Nearly All Go for Fall

With nearly my whole being, I’m welcoming cool temps and cool breezes. Frosty shadowed mornings and orange leaves spotlighted with the morning sun. A light sweater over a summer short-sleeved shirt. The comfort of my hair insulating my neck rather than pulled up in a summer ponytail.

By the end of October, I’ll have little pots of thick hand cream and lip balm placed within reach of the day’s journey. Reminders of the dryness of fall rustle in the leaves on the sidewalks and on the catching of skin when putting more knits on my body.

“I think I have dust in my gills.” That’s Liam’s interpretation of this change. Time for more tea and hot cocoa to help clear the dust of cool fall afternoons and dry nights. Bill and I smiled when Liam started drinking English tea last winter. Based strictly on the English population I’ve met, including Bill’s mum, who was a kind of English tea goddess, English breakfast tea is usually consumed with milk or with milk and sugar, only occasionally, black. Liam started his tea odyssey with sugar and... half and half. No half and half in the house? No tea for Liam, thank you. As much as I enjoy half and half in my coffee, I cringe when I make Liam’s tea with this thick dairy product.

We had our first frost over the weekend. Soon there will be fires in the fireplace. Once Bill gets on that kick, there will be a fire every night. Before the snow flies, we want to rent a log splitter and take care of chunked up logs from a tree we had taken down this summer. Then there’s the creosote that needs to be swept away before the first fire.

Chili, stew, and roast beast are on the horizon. More slow-cooking, less grilling.

The October mammogram has come and gone with an all-clear.

Yes, the stage is nearly set to snuggle into my favorite season. If only my feet were as ready as the rest of me. It was 44 degrees this morning. As I looked through the mudroom for proper shoes, my feet screamed like a toddler. “I want to wear sandals!” Not this morning. “I’m not going if I can’t wear my sandals!!!” No. “But I don’t know what other shoes match my outfit! And, I don’t want to wear socks. Definitely, no socks. I. Want. Sandals!”

We agree on shoes with no socks. The toes wriggled about all morning inside the confines of their enclosures. They’re happy now that I’m at the library. I kicked off the shoes and brought out a pair of short socks from my backpack. The library runs cool, so I always have an extra sweater and socks with me.

Shoes with no socks seem OK. Socks only seem OK. I’m taking baby steps toward the season in which both are essential.

View fullsize

Stopping to See the Berries

As much as I like to claim a love for change, I’m a creature of habit. The change of seasons makes me giddy. A friend once pointed out that those aren’t really changes because they happen every year. Consistently.

Since 2010, I’ve done Pilates once or twice a week. Stretching my wings keeps the on-going shrinking effect of radiation from affecting my range of motion on the left side. At the end of class, we do a “mermaid” which is an arm-overhead side stretch while seated on the floor. Then we add “thread-the-needle” taking that arm from overhead and weaving it through the hole under the other armThat's firmly planted in place with a hand on the floor. Then, the finale and my favorite: we bring the arm back overhead and then twist back and reach in the opposite direction of thread the needle. It’s my quiet way of cursing cancer, sticking out my tongue while proving I have full range of motion on the left side. Actually, there’s no cursing, only thankfulness for that movement that I can so easily do.

There are sixteen to twenty people in each Pilates class, and quite a few of us are regulars who have been with our instructor for a long time. Pilates is about strengthening the core, moving small muscles, and stretching the body. Small, mindful moves with a bit of fierceness unseen to casual observers. You need to be on the mat to see and feel the intensity of the sport. Hmmm. It’s not a sport per se… but that’s what fell out of my fingers, so I’ll leave it at that.

Last Monday, I left the class standing upright and smiling. People waiting for the class after ours often comment about how happy people look as they walk out of our Pilates class. I left the building with a friend, and we walked to the intersection where we always end our five minute in-transit chats. From there, I turned and headed down the sidewalk toward where my van was parked on the street.

It was a wet day. Rain from earlier puddled on the sidewalk. Sticks were on the sidewalk. Mud was on the edges of the sidewalk. These visual observations were in my peripheral thoughts. Commanding my attention were wandering thoughts – cranking back up was the what-next-in-the-day pattern. My head was down and my shoulders were beginning to lean forward with it. I caught myself. “For crying out loud, stand up straight, and look up!”

When my self-talk starts with “For crying out loud…” I listen. I elongated from the waist up, looked to the left, and saw light red berries right at eye level.

I grabbed my phone and took a photo, thinking how nice it would be if they were a more brilliant red. I looked closer, pulled my glasses down, and saw they had raindrops hanging from them.

Like a dog onto a scent and needing to take a million sniffs, I leaned into the bush, making sure not to touch it. “Holy cow, that’s amazing!”

“Yeah, there’s dew on them! Cool!” said a man passing by.

Each berry looked like it had been glazed by hand in a thick, glossy syrup.

And with an even tighter look, the bottom of the berry melted into the drop of water. The clinging water was nearly as large as the berry. Looking through the drop, the green leaves showed through crystals.

In a bit of euphoria over this tiny, magnificent discovery, I didn’t want to break my gaze. Surely, I was seeing a moment that wasn’t easily repeatable. And one that would be gone with a strong gust of wind or a bump from a passing shoulder. Six inches from my face, this was as close to “now” as I could ever imagine. Right now.

I didn’t stand there for an hour or even ten minutes. The moment from seeing the branch of berries to the discovery of green crystals shining through a drop of water on the bottom of two berries was tight. The linger over the discovery of the latter was longer. And I was thoroughly there. Right there.

Like a bee that’s collected as much pollen as possible in it baskets on its hind legs, I only moved away when I was full. Fully consumed in “now.”

And, it hadn’t taken hours from my day. Just a few minutes.

A Hitch in My Giddy-Up

I’ve been counting a lot lately. It’s proven to be challenging. Very challenging.

On June 20th, I got a hitch in my giddy-up. I was on the treadmill watching my hero walking the next row over and listening to the chatting and heavy breathing going on around me. I had the treadmill cranked up a notch so I was jogging for forty-five seconds – as timed by the clock on the treadmill. When I decreased the speed to return to a brisk walk, my right hip popped, and the gait of my pace changed to brisk limping.

Figuring it was just a pulled muscle that needed to heal, I stayed off the treadmill and rested my body for a few days. Then a couple weeks. July 20th came and went as did August 20th. The come-and-go pain came and stayed after hiking waterfalls in western Massachusetts on August 19th. The physical pain had also become a mental pain. Was this cancer in my hip?

The week after the boys were back in school, I went to my doctor and told her I was there for two reasons: to take care of the physical pain and, more immediately, to confirm that it wasn’t originating from something more complicated. I’m impressed by the medical practitioners out here. My doctors treat mental and physical symptoms equally. Three days later, I was lying on a table at an orthopedic clinic having my hips x-rayed.

After taking the x-rays, the lab tech took me to an exam room and said she’d get the pictures up on the screen for the doctor. My hip bones popped up on the screen, and she left the room – leaving me to look at them. Up close. Eyeing every shade of gray, light gray, dark gray. And, on that right bone were a couple spots of random gray that were not on the left side. In the ten minutes that I sat waiting for the ortho doc to come in, I had cancer all over again. A self-diagnosis. It let a wild animal loose inside my body, running around in a cage unable to escape.

With crazed eyes, I met my bow-tie-wearing ortho doc. He sat facing me, with his back to the screen, and asked me to explain what was going on. I only wanted him to turn around and look at my hip x-ray. After my introductory remarks spoken succinctly and with a bit of a shaky voice, I told him my history of cancer and that first I just needed to know if that’s what this pain was from.

Nope. None. My bones look great. No arthritis either. I was cured of that ten-minute bout of self-diagnosed, make-believe cancer. I felt like a rag doll. That same feeling that tailed me so often during cancer treatment in ’09 and ’10: anxiety, calm, anxiety, calm.

I never thought being diagnosed with bursitis in my hip would feel so amazing! I chose physical therapy over cortisone shots. Which brings me back to the issue with counting: I have ten leg and hip exercises to do twice daily at home. My physical therapist started with just 30 reps on each leg the first week. Now, I’m up to three sets of 30.

The pain is easing over time – despite my inability to count to 30 in my head. This is the slowest task I’ve had to complete in many moons. My brain wants to solve other issues while I’m stretching a muscle. It’s behaving like a child hyped-up on sugar on Halloween night.

The nimbleness of brain movement is like walking on a non-stop treadmill where each step is a new idea, a new task. Something that I don’t want to forget. Something that I forgot but now again remember. And don’t want to forget again.

Honestly, shouldn’t I have absolute control to stop this pace so that I can simply count to 30, thirty times in fifteen minutes, as I stretch? I’ve resorted to physical cues of lifting a finger to signify each set of ten. Three fingers up equal the last set of ten. Assuming I remember to lift a finger at the appropriate time.

So, can you hold one nice stretch and count to 30 in your head, release it, and do that two more times in a row? I’m guessing your brain will take you on quite a ride with this monotonous, silent task. It will surely find something more exciting to do than count non-stop to 30.

A cortisone shot might have been easier. However, the exercise is probably just as good for my brain as it is for my hip.