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After the shock of the trauma of my initial diagnosis abated somewhat, I began to ask the inevitable, “What now?” question.
So far, I’ve come up with three goals to accomplish post-cancer. They’re in no particular order.
Learn to sail
Be in a community theater production
Get into a fight with a girl
I’ve got one down. This morning, amidst scattered cloudy skies, my husband and I took our brand-new-to-us sailboat out onto Bodecker Lake (a monster feat, I must say) and caught some gorgeous wind. Our sailboat is made gorgeous by the brightly colored sails that, when filled with wind, conjure up images of Nantucket or the Hamptons, I suppose, though I’ve only ever gotten as close as Martha’s Vineyard.
When the wind is good, sailing is a beautiful thing. When the wind dies, it’s like being in a canoe, so we, as our 5-year-old says, use the paddle and “Oar around.”
I think I’m starting to understand when people have those bumper stickers on the back of their cars: “A bad day fishing is better than a good day at work.” I think mine will say, “A bad day sailing is better than a good day wiping butts.” Yep, I do love my children, but not so much the wiping butts part.
We decided to christen our boat “Hope” as a way to express our post-cancer optimism. We waited, however, until our first successful sail. Just in case the thing sank. I’m just saying–it’s practical.
We have two evergreen trees in our backyard that I bought for our Christmas wedding, draped with lights and put up front in the church. After the wedding, we planted them in the hard winter ground, and, miracle of miracles, they’ve both survived and are even starting to thrive. Early on, one of them looked rather pekid, and we’d joke with one another about which tree would live, and which one was him and which was me. When I was diagnosed, it wasn’t so funny anymore, but given my propensity for gallows humor, I’ve brought it up several times anyway. So it seemed prudent to sail the boat once before we gave her such an auspicious moniker like “Hope.” She is sailworthy, and hopefully, less flighty than her Days of Our Lives namesake.
My attainment of the other goals is in the works. I’m working up my margarita-induced mouth to prepare for a good girl fight, and I auditioned last week for “Birth,” the play The Family Journey‘s bringing in, sponsored by yours truly, get born.
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