This has been our recovery week, perhaps the first of many such weeks. We left the house Monday morning while it was still dark, highways nearly empty of cars, commuters likely still at their kitchen tables sipping coffee or pushing the snooze button one last time. Darrell’s surgery was just hours away and we were en route for Rochester General.
He’d been instructed to bring nothing along, the lightest he’s ever traveled for an overnight. I’d packed sparingly toting my journal, novel, and a Ziploc baggie filled with trail mix to fill the hours of waiting that would tick by purposely slow as if to punctuate the weight of the cancer.
36 hours later, we were traveling the same route home, the passing in-between still settling over and into us. We were both exhausted; my body simply tired, his needing to heal. Hope rode along in the front seat. The surgery had gone well. Worry had somehow gotten in the car, too whispering almost indiscernibly from the back seat, “We don’t know yet about the biopsy results.”
What choice was there but to wait: wait to heal, wait for results, wait for life to establish a new normal. We waited on opposite couches, a small fire in the woodstove warming us in the cool mornings. Always a person of routines, Darrell continued to wake early, waiting again, this time for me to rise and scramble his eggs, to peanut-butter his toast. Milo, his tail hanging low, was the only one outwardly disgruntled by the waiting as he whimpered at Darrell and wondered why he wouldn’t just get down on the darn floor so he could curl up in his lap.
We adjusted positions, medications, and routines and found comfort in scraps of normalcy: bringing in tomatoes from the garden, slow walks around Mud Puddle pond out behind the barn, phone calls from friends. We fed ourselves on good food and documentaries traveling back in time with ZZ Top, Rush, and Michael Jordan. We read, napped, and read some more. We let things go where we could.
Toward the end of the week, we both noted, again, the bruised peaches wrinkling up in the fridge. I could toss them into the compost pile I supposed but in our house, that’s always the last resort. The word rotten fruit doesn’t exist in our vocabulary. We call withering fruit by dozens of other names like pie, apple sauce, or cider long before we call it compost.
There’s still potential in fruit that is long past its peak, you just have to work a little harder to see it, adjust your expectations, consider all possibilities, and ultimately make a choice. Do I turn this into something nourishing, tasty even, or just trudge it out back to eventually become garden soil?
I weighed my options as I picked through the 8-quart basket of seconds I’d been so delighted with just the week before. Before all this. I decided to dig for gold and work around the bruises hoping to harvest enough for a pie.
I paused a lot making the pie thinking about how our lives had been bruised by cancer and wondering what potential it might hold in the weeks, months and years ahead. I paused rolling out my crust to watch him nod off feeling a swell of great good luck at being able to travel this life together, at being able to bake a pie in this crooked old farmhouse of ours. We’d rode the waves of change to new territory before, the essence of his kind heart a steadying force that was dependable even in times of upheaval.
Darrell, a peach himself, deserved this pie.
Before tucking the filling in beneath the top crust I remembered that there were berries still ripening in the garden. While there was not the glut of summer, there was enough to brighten this pie, to add a touch of the unexpected when the first slice revealed itself.
And yes, I know, it’s just a pie and I’ve gone on way too long about it. Cancer is big. A pie is small. Who cares about a pie when so much is at stake and yet it’s reminding me of potential, of making use of what’s in front of us, or reveling in small bits of unexpected joy. Yes, yes, yes. It’s just a pie in the midst of our first week of recovery and I can’t wait to dig in.
Mindfulness - in practice 