Hello tenacious fans,
We are still here. It’s April now. Things are riotously blooming all over Portland: trees, shrubs, flowers, mosses. Right now our front yard has four kinds of daffodil still in bloom (the early spring climate here works as refrigeration and the daffodils bloom for months), hyacinths, euphorbia, a camellia bush, a variety of tiny weeds, and the colorful heads of tulips about to pop. The whole city looks lush and lacy. I took Tuley for a long walk around a wetland this afternoon when the sun came out, and Val rode her bike around for hours.
In March we both had birthdays, evidence that we successfully survived another string of seasons. Yay us. For Val’s birthday a small crowd convened, some flying in from other states, and with lots of music and food we generally made merry for several days. I celebrated my birthday with a mid-month trip to Mexico with my dad, where we clambered about the mountain towns of Michoacán for a couple weeks and delighted in our good fortune to still be here, together, and in such lovely places.
What with stupid cancer and complex relationship shifts, life continues to perplex and astound, and we do keep busy, sometimes just staring into space and gibbering. Not to mention the infestation of carpenter ants and the fat pink tick we found on Tuley’s chin. (Who knew ticks even come in pink? Not me. I thought it was a sudden skin tag or something until Amy pointed out its tiny little legs. Ewww.) Anyway, though, we are carrying on, separately and together, wobbling or dancing, depending on the day. Val’s got a treatment next Wednesday and the portentous PET scan coming up in a couple weeks. Please use the power of magical thinking and anything else you’ve got to remind the tumors to be dead dead dead.
Thanks. And happy spring.
Deborah
p.s.
A spring poem for you. It’s by Archibald MacLeish and is actually a little piece of a much bigger poem called “The Pot of Earth.” I first heard it in the Bloomington UU church in the early ’80s, and it has become part of my family’s beloved spring canon.
Why it was wonderful! Why, all at once there were leaves,
Leaves at the end of a dry stick, small, alive
Leaves out of wood. It was wonderful,
You can’t imagine. They came by the wood path
And the earth loosened, the earth relaxed, there were flowers
Out of the earth! Think of it! And oak-trees
Oozing new green at the tips of them and flowers
Squeezed out of clay, soft flowers, limp
Stalks flowering. Well, it was like a dream,
It happened so quickly, all of a sudden it happened –