One bad lemon

Today I learned from a friend that the cancer she was being treated for had spread. This was I'm sure a shock to her as she'd been told her prognosis was better than most with pancreatic cancer as she had been a candidate for a special surgery only done when people had a good prognosis. Since the surgery in the Spring she has been through chemo and was undergoing radiation. She was about halfway through it I think and now this. As I write about this I can't really find words to describe not only how I felt when hearing this (no matter how bad it was undoubtedly a shadow of how bad she felt) but how impressed I was with her acceptance, grace and strength in the face of this. She says she has no intention of being anyone's lab rat now that the cards are on the table. She has no intention of prolonging her life if that life is spent sick to her stomach and unable to enjoy the company of family and friends. We all say this, but how often does that resolve fade away when faced with the unambiguous, real end of one's existence?

This person is very dear to me despite the fact that I hadn't seen her often in the last decade or so. I want to go back in time and make up for that; to spend time with her that isn't available. She taught me much in the 31 years I've known her, not the least of which was how to make lemonade when life handed you lemons. But this time by her own admission, she can't do it. No more lemonade. This is one really bad lemon. And one more lesson she's taught: the ultimate in blooming with grace and strength exactly where she is.

(As a note, this is not the same person I wrote about last month.)

Routine

When I was growing up I watched my mother who was born in the 10th year of the 20th Century, do the same thing every day. Probably much the same (with different specifics) as her mother before her.  My mother got up, fixed breakfast, worked around the house (cleaning, sewing, cooking), fixed lunch, worked around the house (cleaning, sewing, cooking), fixed dinner, sat in the living room watching TV and sewing, went to bed and repeated everything the next day. At least this is what it looked like to me - a routine occasionally punctuated with trips to the grocery, church, getting her hair done, visiting relatives or other things that bored me to death. Where was the excitement? Where was the newness? How could anyone possibly be happy with a routine life. And when I asked her about doing something novel, she'd say "later." Over time I stopped asking. She had made her choice.

Fast forward 40+ years and I find myself doing exactly what she did but with my own set of 21st Century activities. I can't easily visit relatives since they are all either deceased or disbursed around the country. And when something threatens to break my routine, I often say, "later." My routine is my meditation. I wonder if hers was too?

Another "aha!" moment

A new friend stopped in last night on her way to her get-away home here in Michigan. It was a lovely spring evening - warm enough to sit on the deck for a while - and we chatted about this and that as the work week came to a close and the sun went down.

One of the topics touched on was my interest in a small house in my friend's town. I'd looked at it months back because I was itchy again to move to what was more in line with the "there" I was looking for nearly seven years ago when I left the Chicago area. A place where I would fit, feel at home and bloom. But decided not to risk trying to sell my current loft in a down market. Prudent, I told myself. About six weeks ago I heard it had been offered for short sale. Too bad, I thought, the owners must really be in trouble. Maybe I could afford it now, but no, can't own two homes. Not prudent. Then just last weekend, I was driving by the house and saw something posted on the front door. I pulled in the driveway and walked up to the door. A foreclosure notice; the home was now a HUD property. Wow, I thought, that's really too bad. Those owners must be in a world of hurt. And again the little voice said, I'll bet this place is really cheap now! But no, not prudent. Owning two homes is crazy when you are consciously choosing a very limited income way to live. Crazy, stop thinking about it.

Back to the conversation...my friend said she  hoped she didn't offend me and that while she loved my current home (this was her first visit), she really saw me in the other house. Said it suited me; that she saw me there. I quickly countered that while it was a lovely home and certainly the land had been a dream I'd held, that when I saw myself there I saw myself as 30 years old, but that sadly I'm not going to turn 30 my next birthday, but something that is a  multiple of it. That a house requires much more work than a condo. And while these words were coming out of my mouth, I realized that what I was really saying had nothing to do with money directly. It had everything to do with a way of thinking that was limiting me. A way of thinking that limited my parents and kept them from doing things they wanted to when they could have. Not wildly reckless things, but things that would have made them smile and given them memories. Like my father taking a job in Chicago when his company wanted to transfer him (he ended up in the same job, hating it his entire career) or the family taking vacations (we took one vacation while I was a child and I  know my mother had traveled a great deal before she married my father.) Of course, my parents smiled and had memories, but you know what I mean....I'm talking about their foregoing what someone recently called "re-liveable moments". And here I was, thinking I was being financially prudent when I was avoiding something that might be just such a reliveable moment. How smart was that? How often had I misunderstood my own intentions and limited myself unnecessarily?

I'm once again reminded that blooming where you are planted is not only about a place. You can be planted in a mindset too. And like any garden, a mindset needs tending too. I need to do a bit more weeding, to clear out misperceptions that are holding me back. And I need to enrich my mind garden with some ideas or dreams. Rather than focus unnecessarily on limits and what isn't possible, as my friend said describing her own life, my "aha" was that I need to "figure it out" as I go; not live tomorrow today or get stuck in yesterday. Yes, I am getting older, but I'm not "older" yet. Blooming where I'm planted means I need to correct mistakes, celebrate successes and smile and remember how I did both...

What's in the pantry?

I've been thinking about cooking even more with what I have rather than what I want so tonight I made dinner with what I found. I do this a lot, but I want to do it even more. Needs are very different than wants and I plan to focus on meeting my needs for a while.

I pulled some salmon out of the freezer and some barley and mushrooms I'd dried out of the pantry. Then I grabbed some green beans from the fridge. It was a meal. I cooked the barley with a bit of onion that was left in the fridge and the dried mushroom. I cooked it in chicken broth from the pantry rather than water. I roasted the green beans with pepper and some onion sugar (great stuff if you can find it!) and baked the salmon with a sauce of lemon juice, honey and some ground ginger and cinnamon. It was tasty. It was good for me in many ways.

Unfortunately when eating a green bean I also knocked off one of the brackets from my braces and so now I'm waiting to hear from the orthodontist's office whether I can wait til my regular appointment or if I have to make a special trip in to get it fixed. Rats... nothing is easy....