Don't leave me!

I have a thing for leaves. I may have mentioned that once or twice before. My house is full of leaf-motifs.

Mostly, I have a thing for fall leaves. I absolutely love the colors of fall.There is something incredibly soothing about coming over the hill on the way home and seeing a huge splash of golds, reds and oranges from the windshield. (If my windshield wasn't so bug-splattered, the view would be even better!)

My only complaint is that  the beauty is fleeting. I wish the leaves wouldn't leave so quickly! But that's why we have photographs, I guess! So I'm sharing a couple of mine from  today.

He went for a walk and came back with flowers

I have such a wonderful son. He's 15 years old, but he will always be my little bug. He went out for a walk and came back with flowers.

For me.

He even put them in a vase before he presented them to me. He found them all in the roadside ditches he walked.

I was so touched, I almost cried on the spot. But I held back the tears until after he left because somehow when I cry in front of them -- even when they are happy tears -- they think something is wrong.

I have such a wonderful son. Oh, I said that already, didn't I?

Carrots after a frost

After two hard freezes, two nights in a row, it is safe to say that my garden is toast. I didn't cover it either night, because truth be told, it wasn't a very good garden.

I'm blaming cancer. I kind of lost my interest in weeding and watering my garden about the time it got really hot and I wasn't feeling very good after my chemo treatments. It all seemed like a lot of icky, sticky work and I wasn't in the mood to sweat much. Mostly because the doctors didn't want me using deodorant until I was completely healed from the surgery. And without deodorant in the hot sun, the amount of stink that emanated from my armpits made me even more nauseous than the chemo.

So the garden languished and it wasn't until it was almost dusk on the evening of the first freeze that I decided we should dig up the onions and carrots. So there we were, in the twilight, my daughter and I, digging up carrots from hard-packed, neglected soil. We got through all the onions and half-way through the row of carrots before we just couldn't see well enough to dig anymore. And since we were leaving town very early the next morning, the other half the row would have to wait until after a second night of frost.

I have heard, however, that leaving the carrots in for a freeze or two only makes them sweeter. The ones we dug up before the frost were pretty sweet. Tonight, I plan to dig up the rest of the row. We'll have to do a taste test, I guess, and see if there is any truth to the sweeter-after-a-frost deal.

And if they just taste like frozen mushy carrots, well I guess I'll remember that for next year....when hopefully cancer and surgery don't make me garden neglectful!

Where did I go?

I look in the mirror. I have bags under my eyes. My eyebrows are slowly disappearing. The little bit of hair that I do have on my head stands up defiantly, my jowls are sagging even more than they used to, and suddenly I wonder, "Where did I go?"

Who is this woman looking back in the mirror at me? She looks worn out. Tired. She used to have a sparkle in her eyes. She used to stand a little straighter.

Could cancer really have done that to me?

I look a little closer.

"Nah. I don't think cancer did that to you," I say back to myself. "I think YOU did that to you, with a little help from your friends Adriamycin and Cytoxan."

What really changed when I found out I had cancer was that I wasn't as teflon-coated as I thought I was. And it affected me.

Or maybe more appropriately, it aged me.

You see, I had convinced myself that, even at 50, I was really only about 38.

I felt good. I felt strong. I felt pretty knowledgeable. And I actually was happy with the way I looked...well, most of the time, anyway.

Now the feeling good days come and go, all the drugs cloud my memory and the lines on my face have gotten more pronounced. And I worry; worry about the way I am and will be.Yeah, my hair will eventually grow back, but will my exuberance? Or will I just spiral into crotchety old woman?

I have finished the every-two-weeks Adriamycin and Cytoxan treatments and now move into weekly Taxol treatments, starting next Monday. For 12 weeks. The time between the AC treatments seemed to drag on FOREVER. Maybe having weekly treatments will make the time seem to go faster, but the end of all this still seems so far away, I can't even wrap my brain around it.

But on the positive side, time stops for no one.

So, hey, I got that going for me, which is nice.

Wordless Wednesday: Keep your chin up

Already a plan for next year...

At some point this summer -- probably when it was ridiculously hot and I was doing chemo, and it wasn't raining, and keeping up with the watering seemed like an insurmountable task (not to mention a huge drain, pun intended, on the pocketbook) -- I let my flowers go.

Go unweeded.

Go unwatered.

Go uncared-for.

Despite the neglect, the Black-eyed Susans are thriving, and so are these beauties....

Of course, I'm talking about my purple fountain grass again. (I just talked about 'em -- well, actually not talked because it was a Wordless Wednesday post, so my description remained brief, although not entirely without words -- a few weeks ago.)

I have decided that this fancy grass, despite the fact that they are NOT My Two Acres winter hardy, will be a huge feature in my front yard landscaping next year.

What really clinched the plan for next year? A nearly six-foot tall, 15-year old boy.

We're all standing outside the other night and suddenly, my son looks over the railing and says, "This bed really looks nice."

Whoa!!!!

"This bed looks really nice." It was like music to my ears!

If a couple of purple fountain grass annuals and a line of purple petunias (with some volunteer red moss roses thrown in for good measure) can get my son to comment about how nice it looks, you just gotta run with it.

So next year, there will definitely be four purple fountain grass plants in my front beds.

I had one in the back yard a few years ago and dug it up to see if I could save it over the winter. I put it in a pot in the sunniest location in the house. It survived, but didn't make a very good houseplant because it lost a lot of the "fuzz" from the plumes all over the dining room floor.

I might try it again, but to be honest, I don't want to dig them up because I'm thinking they'll look cool (dead, yes, but cool) even in the middle of the winter.

And to be honest, I will spend the extra bucks if it means the front yard looks good enough to get noticed by my teenage son!

First cup of coffee in weeks

This afternoon, I had my first cup of coffee in many, many weeks. I had been trying to stay away from coffee because it dehydrates you, and I need a lot of hydration when I'm doing chemo.

Doing chemo. Sounds like it was something I wanted to do. Need to do? Yes. Want to do? Not so much.

But I digress.

The coffee was DEE-VINE!

It was white chocolate cappuccino, the kind from a can, where you add it to a cup of hot water. I figured if I made it by the cup, I wouldn't go crazy. But the coffee cup became empty far too fast, and it is now sitting in front of me, taunting me: "Go on, have one more cup."

For me, it is VERY hard to stop at one cup.

But so far, I have made it about four hours. And as the time goes by, I find it is easier to resist the urge. This is a good thing. And it tells me I have more willpower than I thought I did. This is also a good thing.

Now that I have the high dose chemo out of the way and am moving on to weekly lower dose Taxol treatments, hopefully I can indulge my coffee craving a LITTLE more. Like maybe one every few days or something. (From someone who was a 6-cup a day coffee drinker, and that might even be understating my habit just a little, this is quite an improvement!)

One day at a time, I guess!