So life here has been pretty stressful recently. And I don’t post about the rest of my life so much on this blog. So here is a little bit about the rest of my life for a change:
As I type my daughter is alternating between dancing and telling me what her next art project will be (which involves pointing to the computer screen where she will draw various items). We have roses blooming everywhere even though I haven’t been able to be out and prune or deadhead them this year. And our weather, after one miserably hot spell, has been cool and even rainy some days.
In all those respects, life is pretty good. At eight years old, my daughter has grown up listening to Little House on the Prairie. (There is a series of books about Laura, her daughter Rose, her mother Caroline, and her grandmother and great-grandmother, plus the Laura series is on audio book so we listed to it repeatedly as we drove.) We talked about it last night, the various difficulties Laura goes through and keeps going through. Maybe that’s how she’s managing to take all this in stride. When I told her earlier this week that eight year olds shouldn’t have to do this, she answered that she was almost nine. On the subject of being like Laura, I told her there were more chores she could be doing — she said “no”. She’s not dumb. :-)
We don’t watch TV in our house. John and I stopped when we moved across the country ten years ago and there wasn’t any TV reception where we moved to. I don’t know how we’d fit the time in now. We read. We cook. (I’ve been reading crock pot cook books and cooking thing in a crock pot. Some of the recipes amaze me — people actually eat that stuff? The cook books are as entertaining as fiction! Why does every recipe that calls for tater tots also call for canned green beans? Why do some recipes pre cook every thing and then put it all in the crock pot for twelve hours — just in case twelve hours wasn’t enough to get all the ingredients done?) I can go on for ages about that stuff. I can read cook books for ages. I’m fighting the urge to pack cook books for our trip out of town. Maybe I’ll pack one or two for airplane reading instead of fiction. I’ll have audio books for airplane fiction, if I can get to the computer that lets me put them on the ipod.
In past years I’ve gardened. I’ve been less able to each year, and I miss it each year. I think we’ll be moving in to the city, and I hope that next year I can have some small garden beds. I wouldn’t mind some flower beds, if I didn’t have to do much to them, but I like vegetable beds. I like going out and being able to pick salad, and zucchini and cucumbers and tomatoes. Watching the first vegetables appear and grow and slowly ripen is wonderful. I especially like to grow pumpkins and sunflowers. I don’t have anything growing this year, which makes me sad. I’ll be buying them when I see them at stores and farm stands in the fall.
We live in the midst of forest and pasture land. I haven’t lived in a city since college, although I lived on the outskirts of one after college. I can hear the birds and my metal and bamboo wind chimes as I type. At this time of year the only time I’m likely to hear a vehicle is if it’s coming up our driveway. I can see as many stars as I want to when I go outside at night. As well as bats. I love the bats. I have deer and wild turkeys around my yard. They ate my last garden. (Fence problems.) I talked to the dog about his job after that.
There’s a snapshot of my life besides cancer, the lighter side of it. It’s not all fear and misery, this is just where I let that out.
