety, I started my own sourdough starter, and I then made loaf after loaf of sourdough bread.

Miche was my favorite. A giant boule of bread would rest on the counter after I had tended to it for 16 hours stretching, pounding, and pulling the gluten into long elastic chains. D came home from work to find me with 5 or 6 different types of loaves lined up on the counter in various states of doneness. My arms, covered with flour and bits of dough, my nose dusted with white, and my hands stirring the starter. "I love sourdough. With all the little yeast beasts, it's like I have billions of friends."

I started my starter again. In the last week and a half, I've made sugar cookies, biscuits, bread, and bagels. My joy soars as I sink my left hand into the warm, breath filled dough.  Before I bake them, I can feel the life thrumming in their fibers. The energy of everything captured in flour, water, salt and yeast. It heals me to smell it. It heals me to touch it. In the process, I find flow.

So what that I can't knead it with my right hand? That's what clean elbows and forearms are for. So what if I have to use a stand mixer? Who cares? I can still bake, and I am glad I found that out again.