Like A leaf In the October Breeze

I was thinking of my father-in-law today and decided to repost

this.

He sat next to the picture window in his chair, his once plump face now gaunt with a tint of yellow to his skin. He pulls his sweater around his frail shoulders and watches the last of the fall leaves, loosen their grip from the branches, fluttering slowly in the cool, gentle, October breeze.

“Why does every thing have to die?” he says to me. I can’t give him an answer. The words won’t come out, blocked by the growing lump in my throat. So I sit next to him and watch the leaves, hoping that will comfort what words cannot.

Phil was a man with a kind, giving soul. He loved to fish, camp, and bike with his wife. He donated many hours to the community, working at the senior center, the community center where he helped families in need, played Santa Claus in the Christmas Parade, mixed the pancake batter and cooked pancakes for the church breakfasts, and countless other deeds.

Every fall when we would visit, our tradition was to dry apples. Phil would have a bushel of Harrelson apples waiting, he had purchased them at a nearby apple orchard. We would spend a day peeling, slicing, and drying apples. It was time consuming but it was time spent talking and bonding. We ate as many apples as we peeled. By afternoon we were sticky from the juice of the apples and dry jello that we shook the slices in before drying. We loved it!

Phil loved to play games with the grandkids Uno, Rumikube, Sorry, and when they would get wound up and noisy he would scold them, like a grandpa would.

It was Oct. 1993. The leaves were falling. He had fought the battle with cancer for over two years. Beating it once, so he thought, only for it to take over his body again. His time was limited. He knew that. He insisted on taking Bev and myself for a drive to visit his younger brother. On the way he stopped at a small grocery store and purchased vanilla ice cream and root beer. At the farm we sat in the small kitchen while Phil made everyone a root beer float. Seemed Odd for ten o’clock in the morning. I slowly ate mine with a spoon, letting the ice cream melt on my tongue. It had been years since I had a root beer float. I don’t remember them tasting as good as the one I had that morning.

That afternoon I sat on the back deck and watched as Phil showed his wife how to start the lawn mower and the snow blower. He then showed her how far back she should cut the rose bushes in the fall before covering them with straw. He showed her how to keep the water softener maintained and how to light the furnace. He had done all these things over the years and was worried she wouldn’t know how to do them.

That night Phil sat out in the camper and played cards with the grand kids. They played for hours. At the supper table he drank his can of ensure while everyone ate baked pheasant and mashed potatoes with pheasant gravy. His favorite meal.

Later that night Phil fell asleep in his recliner. It was the only place he was comfortable enough to be able to sleep. He never got out of that chair to do anything with any of us again. The cancer had broken him. He was awake for short periods of time after that but didn’t know what was going on around him.

Phil died on a cold November morning. I had lost not only my father-in-law, but my friend. He went peacefully, just like the fall leaves fluttering in the cool, gentle, October breeze.

Breast Cancer, Have We Forgotten The Other Cancers?

So October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month.  Every where you look there are  pink ribbons, pink bracelets, pink shirts, and someone even mentioned they saw, at a liquor store, a bottle of alcohol with a pink ribbon on it.  Really?  Not to take anything away from the sadness and fight of breast cancer, but from the publicity and the attention that is focused on it, you would think that Breast Cancer is the only cancer that strikes millions of people each year.

Was anyone aware that last month was Thyroid Cancer awareness month?  That cancer strikes millions of people each year, myself included.  How about colon cancer?  I never hear of a month dedicated to that cancer yet how many people die from it each year?  My father and father-in-law did.  Lung cancer?  Is there a month set aside for that?  Sure you probably think, oh those people smoked they had it coming.  My brother-in-law never smoked yet he got lung cancer.  None of those cancers get the attention of Breast Cancer, why, I don’t know and this is very sad.

Breast cancer hasn’t cornered the market on the right for an awareness month and all the fund raising.  Don’t get me wrong.  I have had relatives who have had breast cancer.  It’s a horrible thing to deal with but so are the other cancers out there, the cancers we don’t dedicate a month to.

While you are out there this month doing your part in bringing awareness to the plight of Breast Cancer, don’t forget to mention those other cancers that your fellow Americans are suffering from, those cancers that everyone forgets.

Goodbye Old Friend

I’m sitting at the computer listening to the rain outside the open window. An occasional cool breeze blows through, brushing the curtain across the accordion box on the table standing just to the left of it. It’s a slow soaking rain, one we’ve desperately needed since March but has somehow passed us by since then. It’s dripping through the branches of the maple tree and pinging onto the metal roof of the carport. A distant rumble of thunder comes from the south as stronger storms approach. The rain is washing the seven months of accumulated dust of this summers drought, from all surfaces outside. A fall cleaning.

A month ago I went home to Nebraska to do the final cleaning of my childhood home. My mother is now in a retirement apartment and my Dad is no longer with us.  We had been trying to get this done for over a year. Seven of twelve gathered for a three day weekend to get this task done. My parents had taken most of their belongings to their new assisted living apartment, so what was left were things they could no longer use themselves, or wanted. We were left with the decision of what to keep, to donate and to throw away. After deciding amongst ourselves what to keep, we set the rest on our parents front lawn and put at a sign that said “Free, Help Yourself”. People came from all over and help themselves they did. Many had a kind word to share about my parents as they looked through the treasure trove. I think my Dad would have liked that.

Going through what was left after forty-two years, we found all kinds of little mementos of things from when we were kids. “Look what I found!” Someone would say, or “Oh my God, do you remember writing this?” Diaries found in the bottom of a chest of drawers, letters in books, even a Country Western song my Dad once started to pen. These more valuable than the actual material belongings of the house. As we emptied the house the mood became more melancholy. The final day, there were few of us left. We loaded the last of the heavy items in my sister’s and brother’s pickups. We carried out the last trash bags to the dumpster and did a final sweeping. I walked through the house and took photos of every room remembering how much life was lived in each.  Rooms bare, like the first day, forty-three years ago when my Dad moved us in. It was when I took the photo of the stairs that led from the kitchen to the bedrooms upstairs that I got teary eyed. As I stood at the top looking down the twelve steps, I could hear a faint rumble of the feet of ten kids running down those steps on Christmas morning.

We gathered our purses and cameras and  looking back one last time, walked out the front door and closed and locked it.   My sister began to cry when I asked to have a picture taken of us in front of the house before we left. My brother, sister and I all stood for pictures and smiled through tears.

 I was there the day our Dad moved us in and I was there the day we said goodbye to the house. We were done with it. I’m glad I was the last to leave, and glad we took that final picture. As I was walked away I believe I heard that old house whisper “Thank you.”

It Is OK Once Again In Oklahoma

…the wind, heat, and drought,  seared the earth for sixty one days and nights.  Swarms of locust and grasshoppers invaded the fields and devoured the crops leaving the livestock little to eat and gardens little to produce.  The waters in the rivers and streams dried up.  There was great hunger and thirst amongst the Peoples.  On the Sabbath God sent a cold front.  The wind blew from the north.  Rains fell from the skies.  The temperature plummeted and drove away the swarms of vermin.  Villagers danced in the rain.  God raised his arms to the heavens and proclaimed, “This is Good.”

Menopause, Where the Hell Is It!

I’m bitchy today, it’s that time of month, AGAIN!!!  I’m 53 years old.  For the last ten years my Doctor has been promising me I would be going through menopause but noooooo!  Every month the demon curse not only knocks at my door but comes bursting through like the ocean surge from Hurricane Katrina, lapping up every super, overnight express, surplus pad I have in stock.  Those lying bastard doctors!

When I was thirty-eight I was experiencing difficulties with my monthlies, and I’m not talking about magazine subscriptions.  I was having longer than usual punctuation marks, (get my drift), accompanied with hot flashes, day sweats, and more than my usual bitchiness.  My doctor at the time told me that I was beginning to go through my change and it would take about ten years to get through it.  I was hoping it would go as quick as the seventy-five cents of change I actually had on me.   Anyway, I believed him as my mother had my two youngest sisters while going through her change.  He put me on hormones to get me regulated and after a couple of  months of taking them,  and coming  up with hundreds of ways of offing the old man, I decided I should stop taking them and tough it out.  Needless to say eventually my grammar became regular again and everything was fine but the monthlies kept coming for the next thirteen long years.

Three years ago I went to a new gynecologist for my yearly subscription and she saw that I was fifty and asked me if I had stopped having punctuation marks.  I told her unfortunately I still had good grammar.  She said my grammar would stop when I was fifty-two.  Well fifty-one came, still  punctuation marks.  Then I hit fifty-two.  I skipped a month and I was elated!  The next month, punctuation marks.  I wanted to cry.  The next month, no punctuation, yippee!!  The next month, punctuation with a punch!   Son of a bitch those lying bastards!!  Now I’m fifty-three and I still have to dot my I’s.  I’m going to be one hundred years old and standing in line at the checkout with boxes of commas.  What does a person have to do to get an F in grammar?

So I must forge ahead and trudge through the mire of punctuation for all of woman hood to come.  I am the example of  devout punctuation at it’s best.  No one does it better than I.  I am  the exact balance of perfect punctuation and grammar, just like you would find in the book, “There Will Be Blood”.