My sister has breast cancer and I cannot seem to write about it.

It’s stage 0, ductal carcinoma in situ.  That’s nothing, right?  It’s like being a size 0 in clothes.  It’s not even real.  It doesn’t make any sense.

We have two friends right now who are actively fighting breast cancer.  One is stage 2, invasive.  One is metastasized.  I know there are more words for both, I just don’t know them all.  How dare I write about a little stage 0 when people we know are going through so much more?

Because she’s my sister.

My baby sister.

My only sibling.

Our mother died in 2013 from pneumonia contracted while on chemotherapy used to fight esophageal cancer.   Our father died in 2015 from glioblastoma.  Sound familiar?  It’s the cancer John McCain has.  It’s terminal, but treatable – if you want to spend the rest of your life being treated.  Dad didn’t (although he did endure a valiant first round of chemo and radiation and surgery).

Jenny has been told very good things so far.  Stage 0, no chemo, no radiation, surgery will get it all, how about some new boobs?  I am amazed – encouraged – at the team of people who have been assembled to help her battle this dreaded C-word.  She has a surgeon, a radiation oncologist, a plastic surgeon, a genetic tester, and probably people I don’t even know about.  “It takes a village”, you know.

I really don’t know what I can do for her.  And I realize that the obvious answer is to ask her, but just asking her feels like a burden to her.  Cancer took our dad and essentially took our mom.  All of the good news surrounding this diagnosis still can’t make me forget that it’s cancer.  She has found a place where she can face it positively and I don’t want to change that.  “Hey, can I come clean your house?  Remember, I did that when Dad was dying and lived with you.”  But I feel so disconnected . . . when our parents were diagnosed, we united in our fear and our grief.  We talked about those things honestly, and if one of us was down, the other one was there with lifting words.  Because we shared them as parents, we shared the experiences of their diagnoses, struggles, and deaths.

This is different.  Our perspectives are different.  She has a tumor to be removed and I don’t.  She has several doctors to meet with and has to balance that with work and parenting and wife-ing . . . she has to put on a brave face for her sons while also trying to be honest with them while also not saying “cancer” because at 6 and 8, they already know cancer is deadly.  I get to come home to my quiet apartment where my cat watches me write and cry and I don’t have to pretend for anyone.  I can barely imagine having cancer and trying to put on a happy face for THE MOST PRECIOUS PEOPLE IN THE UNIVERSE, your children, when perhaps all you want to do is burst into tears and let them give you giant bear hugs and tell you it will be OK.  (Which of course wouldn’t happen, because they are kids and they would be scared if Mommy burst into tears.  Mommy has to lead by example.  Parenting is hard.)

My sister will not die from this.  I do believe that.  STAGE ZERO, did you hear me?  I don’t want to be cavalier, but I think that’s about as good a diagnosis as you can get other than benign.

But to pretend everything is OK feels wrong.  It feels wrong because we hate cancer so much and we know what it can do.  It feels wrong because I know this is scary even if overall she is doing quite well.  It feels wrong because I don’t want her to come back one day and say, “I had f*cking cancer, Schwesti, and you acted like I had nothing more than the flu.”

My sister is a mom.  I think one of the gifts of parenthood is it gives you somewhere to focus other than yourself.  I don’t have that gift – hence, this pity party blog.  I have a baby sister and I think partly I am just feeling helpless because, what can I do?  I’m not her husband or her doctor or her sweet healing sons.  All of this seems to be going quite well (THANK GOD) and I actually don’t think she needs me for much.

But I need her.  I think I need to talk to her every day and assess how she is doing, find out what’s new, instead of being nonchalant like this thing doesn’t exist.  I think in her silence, I feel a distance, and I worry she is keeping something from me.  A protective wall she is building to save face, to hold it all together – just like I am fighting to retrain my brain in its approach to this cancer diagnosis.  “Stage zero ain’t the cancer we knew before, y’all.  It’s a new, friendly cancer, and it comes with new boobs!  Yippee!”

Bullshit.

I know this isn’t about me, ultimately.

But it is.

She is my sister, my very best friend, my other half, my Schwesti, my life mate since 1977.  She is kinder and more generous than me.  She is an excellent and adored mother, a beloved wife, a cherished sister, a fighter more than she even realizes.  She has been into the panic and come back out like Carol Ann into the Poltergeist.  She is made of steel.

This is sounding too much like a eulogy, so I’ll stop now.  But my heart is bursting with something I just can’t quite verbalize, and I had to try.

Until next time . . .

Someone I know has been writing a lot recently about his struggles with mental illness, and it’s got me thinking about how I feel about that label, particularly since it seems to apply to even such an everyday demon like anxiety, which I realize I battle.   Do I have mental illness?  Does he have mental illness?  Do most of us have mental illness?  Maybe there are varying degrees of mental illness.  I don’t feel mentally ill.  I feel more like a beautiful mind – but I saw that movie, and that guy definitely saw people who weren’t there, and that’s not right.  He figured it out, though.  I try to figure things out.  I don’t see people who aren’t there.  I just have what I self-diagnose as manic episodes, like Thursday when I got a couple of hours “to myself” at work and started catching up on things and it led me to think about everything I could get done, and I stayed until after 10:30pm.  So yesterday I was really tired, but I made it to Asheville and somehow stayed up until 1am, and I wasn’t even ready for bed then.  And today my husband says I’m still processing things at a manic speed, making plans for the day.

All of this might not matter to me if I didn’t know from observing other people (and maybe myself) that manic (if that is truly what I experience) only precedes a crash.  I also did some shopping Wednesday.  This is another symptom of manic, now that I think about it.  Nothing crazy, but again, I am aware.  I am also aware of my lows.  Times when I am inexplicably sad and just want to be alone . . . and write.  Today I am hyper and writing because my head is noisy.  Not noisy because people are talking to me – it just won’t stop working sometimes.  Because it’s beautiful and there’s a lot going on in there.

I knew a woman who said she was perfectly normal until her 40s.  She had a job, children, a husband.  Then she became symptomatic and was diagnosed bipolar.  She will be medicated for the rest of her life.  She is permanently disabled.  Lovely lady, can’t handle stress, can’t hold a job.  I fear this.  I don’t want it for myself.  I cite this not because I think I am bipolar, but because I am very self-aware and also not immune to anything.

One thing I have learned is that mental illness, or things that might not be mental illness but are things people struggle with emotionally and mentally, can be very divisive and lonely if not talked about and shared.  These things can also be stigmatized and take us down when we talk about them openly, because people, jobs, insurers will use them against us.  So this is risky, but if you know me, you know I’ve never shied away from candor.

These are just some thoughts.  And I am seeing my therapist this week and will share all of them with her.

Also, I dreamed about the house this week.  Still processing that loss, obviously.  I was inside it when the new owners came home, at which point I realized I wasn’t supposed to be there.  I was upstairs, in the master bathroom.  The new male owner was singing, “Our house, our house,” and I came downstairs and explained that I was so used to going by there, I forgot it wasn’t mine anymore.  I apologized and asked why they hadn’t moved any furniture in yet.  I don’t remember what he said.  Then I left.

I’m not sure this blog has convinced anyone I DON’T have mental illness. 😛  Thanks for reading.

I feel tired a lot lately.  I wonder if I am fighting something.  I saw something recently that said sometimes we have to let go of burdens just because they are heavy.  I think maybe that is why I am so tired.  I think I am burdened.  And when I am burdened, I write.  I let it all out here to free myself of the weight of whatever is wrestling around in my heart and making my mind so noisy.  Let’s see what’s in there tonight.

You may know that at this point, my husband and I have just one cat.  I keep thinking how not too long ago, we had three cats.  Dinnertime was a challenge not to trip over one or all of them.  It was one of the few times Julius came inside the house.

I realized today that our cat Zenith died almost a whole year ago.  It will be a year in September.  It feels like it was just a few months ago.  We lost Julius in Easter.  We don’t know what happened to him and we’ll always feel guilty about being the reason he was set free to disappear.  Although I know guilt is worthless, I can’t shake it.  And maybe some of you who read this aren’t into pets or especially aren’t into cats, so reading this for you is like I’m writing about snails and you feel nothing.  I feel like two-thirds of my kids are gone.  It hurts a whole bunch sometimes.  The cat I have left, Ditto, is probably going to be the last cat I have (because I am tired of them ruining furniture and my apartment complex wants $12.00 a month pet rent), and Zenith was the first cat I had.  Look at that – a whole full circle cat mom moment.  But for all the expense and damage and stress, these animals – as you know if you love them – are family.  Ditto is pretty much my best friend these days.  I come home and we sit out on the balcony and watch traffic.  Or I watch TV and he snuggles next to me.  Or we eat dinner together.  If I’m not out, this is my life.  He is a faithful roommate, never put off by my not-always-pleasant moods, always willing to listen.  And that $12.00 a month doesn’t even get him a jar of cat treats downstairs in the lobby.

My husband and I closed on the sale of our first home together last week.  It wasn’t the first home we lived in together, but the first one we bought together.  We bought it in 2009 and in 2012, we began working in different cities.  The family who bought it from us Friday seems perfect to grow in this house, and I am so happy for them and our neighbors.  I am so relieved that the house has life in it again, and people to watch over it and keep it safe.  But as with every house I let go of, handing over those keys and knowing I CAN’T go inside again hurts a little.  We had a lot of good times there.  We put a lot of love and effort into that house.  And letting it go means letting go of possibilities like the amazing patio we imagined adding one day, the kids we thought we might have, the covered front porch and storm doors I wanted, the master bathroom remodel we never got to, painting the master bedroom closet that never happened (apparently this closet only bothered me) . . . but it also means we never, ever, for the foreseeable future, have to spend any more time mowing the yard.  So, here’s to carefree weekends in one of our two cities, trying to become people who DO stuff instead of just people who ARE somewhere.  I have made so many promises to travel and visit friends and family, and I realize that these are actually challenging promises for me since my job never stops and I find it stressful to actually say, “I am not going to be at work for these days.  I am buying plane tickets.  I am going away.”  I think I really must work on this.  These are chains I put on myself, actually.

An alarming number of my friends at work are seeking happiness at different workplaces.  Yea for them, woe is me.  I’m not going to write a whole lot about that because this is a public blog, but as you can imagine, there are just a whole bunch of different emotions and challenges that come when people quit a job and you don’t get to see, enjoy, and depend on them every day.  Fortunately, we are staying friends in real life, so there’s that.

Something else I won’t write a whole lot about that because this is a public blog, but something which I think is actually causing me a lot of anxiety, is that we have had a lot of technical difficulties at work in recent weeks, unrelenting since the weekend.  This has caused work to pile up.  I can’t stay late or come in early to get ahead of anything, because every day I still don’t have resolution of the technical issues.  It is starting to wear me down.  It’s like watching a slow leak in your boat fill, and you know what ultimately happens?  I drown.   Well, that’s how it feels.  The reality is probably that I’ll get through this fine, just have several days of working my a** off to play catch-up.  All the more reason to buy plane tickets and go somewhere soon, right?

I also have the concerns and challenges of my friends and family weighing on me . . . things that are beyond my control, but things that matter to me because those people matter to me.

My mom’s best friend died last month of non-Hodgkins lymphoma.  She was a vivacious, funny, lovely woman who became a friend of mine, as has her sister.  Ultimately, her physical life was so difficult, coupled with mourning the loss of her husband who died in January (on her birthday), that she was ready to move on to the great beyond.  But she is missed.  She was a treasure.

I found out today that two women I know have cancer that has spread to different parts of their bodies.  Having lost my father to cancer (the same cancer that John McCain has, actually) and my mother to pneumonia-caught-while-on-chemo-for-cancer, I really, really, hate cancer.  These women have children, and in one case, I empathize with the adult children and in another case, I keep thinking how horribly cruel it is when anyone loses a parent while they are still a pre-college-age kid.  I think of the spouses, the patients themselves.  I just think it SUCKS.  My sister said tonight that she wonders when her diagnosis is coming.  I feel the same way.  Some days it feels like EVERYONE has cancer and we’re just waiting for ours to show up.  That’s a terribly bleak outlook, but some days, it really does feel that way.  I guess it’s good that we aren’t hospice nurses.

I don’t have a lot of silver lining in this blog.  I still feel pretty heavy, mostly because a lot of things aren’t resolved.   And because I feel tired.  I think it is time for me to exercise and/or go see my therapist again (neither of them right this second).  I also think this was a pretty lame blog, more like a journal entry.  If you made it to the end, thanks for reading, and I’m sorry for the dump.

 

Small space living reminds me a little bit of planning our wedding. The ability to say “no” is essentially mandated by the itty bitty space restricting each decision. As I told my boss, you would think that working in a tiny cubicle since 2007 would have sort of inspired the need to purge, but it didn’t. There are always more places to put things in an office, and there is an essential need to keep things for my job. I don’t think the Bar or our clients would let us off the hook for getting rid of case-related materials and citing as our excuse that we simply ran out of room for them. But, I digress.

As many of you know, being in a house – especially a large house – provides ample opportunity to keep things. I notice it every time we offer something to our neighbors. One of them said this weekend, “I don’t really need this giant ladder, but I’ll keep it for you until you need it again.” HAVE I MENTIONED WHAT AMAZING NEIGHBORS WE HAVE?! (Said neighbor is not storing our ladder. Another neighbor inherited it instead.) We have a big house, and an attic, and a shed, and a garage. We have amassed a lot of stuff since 2009, and even before we got to this house. I see the same behavior with my sister, who has a big house, including basement and attic, in additional to numerous farm sheds. I don’t have room to put things and she kindly doesn’t mind just having them at her place. We have long talked about “permanent loans” because she knows it’s hard for me to let go of things. I hope that’s changing.

I didn’t mind having my parents’ and my “stuff” sitting in front of the treadmill at my house because it didn’t cost us anything other than a few square feet, and it caused me some annoyance every time I looked at it and knew I should go through it and get rid of it. What really annoyed me was trying to go through it in a hurry (impossible) as we moved out of the house, and now knowing it’s in a storage unit, which costs money and is inconvenient. (Rationalization #1: it is not the only stuff in the storage unit. It is not the sole reason we spend that money.) But yes, I must get through it. I want to scan and organize what’s worth keeping so it’s easy to access and only requires moving a flash drive, disc, or terabyte next time. It will also make me sneeze a lot less. Paper becomes very, very dusty.

The apartment I’m in now is spacious in some ways that don’t really matter (I’m looking at you, high ceilings that hold nothing but air, overhead lights, and ceiling fans). The bedroom does fit a king size bed and both of our dressers and night stands. (And I realize now that the dressers need to be taller, like all the way to the ceiling with ladder attachments on the front, so they hold more stuff and I can reach it all.) The closet is a walk-in, but a small walk-in. I am about to spend a lot of time perusing Ikea, The Container Store, Target, and so on to see what containers are going to work best for all of the things we’ll need to store overhead on the shelves. I’m about to get rid of every piece of clothing I don’t love wearing or need to wear. I am not allowed to visit Bath and Body Works. I am not allowed to buy more shampoo, soap, nail polish, lotion, perfume, a variety of makeup products, laundry products, stationery, Scotch tape, wrapping paper, tissue paper, gift bags, socks, bedding, pajamas, and a slew of other things for a very long time. (I am low on wine, though. Wine donations being accepted pronto.)

I have trouble getting rid of things and saying no to taking new things. Being in this tiny apartment changes that. 727 square feet of attractive living space makes me want everything to have its place. As Pete and I emptied out our house, I could see again what it looked like when it wasn’t crammed full of more crap than we really needed. It looked spacious and magnificent and tidy. It looked reasonable. It didn’t look like I had hit every clearance rack or was nearing hoarder status or was a diva who needed more than 20 lotions and nail polishes and almost as many shampoos.

When I have space, I will fill it. A lot of people do, and I’m OK with it to a point. I was OK with it at the house, even as I knew it was too much and I needed to weed through it and get rid of a lot of it. I thought I had more time. I didn’t expect to move right now. I’m sure my mom didn’t expect to die when she did, either. (I credit/blame her with my keep-it-all tendencies. I credit Dad with my buy-lots-of-it tendencies. Most of my inheritance of light bulbs went to Good Will this weekend.)

Houses require more stuff than apartments. That’s why they give you yards and garages and sheds and attics, so you can put all your stuff somewhere. My new space is going to teach me how to do with less. Unless my new, smaller space is organized efficiently, I will hate it. I will hate accessing anything every time. I logically know that I have been given enough space to live comfortably, within my means. I logically know that I don’t need to keep so much stuff, lest I die and leave it for others to deal with . . . or lest we move again.

I still am who I am. I can’t just toss the boxes of mail from my family and my childhood friends. But I did pass along the adorable sombrero headband I was given Friday for Cinco de Mayo. It was awfully cute, but it made a stranger happy when I took it off my head and gave it to her, and now I don’t have to find somewhere to store it for the rest of my life, or drive it to Good Will later.

Baby steps.

I like to think if Mom were here, she would let me teach her these lessons I’ve learned about letting go of THINGS. But it took going through her almost-70-years worth of keeping things to really hammer it in for me. So instead, I think she and Dad are just helping me through this process from where they are, and sometimes I talk to them and they agree that it’s OK when I let their stuff go, like Dad’s imitation Uggs that are a men’s size 11 that I finally parted with over the weekend. He understood that I am a men’s size 7 and I did not need those shoes. He said that was just fine and I needed to make some room for Pete’s shoes in our new tiny uptown closet. Then he said he had to go because Elvis was putting on a concert. (Did this conversation really happen? I’ll just let you make up your own minds about that. Sometimes, it’s just how you look at things.)

When moving, especially with someone who isn’t a packrat and to a much smaller space, questions keep coming up: “Do we need to keep this?”  “Why did we keep this?”  “Do we need to keep this?”  My husband spent part of yesterday sawing out carvings from his old guitar because they are memories that matter to him, so I know he gets it.  But at the end of the day, he’ll tuck that under his arm and I’ll be dragging behind him with a wagon full of journals since 1983 and mail since around the same time and also sentimental things my parents saved, not to mention every single photo they ever took and printed out, and a cat, and who knows what else.  So, I recognize the imbalance, and I’m working on it.  I REALLY AM.  Look, I just threw out a bunch of nice things people wrote about Mom because they were scanned and I knew I didn’t need to keep the paper (even though the computer might die one day).  It hurt.  Those things were written for her get-well book, and she never got better.  It is super hard for me to move out of those memories sometimes.  I’m going to throw out my bronzed baby shoes (two pairs for some reason) because I don’t need them and all they mean to me is that my parents kept them.  I don’t want to leave them for someone else to lament tossing when I’m dead.

I would miss Easter lunch if I continued this inventory, but I have been processing in my mind why I keep things, in part because I want to understand it and in part because when there isn’t a good reason, I can let the things go.  One thing that came up yesterday is that I found an email from April 12, 2006, at 13:43:23pm, written from a friend of mine in response to a party I was having.  I’d asked for his sister-in-law’s email address because I wanted to invite her and her husband, and my friend replied, “Since you and [she] are our main babysitters, we’ll have to figure something out.”  Now, the first thing that comes to mind is that I never should have printed an email.  Eventually I just made a folder in my email online of ones I wanted to keep.  And I couldn’t figure out why this one was in my cedar chest with all my journals and notes from my parents until I looked at that date again.  It’s the date my friend’s daughter died.  She was 4 months old and on the day he was writing me that email, wondering who would babysit her so he could come to my party, she died.

Yes.   I could go the rest of my life never remembering this, and if my friends who are the parents of this sweet baby read this blog, I am sorry for reminding them.  But the truth is, we never forget she lived and died.  And reading that email made me so happy to remember another VERY REAL moment when that precious child lived.  When she was someone to plan around, when she was someone I got to babysit.

No.  I won’t continue to print lots of emails.  The truth is, if my email provider crashed and I lost all the emails I saved, I’d never know what I lost.  I’d be sad and I’d know I lost emails with my parents, but I’d have my memories, until they fade.  That’s what happens.  That’s life.  But so long as I have the power to try and preserve, I will.

Consider me a one-woman historian.  I hope I become famous one day so it matters.  I am trying to become an electronic preserver, and I looked into having someone else scan my/my parents’ photos, but it cost too much.  My motivation now is the cost to store this stuff.  It’s not a lot of stuff, in case you were wondering.  It could fit nicely into the apartment’s 4×6″ storage closet for $50/month and probably have room left over.  But I don’t want it to.  So I better set myself some goals, like scanning a box a week or an envelope a day or something.  I do think the things are worth reviewing and some are worth preserving.  The letters my grandmother, great aunt, mother, and mom’s best friend exchanged are priceless to me.  I have so enjoyed reading them and learning about how different things were when their first landline phone was installed, for example, and how that was an expense Grandma didn’t know if she wanted to take on.

But I acknowledge that some of this stuff is causing me stress because it weighs me down.  I told my husband, there’s a reason they call it “trappings”.  It causes me stress because those of you who don’t appreciate the keeping of things look down on it, and I don’t like that.  It causes me stress because my parents started dying in April 2013 and I still haven’t finished getting through it.  Honestly, that’s not a good indicator for success.  But wading through emotional tasks is wading through a pond made of syrup.  It moves slowly.  I stop to relive every damn thing.  That’s both an argument for and against keeping things, in my opinion.  Because I need to be more present, but my past is precious.  And aren’t we always taught to study history?

Thanks for reading.  And happy Easter if that is a part of history you are remembering today.

Have you ever made a decision that seemed to conflict with something else that also felt right? Get ready for a big announcement for some of you: my husband and I have decided to sell our “forever home” and downsize. We’re in our early forties, so this seems a bit premature, but there is some solid reasoning behind it. We live apart because we work in cities hours apart. We bought a two-story house with thousands of square feet to live in together and maybe have kids. Neither of those things is happening. My commute, which was about half an hour when we moved here, is now much closer to an hour. I can’t keep this house clean by myself and most of the yard work falls to my husband on weekends. We spend all week apart to come together on weekends to do chores, basically. And maybe “that’s life”, but we’ve decided it’s not the life we choose – not even for this “forever home” paradise – because it’s not one we get to enjoy frequently or long enough. I spend most of my weeknights battling traffic to get home after several errands to make dinner in a hangry state to eat by 8pm to get to bed by 10pm and do whatever else I need to do in those couple of hours, which includes talking to my husband while I move around the house and irritate him with the sound of trash/recycling cans, dishes, laundry, feeding cats, making dinner, and so on. Or else I take myself out to dinner, relax, and lament the cost and calories.
What prompted our discussion/decision was driving by a rezoning notice in an empty pasture one weekend and realizing that even more apartments were coming between me and my job. We’ve already endured more housing, some outlets, some businesses . . . it felt like the straw that broke the camel’s back. Pete asked if I would consider moving closer to uptown and I said I would. My answer surprised even me. Owning a house like this, and a yard like this, has always been my dream. My first house was over 1,000 sq. ft. on half an acre in Monroe, NC. And again, I drove an hour to/from the office and spent two hours push-mowing the darned yard. I was intimidated by riding lawn mowers, although Dad rightly said that yard deserved one.
For me, this move is a pretty big decision, even as I declared that I wasn’t incredibly attached to our house (wrong). I attach to EVERY place. I’m pretty sure I could go to prison and make fond memories of my cell. I suppose this is good, that I make the best of every place I go, because right now I am having a hard time swallowing the reality of losing 1,000 or more square feet in this move. Pete says he can do without stuff and he means it. I say I can do without stuff and I replace the stuff I let go of with more stuff. People know this about me: I like stuff. I keep things, reuse things, wait to find a use for things, like to buy things in bulk . . . none of this seems to be jiving with my soon-to-be small-space living. I fear I will have to own one roll of toilet paper at a time. One kind of shampoo. One bottle of Bath & Body Works lotion. This is like the end times!
There is some peace in letting go of things. Some of the clutter I create causes me anxiety. But not having room for the things I want to keep also causes me anxiety.
Sitting in traffic also raises my blood pressure and causes wear-and-tear on my car. There are trade-offs.
I also worry about my cats, who have such a lovely life right now with their cat door. They come and go all day and night as they please. Ditto brought me a shrew just this morning. How will he do in an apartment? Will he hate me, being confined indoors? He’s getting older, so maybe not. But he has a REALLY GOOD LIFE right now and I feel awful making this decision for him. (I am focused on Ditto because if I go to an apartment, Julius is going to live at the farm, God bless Jenny. I will pay for every single thing he needs, but that cat is NEVER going to make it “on the inside”, nor will I survive living with him on the inside.) My dad would not understand my concern for these animals. Here’s another sore spot if I rent an apartment (versus a condo or town home from an individual): they charge “pet rent” now. How do you like that? There’s the non-refundable pet fee because, let’s face it, pets aren’t nice to things (come see the living room couch we’ll be putting at the curb if you don’t believe me), and then there’s pet rent for . . . what? I’ve seen dog spas and dog parks at these apartments, but nothing for cats. Let me know what Ditto gets out of this. Will someone be coming to scoop his litter box daily? I guess collecting his poop when I set it outside my door counts. (Valet trash pickup is also a thing now.)
I assume this is hard for Pete, too, and I think he’s said as much. But maybe because he’s a man, or maybe because he isn’t one chromosome away from a hoarder, or maybe because he just isn’t ME, I don’t think he spends every day wading in and out of a variety of emotions. My Lord, it really is exhausting. Everything gained means something lost. But I truly am optimistic and think Pete and I are making the right choice for us. Give me a couple of weeks of short drives (or walks) to work and less house keep, some nice weekends when we don’t have any yard work to do and all Ditto looks for is a nice sunbeam to lie in and he doesn’t wake us up bringing us snakes, birds, rodents, and insects, and you might see us on an uptown living brochure somewhere.
You’ll also see us visiting our neighbors that we’re going to miss terribly – because again, everything gained is something lost.
Stay tuned.

Photo courtesy of Pete, who finds my desk amusing/disturbing/unnecessary/unworkable.

A lot to figure out as I begin my “own” blog site, but here it is.  Thanks to all of you who have encouraged my writing.  My parents always wanted me to write professionally (as that was my young person’s dream).  None of us knew it would be their illnesses and deaths that would finally inspire me to write for public consumption, but I think they would be damn proud of and touched by it.

So, here’s to them – and to all of you who read my musings and told me to keep them coming.  Thanks to Pete for helping me navigate the technical side of blogging.  More later!