Mark gave me a digital SLR for my birthday and I have been having a blast with it. It reminds me a bit of when I was first home with Zoe when she was a baby and all I did was take pictures of her and the dog. At least now I’m not running out to get film developed all the time!
Here are a few favorite photos so far as I get used to my new camera (with the requisite dog photo, of course)…
Does one really have a “pleasant visit” with one’s oncologist? Well, I think we just did.
Mark and I met Dr. Campbell after 6 p.m. this evening (the man works looong hours). The CAT scan I had last week was reported by the radiologist as “stable.” Dr. Campbell pulled up a few old reports and the nodule that they measure has actually decreased in size over time. So, very pleasant news all around. Stable is good. Slowly getting smaller is even better.
I’m hoping to be able to stay on this chemotherapy for a good long time. And I’m planning to have a pleasant evening to go along with our pleasant doctor visit and our pleasant news.
I was minding my own business at Jane’s house. We had been celebrating that she passed her nursing exams. I was ready to go home when Paul La Grand caught me on the front walk. Someone was coming over and I, in Paul’s words, needed to be nice to him.
And Paul wasn’t kidding. Right behind him coming up to the house were four guys who had apparently just played a gig. The one I was supposed to be nice to was wearing a chambray shirt and white jeans (please, forgive a hipster, it was 1994!) and a baseball cap. When I pointed him out to my brother that I was supposed to meet him tonight, Chris said, “the one who looks like he’s twelve?” Yep. That was him.
We ended up meeting shortly after Chris’ comment. Parked ourselves on the north-facing front porch, and stayed up talking so long we ended up watching the sunrise. Because, you know, facing north on an urban front porch is perfect for that.
Paul’s brief foray into the match-making business that night was highly successful. Fifteen years later Mark and I have our own north-facing front porch. And I like to think that I’m nice to him. And though he couldn’t pass for twelve anymore, he still looks way young to me.
Happy anniversary, honester, best friend, gentle keeper of my heart.
P.S. Here’s what we looked like three years after that initial meeting (Jamie’s photo from Jane and his rehearsal dinner).
and your family closer.
In May, my hilarious cousin Mary and her charming husband Dave set up housekeeping across the street from us. The house was quickly becoming a neighborhood blight. Boarded windows. Yard full of three years’ worth of oak leaves. Mark and I were becoming fretful.
Then in swooped Mary and Dave. They poached our contractor, plying him with their lack of interior plumbing and quarter round jokes, and whipped the house into impeccable shape in less than two months. Mark and I are in awe.
We are seriously considering a contractual agreement with our other neighbors so that they don’t toss us over in favor of the younger, cuter, funnier, hipper neighbors across the street. Too bad Mary’s 2 weeks away from becoming a lawyer, or I’d have drawn up the paperwork already.
Welcome to the neighborhood, Mary and Dave. Oh, and Daisy’s new friend: Pacman!
I spend far more time thinking about my house–what’s in it, where things should go, how it’s organized, what color things are, etc.–than I ever in my life intended. I thought I had a novel in me. OK, maybe a short story. Fine, an essay. But I thought I had some literary ambition.
Apparently I don’t. I’d rather re-decorate.
This has brought me a fair bit of shame–literary ambitions being far more lofty than the repainting of bedrooms and the rearrangement of furniture. I’d think, “This is what God is preserving my life for–to feel great satisfaction when I clean out the attic?” “Shouldn’t I be writing a memoir to God’s faithfulness rather than perseverating on de-junking the garage?”
Shame until I read this passage from a book of Jonathan Franzen’s essays that my sister passed along to me. Franzen, author of the best-selling novel The Corrections, writes about his mother’s house which he is responsible for selling after she dies.
In the days after the memorial service, as my brothers and I went from room to room and handled things, I came to feel that the house had been my mother’s novel, the concrete story she told about herself. She’d started with the cheap, homely department-store boilerplate she’d bought in 1944. She’d added and replaced various passages as funds permitted, re-upholstering sofas and armchairs, accumulating artwork ever less awful than the prints she’d picked up as a twenty-three-year-old, abandoning her original arbitrary color scheme as she discovered and refined the true interior colors that she carried within her like a destiny. She pondered the arrangements of paintings on a wall like a writer pondering commas. She sat in the rooms year after year and asked herself what might suit her even better. What she wanted was for you to come inside and feel embraced and delighted by what she’d made; she was showing you herself, by way of hospitality; she wanted you to stay.
Each time I read this passage (and I’ve read it plenty) I feel a little less ashamed of my preoccupation–of the decorating magazines I am loathe to part with. Of the trips to thrift stores that make me slightly giddy. “I’m writing,” I tell myself now as I snap up yet another owl figurine–this one a brass set of three–yay! “And, since writing is really re-writing (or so says Scott Henkel), then decorating is really re-decorating.”
And I’ve got tubs of unused thrift store treasure to prove it. Commas, I mean. Tubs of edited commas and semi-colons in my attic. Whole paragraphs of throw pillows. First and second drafts of photos sent to my sister for comments. Cut and pasted chapters of furniture in our bedrooms. Former editions of paint colors rusting in their cans in the basement.
Perhaps our home is my novel and I might be a writer after all. My daughter an essayist, in her freshly painted bright red room, the furniture just where she wants it and the mineral poster perfectly positioned above the dresser.
Thank you, Jonathan Franzen. I think I would have liked to have your mom come over. And for her to stay for a latte.
Summer has started splendidly for our family.
We started with a Memorial Day weekend trip to Madison to see our dear friends Jane and Jamie and their family. We travelled with Bob and Heather and their charming Ben and Cate.
The ferry across Lake Michigan was a blast–not just going up on deck, but playing with all manner of plastic toys in the main cabin, and gorging on vintage-inspired penny candy compliments of Ben and Cate’s awesome Oma. Heather and I thought the best one was the Chik’n Stix. Is there a more yummy-sounding confection?
The kids had great fun in Madison. Three girls, three boys, three dads, three moms, it all felt very trinitarian. Below are several shots including photos of the six kids, Jane and Luke, and girlfriends 1.0 holding girlfriends 2.0. And a parting shot of our gracious hosts.
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Last weekend I travelled to Chicago with Chris to meet Becki. Our Annual Sister Weekend has now officially changed to Sibling Weekend. Now that we all know our spiritual gifts, Becki and I thrifted, visited museum gift shops and celebrity sighted, while Chris attended a real estate law conference and waxed philosophically about the bed-bugs and arachnids he was sure inhabited our awesome thrift-store scores. Low-light of the weekend was getting my wallet stolen at our first thrift store (could it possibly have happened while I was stuck in a dress, laughing, and Becki was taking my picture looking like a teletubby during a stick-up?--photo evidence below). Highlights were laughing with my siblings until I almost fell out of the restaurant booth, meeting my new friend Joan Cusack (ahem, ahem, photo evidence below), seeing our dear Kiff VandenHeuval in his show at the Goodman, and telling stories with him post-show and closing down the restaurant. A perfect start to the summer.
I saw my oncologist today and we’re staying the course on the chemo. The CAT from earlier this month looked like things were stable, so I’ll have a check up again in the middle of July. That would be AFTER my 38th birthday, if anyone out there is keeping track–YAY. So, happy rest of April, May, June, and some of July to me!
Please continue to pray that this chemo will work for a good long time!
My favorite photo from spring break. The Cousin Club meets in Atlanta…
member absent but not forgotten: Henry.
I found out today that the pain in my back is NOT due to any cancer mets in my bones. Bones are clear–yahoo!
Apparently, however, I continue to suffer from DFS. This is what I’ve had since I was a kid. If I don’t get enough sleep (over 8 hours a night), I get flu-like symptoms, often immediately, but sometimes I can last until the next day until I fall apart–fever, chills, nausea, you get the picture. As a college student, this ruled out any “all-nighter” study session and seriously curtailed my social life.
When I was working full time, I had a few sick days due to DFS, which was at that time unnamed. Having coffee with my friend, Jeanne, and talking about this mysterious syndrome of mine, she said, “You seem so strong, but really you’re just a delicate flower!” Thus, Delicate Flower Syndrome (DFS).
DFS has gotten me a few times over the past few weeks as I’ve had some anxiety over the possibility of bone mets, but I plan to sleep well tonight!!
The girl who pitched her tent in my heart has apparently been living there for SEVEN YEARS!
We celebrated with a polka dot party…
ready and waiting…. polka dot cupcakes with dip’n dots
playing Twister….. a great mound of sugar
the hardest part was waiting for the party to start!
Mark and I were spent by the end of the festivities. But we’re still glowing over how kind and lovely Zoe’s friends are. And how happy we are to be Zoe’s parents.