We have tulpis and daffodils

 

The years go by so fast

 

So many thoughts going through my head

 

 

 I have been feeling sad and angry about cancer.  The lives it has effected and is effecting friends who are dealing with it right now and all of the friends I have lost to the damn disease. 

I feel so powerless.  I cannot stop it.  I cannot cure it.  I don't pray so I cannot pray it away.   

How many friends have I lost over the last few years.  I thought about listing them by name, but that's too depressing and sad.  And depressing.

A few, my sister included, have fought it and won.  My own daughter too.

But the others.  I just don't know.  I wish I had all the power in the world to make it all better.  Kiss it and make it go away like a boo boo on a little child.  But it doesn't work that way.

One dear friend has cancer and has been working so hard to get better.  She has physical and occupational therapies.   She could be my daughter, age wise. She has two little girls in addition to two sons in their 20s.  She wants to be able to mother and they deserve a mother, but what can be done?  I don't know.  We exchange emails every day and when I don't hear from her I worry that she might be in the hospital.

A young woman who I have known since she was 14 was recently diagnosed with a particularly vicious for of breast cancer.  My sister and I went to Baltimore to help with the major cleaning project that needs to be done on her house before she can start chemo.  Our contribution was doing loads and loads of laundry at a laundromat, with her mother.  If I was younger and fitter I might have offered to help with the physical labor required to clean out her house.  But I just can't.

So I play "wordle" on the computer every day.  I play solitaire on my cell phone.  I watch TV and I knit.  I am trying to get more walking in.  So far I am not great, but better than in the past.

I know that everyone has to die at some point.  Even me!  But I feel like I have a high number of dead friends.  I guess what that means is that I have a lot of friends!

Nine years ago

 Nine years ago this month I was stressing about my approaching 60th birthday. And I was having bed headaches. I was diagnosed with a meningioma brain tumor. Guess what? I turned 60. had brain surgery. Lived. had another brain surgery. Lived through that. And now I am approaching my 69th birthday and feeling just fine and tumor free!

 

Pizza, kids.cats & sewing machines

 I'll start with the pizza.  When we were first married we used to go to my mother's place at least once a week for dinner and TV.  We almost always made pizza.

 Then, when we had kids, we continued the pizza making tradition just about every week.  Cheap dinner and everyone liked it.  For Morgan's birthday this year, among other things, I ordered a few boxes of our favorite boxed pizza.   

Yesterday, Morgan sent me a couple of pictures of him and Kim and the pizzas they made.

 

 

 

 

    

 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        ***********************************

Austin returned from his tour of South East Asia on Thursday night/ Friday morning.  He looks great and seems very happy.  He told us all about his travels and adventures!   He and Kristin, who I have not met yet, had a great time.  First in Thailand, both south and north, then Cambodia and finally Japan before heading to LA and then here.  He sang karaoke with a lot of different people and made new friends on the way.  We have been caring for his cat, Molly while he has been gone.   She has been a very sweet and quiet cat.  As soon as Molly heard Austin's voice, she recognized that it was him and she started to meow and bang on the bedroom door.   Smart kitty!

 

 

***********************************************************

 

 

 

Every so often I get emails that have photos that I had posted on that date in other years.   One such picture popped up today.  It's a picture of my mother sewing on her Featherweight sewing machine.  The picture was taken in 1950, so my mom must have been around 24 years old!   She loved sewing on that machine.  In fact, it is the machine my sister and I learned to sew on.   We both did a lot of sewing in high school.  It used to be cheaper to make your own clothes than to buy them.  Now it is the opposite!   I looked at that picture of my mom and thought that she really looks a lot like Courtney, my daughter, her granddaughter.   It's so strange to think of my mom so young!

 

 

 

 

 

Last but not least, the daffodils that Nick planted have come up and are really beautiful!

***************************************************************

 

 

This really is not homework

 Almost every day I think about writing here and then I don't.  Somehow I have made myself feel as though this is homework and I "have to" do it. 

That was certainly not my intention when I started this blog.   I used to journal a lot.  All through high school I did and after too.  I journaled pretty regularly until I had kids.   Then I just found it too challenging at times to sit and write.

I wrote letters of course.  I have always been a big letter writer.  At least until we started to use email.   Our last overseas post as a family was Perth, Western Australia.  We did have the internet, but I still mainly wrote actual letters.    I have saved many of the letters we received and many of the letters I wrote to family have been returned to me and I have filed many of them in binders.  There are always more to do.  I don't know what I will do with all of the binders.   Perhaps the contents can be scanned and saved or published.  We'll see.

Recently, Courtney posted the question "where do you see yourself in ten years"   Actually, I am going to lift her words off of Facebook:

"Facebook memories are so weird.

Fourteen years ago today I was reading Faulkner and loving his way with language.

Ten years ago today I had a terrible homemade pistachio-kale smoothie, and helped a Burning Man artist with a write-up about his project.

Eight years ago today I was in the Dominican Republic with Ben, struggling to relax as a person who is not a natural at the resort approach to vacation. A hike to a lagoon helped some.

Three years ago today I was freaking out about a fast-spreading new virus and wondering if Oregon might impose restrictions soon.

One year ago today I attended a Meow Wolf pop-up mini-museum, saw an unauthorized Banksy exhibit, and danced on stage with Wyclef Jean, while at SXSW in Austin, Texas.

For the record, on this day in 2023 I'll be taking out the trash and recycling, putting away clean laundry, snuggling with cats and Zach, and I may or may not buy groceries and/or watch the Oscars."

 

This got me thinking about the future.  In ten years, Nick and my sister will both be 85.  Yikes!   I will be almost 79!  Yikes.  Who will we be in those ten years?   How many more friends will we have lost?  And family members- cousins?

I think for now I will just try to plan a week or a month or a few months ahead.

 

Last time I wrote here I mentioned my plan to make a temperature blanket.  Well, I have started it.   So far, in the week since starting it there have not been any great variations in the temperature.   I plan to take it with me on the Alaska cruise Courtney and I are going on in July.  It will be interesting to go from July in Virginia to July in Alaska.  Can't wait!

 

It is not going to be a circular blanket.  Rather, this is the kind of needle it is knitted on because it is too wide for a regular knitting needle

This is how much I have knitted so far

 

I'm alive

 Yes, of course I am alive or I wouldn't be sitting here writing this.  

This afternoon I was watching TV and eating a chicken sandwich.  I must have bitten off to much because I couldn't swallow it.  I kept trying to swallow but it just got more and more stuck.  I ran and found Nick and he did as close to the Heimlich maneuver as I would know how to do.  He  pulled up and in just below my ribs (is that the right way?).  It worked.  A spit out- threw up pureed chicken sandwich.    I think we were both pretty shook up afterward.  I have felt very vulnerable today after that.   Things happen so fast.  I am glad Nick was here.  He is my hero. 

Beyond all of that excitement, I continue to knit and create .  I guess I am a "maker".   I finished some mittens that I am sending to Austin's  neighbors in Maine, Sylvia and Jim.  They are such nice people and they are always looking out for Austin, or in his absence, his house.

I always feel like I need to be doing something.  Knitting is what I enjoy the most and feel that I am pretty good at it.

 

 

 

I also like making potholders- here's one I made this evening:

I have started a new project.  It's called a temperature blanket.  The colors are chosen to represent the weather- actually, the temperature on each day for a year.  The rows are quite long, but you only do two rows per day.  So there's a lot of down time which means I need to work on something else too.

This chart gives an idea what temperatures are represented by each color.  Below is my set of yarn to knit into the blanket.

 

 

A few months ago, Nick planed bulbs.  Lots of them.  daffodils, tulips and others.  Everything is starting to push up through the dirt and some are even blooming.

 

When we were first married and lived in College Park, there  were loads of daffodils along the fence in the back yard.  Daffodil bulbs split, so they can be dug up and split into more plants.  We gave a lot of our split bulbs to my sister, and then she had a lot of daffodils in her yard.  Somewhere along the line, Nick's mom got some of the offspring of the original bulbs and had them growing and blooming in her yard.  I am not sure why, but for some reason, Nick's mom always called them "Carol's daffodils"  I think she thought that they originated in Carol's yard.   It's funny how something becomes a different story than it started out as and that becomes the "truth".

 

I have been feeling very blah lately.  I think that it's just the anxiety of being a parent and wondering what the future holds.  Chance has been living in our basement for at least 6 months now.   It's a nice space- more like an apartment.  Now that he has bought a house, he is working on moving into the house as he moves things in and meets with various repair people.  I am looking forward to having my sewing/ scrap-booking space back.   

When Austin got sick in November, I flew up to Maine to make sure he was alright.  There was the possibility of appendicitis, which, fortunately it was not.  He and his cat flew down here to stay in our house for a while.   We gave him the room that is usually our bedroom because it offered the best space for him and the cat.

Austin and Nick and I went to Seattle for Christmas and then the two of them went on several cruises.   I was back here in Aldie with Chance and his cat downstairs and Austin's cat upstairs.  Almost as soon as they got back, Austin took off for Thailand to connect with his friend Kristin.  Austin is due back here next week.  I know that the cat will be happy to see him.  I am sure that he will be very jet lagged.  I hope that he and his cat are planning to go back home to Maine.   

Nick and I look forward to having the house to ourselves, just the two of us.  We love our kids and are glad that we can offer a place when it's needed.   

Well, it's really really late!  Every night I tell myself I will go to bed earlier.  Every night I stay up too late!  Then I am sleepy all the next day,  And today won't be any different.

 

Morgan is 42 today. Happy Birthday!

 Morgan Robert Sherwood was born March 4, 1981, three years and one week after his sister, Courtney.

He was the sweetest, most sensitive baby.  A good nurser he gained like crazy as a newborn.  he was very chill.  But if I put him down, even if he was asleep, in a very short time he would be making soft sounds that told me that he did not want to be alone and that he needed to be held.

We lived overseas for much of Morgan's first two years, but we were back in the States for his third birthday.  Morgan showed his personality when it was his third birthday and he was supposed to blow out the candles on his Big Bird cake. He didn't want anyone to look at him and he shielded his face.  If I find pictures form that day I will post them here.

Morgan was a tough looking baby in his newborn photo taken by the hospital photographer.   But he always looked sweet to me.

 

 

 

Friends for a long time!

I shared this with some La Leche League friends and I thought I would post it here too. 

When we moved to Chiang Mai Thailand, Courtney was 3 and Morgan was 6 months old. Before we got there I was adamant that I did not want a "baby maid". Our predecessor's domestic staff would become ours. They said that they had a maid, cook, gardener and a baby maid . I wrote and told them to please find another job for the baby maid as I did not want to have to fire her.

 

Aleck and Julie were the housemaid and gardener- a married couple. They lived with us as did their daughter, Ann- who became Courtney's best friend.

 

Upon seeing that we slept with our kids and breastfed, Julie told me "you raise your children like Thai people".. They did not know that "farangs" (foreigners) even liked their children. To this day I find this to be one of the greatest compliments I ever received on our parenting style.

 

We left Chiang Mai in 1983, but have kept in touch with Aleck and Julie through the years.

 

 They met my son Austin when he was 2 years old. I was attending a WHO conference as a representative of LLLI, and, of course my 2 year old Austin went with me. That was in 1989.

 

My son, Austin is now 35. He and his girlfriend are traveling and Chiang Mai is one of the places that are visiting . Yesterday, Austin and his girlfriend, Kristin, met with Aleck, Julie and Ann for lunch in Chiang Mai. 

 

This picture warns my heart