Waiting for moonrise, and then the dawn

After months and months of writing to deadlines, playing hard and fast and fun with words, the ideas zipping from my heart and brain to the page, my creative drive simply stopped dead this week.

Richard and I had driven to Arkansas to visit his family, and after we arrived home, I couldn't write. Oh, I wrote in my journal, wrote some emails, and even wrote a snail mail letter. But beyond those commonplace communications, I couldn't find words.

I told myself that my lassitude was due to the drive. We did nearly 2,000 miles (950 miles each way between southcentral Colorado and northwest Arkansas) in six days, so that's a pretty good excuse. By the end of the second day, when I still couldn't drum up my usual writing jones, I knew it was something deeper. I live to write. Writing usually clears the fog and gives me energy.

This week I've felt like the ruined picnic shelter in the photo above, a relict of a whole host of planned "recreation facilities" built along the shore of what was to be a large reservoir, except that the lake never filled. Without that watery playground, the parking lots and boat ramps and picnic areas and scenic viewpoints and campgrounds never filled either. Eventually the whole complex was not only abandoned, the facilities seem to have been deliberately destroyed.

We camped there on our way to Arkansas, winding in on asphalt roads shrunk to one lane as the prairie reclaimed them, threading past restrooms with windows smashed and doors swinging open, parking lots knee-high in autumn-colored prairie grasses, light posts tilting every which way, electrical boxes with wires ripped out, and picnic shelters with tables gone and bases smashed. It was eerie, like a post-apocalyptic world.

We set up our little nylon tent at the end of what had been a long loop of tidy paved camping spaces, each with its picnic shelter and electric plug-in. I told Richard that I was glad he was there. It was a place I wouldn't stay at night on my own.

I know just how desolate that place feels now. I've spent the last couple of years keeping up a work schedule so insane, that it's been the rare weekend when I didn't have to write straight through to keep up. And then last February, Richard began to pee blood. Not just dribbles, streams as dark as a good pinot noir, full of clots and chunks. In April he was diagnosed with bladder cancer and in July he went through his first surgery. After the second surgery, in early September, his surgeon told me he thinks they got it all. I should be relieved; I should be dancing with joy. Instead I feel empty, worn out, exhausted. Hence this dry spell, and my fear that the words - and my passion for changing the world with them - won't return.

That night by the lake that didn't happen, we ate our picnic dinner as the sun set and swatted the last few mosquitoes of fall. When the stars appeared, littering the black sky with pinpricks of light, we crawled into our tent, snuggled close, and watched the level Panhandle horizon for a silver glow. It grew brighter and brighter until the dazzling rim of an October moon edged up. Immediately, a pack of coyotes nearby tuned up, yipping and barking and howling, lifting their voices in song to that huge, round orb of light. The wind howled that night too, flapping our tent fly and whooshing through the branches of the nearby grove of trees. When dawn's light edged the rim where black sky met darker land and the silver moonlight gave way to pastel day, even the destroyed picnic shelter looked beautiful.

I can still see that moon rise in my minds' eye, and hear the wild coyote chorus rising over the stark landscape - and the dawn light, pearly and soft, heralding a new day. And I know I'll have my new day too: I just need the patience of those coyotes, waiting for the silvery orb of the moon to signal their singing, and then the stars swimming across the sky until they gutter out in the quiet beauty of the dawn.

Finding comfort in the garden

Driving home from Denver on Wednesday afternoon following Richard's second round of surgery for his "beautiful carcinoma" (the tumor that revealed his bladder cancer), I was numb, so exhausted after nearly eleven hours at the hospital the previous day that I couldn't even get excited about the good news: his surgeon reported no sign of tumor regrowth, meaning July's surgery may have removed the entire carcinoma. I knew that was good news, I knew I should feel relieved, but I couldn't. I just didn't have relief in me.

The weather was blue-sky balmy, the aspens were glowing in the shafts of light slanting through the gathering cumulus clouds, and the dotted mosaic of shrubs, the wild roses, currants, sumac, raspberries, chokecherries, and thickets of shrub oak had tossed off their summer green pigments, revealing the season's accumulation of sugar-synthesized colors in burnt gold, scarlet, rust, crimson, lemon yellow, burgundy, bronze, and orange.

This has been the most glorious fall for leaf color in recent memory, and our route home took us through some of the classic leaf-peeper drives at the height of the season. And I didn't care. Oh, I went through the motions. I looked, I exclaimed; I pointed to particularly picture-postcard perfect mountainsides. But I couldn't muster the energy stop the car, get out and collect a few leaves, listen to the sounds and sniff the smells, compose and shoot a few photos. I just wanted to get home to my garden.

I usually spend our two-and-a-half-hour commute to and from the urban part of Colorado delighting the wildness: watching eagerly for red-tailed hawks and golden eagles spiraling high overhead on long wings, scanning for antelope, prairie dogs, and migrating long-billed curlews in the high-elevation prairie, and searching for bighorn sheep on the rocky cliffs and wildflowers the whole way.

Not Wednesday afternoon though. I just wanted to get home to the reclaimed piece of industrial property near downtown in the small town where we live, unload the car, put away the groceries, and go outside to the kitchen garden. I needed the company of the plants I've nurtured from tiny seed to sprawling adult, the lives I tend every day and whose leaves, seeds and fruits nurture us in our daily meals.

As I moved among them, watering the sun-dried soil, discovering that the deer gate had blown open in the prints in the gravel path and the downed tomatoes that bore the unmistakable marks of mule deer teeth, finding a striped Romanesco squash ready to pick, a golden beam of pumpkin nestled among dark leaves, and sweet strawberries, I began to settle. I don't know what it is about the company of the plants that calms me, but it does. It as if being at home in my garden returns me to myself, slides my fretting mind back into the familiar case of my brain, my troubled emotions back into the soothing pulse of respiration and heart-beat, and returns my restless spirit to the comforting embrace of muscle and and skin. Back at home with my plants, I am once again at home in me too.

As I watered, Richard came outside with a bowl to help harvest. We picked up half-eaten tomatoes, plucked more ripe ones from the vines, gathered strawberries and squash, and went inside, holding hands. I took a deep breath, and let the air out slowly, feeling myself relax. I smiled.

Home at last in the familiar community of our own landscape - and best of all, home together.

Ten things to be thankful for

Today I brought my husband, Richard, home after his surgery to remove that "beautiful" carcinoma that the surgeon spotted in his bladder back in April. Yesterday was a long and very rugged day, beginning at five minutes before five when the wake-up call jolted us upright so we could be at the Veterans Administration Medical Center at 5:45 a.m. for his seven o'clock surgery.

There's the first thing I'm thankful for: The surgeon thinks he got the entire tumor removed. He had to cut deeply into Richard's bladder wall to do it, so Richard has to have a catheter for a week. That is most definitely not a thing to be thankful for, but if the tumor's gone, it outweighs the rest.

The second thing I'm thankful for is the VA staff: Every single person we've dealt with there, from intake clerks and aides to pharmacists, residents, and surgeons, has been kind, caring and professional. They go out of their way to make sure things go well. They spend time listening and explaining. They are thoughtful. In short, this VA facility has created a culture of caring that pervades the whole place. What a blessing!

The rest of yesterday was not something to be thankful for. After Richard was discharged and I drove him back to our hotel and got him settled in, his pain got worse and he began having muscle spasms. His need for more medication sent me driving back across the city to the VA Pharmacy at rush hour, exhausted, and feeling just a wee bit sorry for myself. A woman vet about my age who was waiting in line in front of me asked what I was there for, and when I told her I was picking up medicine for my husband, who had just had surgery for bladder cancer, she said, "He's lucky to have you." Tears filled my eyes. "And I'm lucky to have him," I responded.

So there's the third thing I'm thankful for: Wisdom from a stranger that helped me remember what was most important when I was on the way to forgetting it. We're lucky to have each other--all of us are lucky to have each other.

The fourth thing I'm thankful for: Richard slept well last night and felt good enough today that I could drive him home over the mountains to our own quiet valley, something to be grateful for in itself, which makes the fifth thing.

The drive up and over three mountain passes restored my equilibrium, so that's the sixth thing I'm grateful for. Most of the way across South Park, Richard spotted two white pelicans, gliding wingtip to wingtip and looking very huge and prehistoric with their enormous wings, short necks and those long beaks with the fleshy pouches hanging beneath for scooping up their fishy catch. They were flying so close together that they were clearly a pair, and the sight filled me with love for the other half of my own pair, the man I fell in love with more than 25 years ago, and who was sitting in the passenger seat right next to me as we sped along. Those pelicans reminded me again to be thankful for the miracle of this love--there's the seventh thing!--and the partnership Richard and I nurture so carefully.

Once we unloaded the car and Richard settled in, I went outside and watered the kitchen garden, and felt myself relax in the company of the plants that feed us. As I breathed in the oxygen they breathe out, and I exhaled the carbon dioxide that's necessary for them to inhale, I realized that the company of plants is the eighth thing I feel grateful for. I picked a bowl of fresh sugar-snap peas, and a bowl of strawberries.

For dinner, Richard grilled himself a wild salmon steak, and I made him a salad of fresh-picked lettuce mix, dressed with olive oil infused with oranges and balsamic vinegar, and topped with whole steamed sugar-snap peas, feta cheese, and a few of those fresh strawberries. To accompany it, I sliced some of the bread he bakes with wild yeast and organic whole wheat flour.

That's the ninth thing I'm grateful for: The gift of good food, much of it local, from our very own soil. True, that succulent salmon flesh comes from the distant Pacific Ocean. But the garden we nurture which in turn nurtures us--and the bees and butterflies and swallows--sprouts from our own terroir, the landscape we love, drawing on the same sunlight that warms our flesh. The organic wheat that Richard coaxes into sculptural and delicious loaves is part of the community of our region, grown just over the mountains in the high and windswept expanses of the neighboring San Luis Valley.

As this long day ends, what I am most grateful for is the gift of Richard's life. May that particular blessing--the tenth in this particular list--continue for a long, long time.

Making lemons into lemonade

Richard and I drove to Denver last Tuesday to prepare for his surgery for bladder cancer. First came a day at the VA Hospital--a wonderful place despite the many difficult cases it serves, because the staff has a culture of caring and competence. (It's what healthcare should be, with equal emphasis on "health" and "care.") After six hours and lots of tests, we found out that he's very healthy, but for that "beautiful" carcinoma with its filmy petals waving gently in the current of his bladder and for the fact that his blood is too thin--it's not clotting well. So he's got to give up his daily pot of green tea and give his blood time to thicken up, and his surgery has been rescheduled for July 1st.

Hearing his surgeon say that she was pushing back the surgery for a month was like sucking on lemons. We just wanted it over with. But you can only feel sorry for yourself for so long. So we made lemonade: We spent the rest of the week we planned for his surgery in Denver with my folks and Molly, our daughter, who had already flown in from San Francisco. It wasn't a vacation. But we did take all five of us in our Subaru Forester on a picnic to Barr Lake, northeast of Denver, where we walked a boardwalk over a lapping marsh--my Mom clumping along in her special boot after foot surgery and my Dad spotting birds passing on the breeze. We saw more orioles in the spring-green cottonwood trees lining the shoreline there than I've ever seen at one time in my life. And Molly and Richard spent a morning exploring art galleries. We took walks through the Capitol Hill neighborhood where we stayed, admiring the architectural details in the old stone mansions and 1920s apartment houses. We smelled irises and roses and lilacs in gardens growing from spring into summer.

And when we returned home, our kitchen garden was bursting. We picked a huge bag of spinach along with the first harvest of mixed lettuce. When we sat down to dinner that night our thoughts were not of bladder cancer or postponed surgery, but of the culture of caring at the VA Hospital, the chatter of orioles, and of tender new greens flavored by our very own patch of ground.

It seems to me that being healthy is not just about the technology and pharmacology of modern medicine. It's about how you take what comes, whether you use the lemons for lemonade, or let them lie bitter on your tongue. It's about taking joy where you can, and never forgetting to stop and smell the lilacs drooping over the garden wall, to walk hand in hand with the people you love, and to savor the taste of new lettuce, fresh from the soil.

Gardeners: optimistic by definition

"It's easier to deal with crises like this in the spring," a friend said today after hearing about my husband Richard's cancer. "It's such an optimistic time."

I puzzled over her remark all day. This evening, I stepped out into the kitchen garden. The wind was blowing hard up the valley, the air temperature was plummeting, and the storms that might have brought us moisture had passed without dropping the rain or snow we sorely need. It's been an extraordinarily spring dry so far. Today marks seven weeks since our last measurable precipitation--and two weeks since the doctor scoping Richard's bladder said cheerfully, "And that's a big carcinoma."

There's nothing optimistic about this spring, I thought with distinct grumpiness.

Then I looked at the asparagus bed--and counted six fat new spears poking up through the dry soil.


Not only is our valley sliding into drought, the season has been bitterly cold too. Last week the nighttime temperatures dipped to 22 degrees F--twice.

And still the asparagus spears are pushing up from their octopus-like skirts of roots a foot deep, headed unerringly toward light and the chance to produce more food and make new life as surely as their kind have done every spring for millions of years.

As I turned to head back into the house, I passed the tomato bed. One of the plants cocooned inside the insulating tepee-shaped walls-o-water caught my eye--a costoluto, for you heritage tomato fans. It boasted half a dozen tiny flower buds, readying itself for the warmer weather and the buzz-pollinating bumblebees it is sure will come.


I shook my head in wonder. That's optimism, I thought.

And then, as if a light had switched on in my brain, I understood my friend's comment. Spring is an optimistic time: here in the temperate latitudes of the northern hemisphere, life awakens from its frozen slumber, and pushed by instincts far more experienced than mine, sprints into the lengthening days, aiming for light and renewal.

I'm a gardener: I should understand optimism. I'm the one who presses tiny tomato seeds into damp soil of seedling pots in early March, when here at 7,000 feet elevation in the Southern Rockies, the days are still short and dark, and the nights long and frozen. I'm the one who watches the rows of pots each day for the first sign of green, exulting when the pairs of slender cotyledons push their way out of the seed. I plant in the belief that spring will come. And it does.

It occurs to me that I can rely on that same optimism that leads me to plant tomatoes in late winter to cope with Richard's cancer. Only in this case, it's not a seed I want to sprout, but a carcinoma I hope will be destroyed. I'm after stopping that growth, not encouraging it. But that's gardening too: cutting off a diseased limb to save the tree it grows from.

The optimism my friend meant, I think, is about believing in the continuing cycle of life. It's not hard to apply that to Richard and his bladder cancer. He's blessed with caring people dealing with him and they're upbeat about his prognosis. So I'll just press my seeds of hope and rejuvenation in the soil of the universe, in the belief that spring will flower for him, time and again.

"Beautiful" carcinoma

On Wednesday, my husband Richard watched on a monitor as a doctor maneuvered a tiny scope into his bladder to look at the mass revealed by a CT scan he had last week. (He's been peeing blood for weeks now, with no other signs of illness. After extensive testing, he was referred for a CT scan, and then this cystoscopy.) When the papillary carcinoma - a tumor caused by bladder cancer - came into view, Richard, ever the artist, described it as "beautiful."

"It's on a narrow stalk," he said later as we walked hand and hand under old trees in one of our favorite Denver neighborhoods, "and the doctor called it a sea anenome, but that's not quite right. It's too - I don't know, filmy."

"A sea pen?" I suggested, and he nodded.

"It's got these tissue-thin 'petals' at the top of the stalk, and I could see them waving gently in the current in my bladder." He stopped to admire the calligraphy of two redbud trees across the way, their spare branches painted in intense pink bloom, and the explosion of yellow flowers on a forsythia bush.

"It's a lovely color, too," he said. "It's really beautiful."

"You should draw it," I said.

"I might."

We got into the car and headed west through Denver, past the suburbs that sprawl right up to where the mountains muscle out of the Plains, and wound uphill in a rocky canyon on our way to the first of three mountain passes we would cross on our drive home. As I drove, I thought about cancer and the beauty Richard could see in this tumor.

My dictionary defines cancer as "the disease caused by uncontrolled division of abnormal cells." It traces the word to the Greek karkinos, or "crab," perhaps because the swollen veins supplying tumors looked like crabs' legs. What the dictionary doesn't say is that those "abnormal" cells are your own tissue with the factors that normally limit cell division turned off or blocked.

Cancers vary enormously, but what they have in common is uncontrolled growth, and the fact that the cells that divide without limit are our own cells - not strangers or foreigners. Richard's bladder tumor is simply bladder cells that have lost their ability to stop multiplying. His cancer is thus an intimate part of him. Unwanted, with potentially serious consequences - but still Richard.

So I can see embracing this sea-pen delicate tumor as part of one's self. But beautiful? That's a stretch for me.

On the drive to Denver, we saw a flock of about 50 white pelicans tracing the looping meanders of a hot-spring-fed stream through the grasslands of South Park. Watching the birds rise out of the grass on white wings edged with crisp black and flap with deliberate strokes, cupping the air, I felt the chill air rush through feathers. That's beauty. Winding our way back through the mountains on our way home, we passed two bighorn sheep grazing on new green grass right beside the highway, their winter coats shedding in shaggy hunks of fur. Those sheep looked like part of the landscape, their muscles chisled like stone, their pelage colored just like the weathered granitic boulders around them. That's beauty too.

Richard was born when the sun traveled in Cancer, the constellation named for the Crab in the myth of Hercules. The constellation was rising over the horizon at the time of his birth as well. Perhaps as a Cancer, he can see things about his namesake illness that I cannot see.

I know this: his company in my days is a blessing. I'm learning to appreciate every moment we have. That's beauty too.