lead thou me on

A big day at the hospital.  Head-to-toe PET/CT scan and a brain MRI.  Six hours of what used to be torture (being poked, holding still, waiting around), really wasn't so bad today.   During the MRI they played some choice music, including some of my favorite songs of all time, and I wondered if the radiologist will read a smile on my face.  It was there the whole time.  With no medication in the bloodstream but the radioactive tracers and contrast dye.

And I even have the patience to wait till tomorrow for the results.  No problem.  In fact, I could wait a week without wanting to know the news.  But come tomorrow it will.  And who knows?  It's anybody's game at this point.  Right?

I used to think of upcoming scans as brick walls.  Unbreakable, cold, impossible obstacles preventing me from planning a day beyond them.  We have lived in these three month chunks (which will now be shortened to 2 month chunks, by the way) with barriers at both ends.  The wall is broken down only by getting through the day they tell you the news, and then you can see what the next chunk should be filled with.  Treatment, sickness, fear, joy, hope?  Then you can plan.  But only to the next wall. So you see, you are always trapped.  With no end in site. 

But tonight I am reshaping that image.  I am adding a door.  When you plan a garden (I remember hearing on some garden show, P. Allen Smith?), you create 'rooms' with a little teaser entrance into the next space.  An opening that intrigues and lures you to another place, with a different design and feeling.  So behind the door that is tomorrow is just another place that I get to enjoy after loving the space I left behind. 

"Keep Thou my feet; I do not ask to see
The distance scene, one step enough for me."

Enough cheese.

Trying not to read into the fact that it is September 11th tomorrow, and the forecast calls for rain, wind, and thunderstorms.  Yikes!

I nailed an old horseshoe we found when we were building this house above the front door to counter my superstitions.  We have come up with a few fun stories about its origins (Butch Cassidy rode through these parts after all).  I will walk under it tomorrow on my way to the hospital while throwing some salt over my shoulder, crossing my fingers, and saying a prayer.  And maybe someday the legend will conclude that the woman who found that horseshoe, a hundred years later, turned out to be a very lucky woman indeed. 

Not super likely.  Stay tuned...