Days

I can’t tell you how many days it’s been since I blogged on this website.  Or how long it’s been since I wrote a single word–my memoir woodfire cookbook abandoned.  I have spent the last few days re-acclimating myself to my work, reading another fine memoir by another Kimball–Kristen Kimball who is a writer who also runs a whole-diet CSA organic farm in upstate New York.  It’s a book about gratitude and hard work.  And food.

My book was about food–and life.  And certainly gratitude.

I’m grateful my daughter is doing well with my new grandson who turns two the 30th of March; grateful my 86-year old father’s Parkinson’s disease seems to have stabilized and he’s enjoying the winter in Florida; grateful my son Josh with Down Syndrome has nothing worse than recurrent bladder infections; grateful my youngest son John (just diagnosed with testicular cancer) so far has escaped chemotherapy.  Two years of cat scans and blood tumor testing are in front of us before we can rest easy.

My days instead of writing have been filled with research finding the best cancer centers, moving him downstate where we still have apartments in Romeo and close proximity to Karmanos; redoing an apartment for him with wood floors rather than carpeting–both can give off unhealthy gases; celebrating life with good food and dinners out for all of us I can’t really afford–but can’t not afford–dinners that kept our spirits up, our gratitude in front of our minds.  As if disregarding that gratitude for even a second would result in catastrophe.

I have given up teaching at Northern.

Our lives have changed drastically since Christmas and yet we haven’t changed at all.  It’s more we just move differently, feeling our way as one does in a pitch dark moonless room, shuffling a step at a time, hands outstretched in front of us.  Yet not without help from friends.  “Take a step to the left,” one of them might say.  We move together some of the time and yet each one of us finds our way alone.

For months I have nothing but watch old sit coms:  The Dick Vandyke show, Andy Griffith, Cheers or Frasier.  Or maybe Forensic Files–anything that might turn one’s brain to mush.

But now I’m reading again and even writing–one shuffled step forward in the dark.