Melissa Wiley's Blog, page 25

What I Did on My Summer Vacation

Those of you who followed our previous interstate move in 2006 know that it’s highly unusual for me to have said so little, thus far, about this new adventure, our move from San Diego to Portland. If I’ve been quiet here, it’s because there has been so. much. to say. Too much!

The move had been under discussion for months—years, really, some pieces of it—and in early June we decided that this summer, mid-August perhaps, was the right time. For one thing, there was a job calling me, one that will fit more amiably into a writing-teaching-homeschooling life than grantwriting did; and further, it’s an advocacy job made more imperative by this year’s perpetual threats to disability services budgets. Another consideration was the timing of our older girls’ college plans. And then we had long since outgrown our little San Diego rental, but had no prospect of moving into a bigger house at SoCal prices.

She was a lot shorter when we moved into that house

Long story short: it was time to move. I booked a ticket to fly up in late June to look for a rental with the help of Ron, one of my closest friends.

I was feeling pretty swamped in June. Lots and lots of work on my plate, and the idea of getting the household packed and ready to move by August seemed darn near impossible. When the appointment reminder came for my mammogram, I came very close to canceling it. After all, I’d had one only six months earlier. But the reason they wanted to see me again so soon was because that December one had been my first, so there was no baseline, and there had been a few little calcification specks that the radiologist wanted to keep an eye on. So I heaved a sigh and dragged myself, oh beleaguered me, to the appointment, grumbling all the way.

The cluster of specks was a bit bigger. Nothing at all to worry about, they assured me; these are quite common in women who breastfed; but we can’t send you on your way without doing a quick biopsy just to be extra, extra sure.

That was June 5th. The biopsy was scheduled for June 16th. On the 6th or 7th, Ron spotted a likely-looking rental prospect on Craigslist. He arranged for a showing on the 8th, bringing me along via Facetime. The house hit all the marks on our wish list—location, number of bedrooms and bathrooms, good work spaces for Scott and me, a nice little backyard—except one: it was available on the first of July, not August, meaning that if we wanted it, we’d have to pay for it to sit empty for a good six weeks.

But we’re a big family, you know, and the Portland rental market is fierce—and likely to get fiercer as the summer rolled on. We decided to apply for the house. I still had my ticket for the end of June, so I figured I’d fly up and see it in person. I made a call to the special education department of the Portland school district and set up a meeting to see the school Stevie would be likely to attend. Scott and I began to consider moving a wee bit earlier, perhaps in late July, right after Comic-Con, to try to cut down on the overlapping rent. I would begin telling people, I decided, after that late-June trip.

I said I wasn’t going to bring the Wedgits. I brought the Wedgits.

The biopsy was on Friday, June 16th. I wasn’t worried about the results. Too busy with deadlines and panicked thoughts of the impossibility of getting us packed and moved in late July—and highly frustrated by being laid up for a few days to recover from the procedure, which had left me in more pain than I expected. I also had a new section of my four-week Comic Strip Capers class starting at Brave Writer on the 19th, so I was occupied in prepping for that.

To my utmost annoyance, I had to had to go see my primary doctor in person to get the results of the biopsy. When she broke the news (rather clumsily, truth be told), I had trouble believing it at first. Scott too. It took us a good 24 hours to wrap our heads around the reality of the words invasive lobular carcinoma.

Things I learned in the next few days: it’s a slow-growing cancer (whew), but it’s sneaky. We caught it very early—perhaps as early as it was possible to catch.

That was June 21st, the diagnosis. A Wednesday, and I was due to fly to Portland on the Saturday. We’d been flung into a whirlwind. What to do? Scrap the move, stay in San Diego? What about work? What about everything?

My doctor set up consults with surgery and oncology, but she couldn’t get anything earlier than July. I reached out to a doctor friend in Portland, who, bless her, connected me with a breast surgeon there. Here. And this surgeon was amazing. She understood my predicament, this preposterous timing, and arranged to see me on the Tuesday of my Portland trip, if I wanted to go ahead and get on the plane on Saturday.

So that’s what I did. On the Friday, Scott and I made the 45-minute drive to Torrey Pines to pick up copies of all my films and records. That long, traffic-congested drive certainly factored into our decision-making later. So did the July consult dates.

On Saturday the 24th, I flew to Portland. Ron took me straight to the house and it was even sweeter in person than on Facetime.

On Sunday, we went to the Rose Garden and I had a chance to breathe a little.

Photo by Larry Deal

On Monday, I met with the special ed administrator and principal of Steven’s new school. It was a good meeting and I was pleased with the program.

On Tuesday, I met with the surgeon. She was awesome. And she urged me to have the surgery as soon as possible, ideally within a month of diagnosis, whether in San Diego or in Portland. It looked like we had caught the cancer before it hit the lymph nodes, so the sooner we removed it, the better. That complicated the timeline more than a little, because Comic-Con began on July 20. And the vacation schedules of the San Diego doctors were pushing things into a much later space if we chose to stay there.

I could keep going with the blow-by-blow, but you already know how it played out. The house that had been going to sit empty for six weeks was ready and waiting for us. We decided to give up Comic-Con and move to Portland as soon as possible. Which, thanks to hours and hours of help from our TRULY AMAZING San Diego friends, was July 11th.

My parents took the younger kids to Colorado for a couple of weeks during the move and the surgery. The rest of us arrived in Portland on July 13 and waited for the moving truck. My Brave Writer class wrapped up on the 14th. The truck arrived on the 17th. On the 20th—the first day of Comic-Con, when we would have been enjoying our annual curry date with our dear friend Jock, and then the Scholastic party and the CBLDF party—I had my surgery. We spent the two days before the surgery unpacking like mad. I knew I wouldn’t be able to do it afterward and I wanted home to seem homey when my parents brought the younger kids to join us on the 24th.

Photo by Murray Brannon

The surgery went well. I was a little blue that weekend—I hated the way the pain meds fogged my brain, and I was sad to miss our 8th annual SDCC Kidlit Drinks Night—but the flowers and dinners and notes from friends and helped perk me up. And on the Monday, there was the fun of showing the new digs to the younger kids and my parents.

This brought a big smile to my face, too. Love you guys!!

So here we are in early August, still weeks ahead of our original move schedule, unpacked, post-op, and settling in. The younger kids and I got library cards (and eclipse glasses!) this morning. Rose has already found a temp job.

Ever since that first awful news on June 21st, the news has been good. Caught early. Removed before it spread to the nodes. Very small. Last week the pathology report came back, and I learned that I won’t need chemo. That’s huge. I’m so relieved.

They grow ’em big here

Since I chose the lumpectomy option, I’ll need radiation—daily for four weeks, beginning the end of this month. Before then, I’ll go in for my radiation planning appointment, which means, yes, I moved to Portland and am getting a tattoo straightaway. How cliché is that?

august 1: looking back

Here we are. New city, new house, new life. There’s a lot to tell. For now, tonight, just a few glimpses of our July.

    

 

August 1: looking back

Here we are. New city, new house, new life. There’s a lot to tell. For now, tonight, just a few glimpses of our July.

    

 

Thoughts while packing for a move

That blanket I started while pregnant

Those cloth dolls I started while pregnant

That quilt I started while pregnant

That needlepoint project I started while pregnant

That round robin quilt block group I started while pregnant

That needle felting

That beading

That spinning

That scarf

So many lives

I started while pregnant

****

This is just to say

I have discovered

the thank-you note

I wrote you

in 1998

and which

I never mailed

but I did stamp

and seal

Forgive me

we loved those books

so Boynton

and so dear

****

Does this spark chagrin

Does this spark regret

Does this spark your life flashing before your eyes

Does this spark a memory of that time we

wednesday

Eek, it’s all happening so fast. Today the kids have their last piano classes. This will be a hard goodbye. They’ve been students at Wagner’s Music School since shortly after we arrived here. It was Jane and Rose then, each in their own class—small Wednesday-morning group classes with our homeschooling friends. A few years later, it was Beanie’s turn. Jane and Rose grew up. Their classes graduated. New crops of beginners rotated in: Rilla’s class, and this year, Huck’s. Miss Cyndi—calm, cheerful, inspiring—taught them all.

Oh, this one is really a hard goodbye.

And it isn’t just piano—these are my lit-class kids. For three years, while Rilla was upstairs in piano, I’ve taught English lit to Beanie and her friends. At first we met in the coffee shop right below the music school; then, when it closed, we moved to the outdoor tables of the neighboring taco shop, swapping muffins and tea for quesadillas and salsa.

This year I added a second class during Huck’s piano lesson—the younger sisters of my first group. And then we added another class after lunch, this one full of the boys I’ve taught poetry and writing to over the years. Oh, I’m going to miss these kids. The lively discussions, the belly laughs, the sudden insights.

Piano is also when I got to squeeze in some mom time. Mostly in the interstices—a dropoff here, a pickup there—but often we found time for a nice little gabfest during Beanie’s lesson, between my two morning lit classes. As your kids get older and activities ramp up, your leisurely playdates diminish. You learn to make the most of the scattered minutes at the front and back of things.

Afterward, there’s lunch at the park with our homeschooling friends. If I start to write about THOSE hard goodbyes I’ll never get out the door this morning.

Northward, ho!

Some news now, some news later.

The now news: A week from tomorrow, we are moving to Portland, Oregon.

I just totally freaked myself out with the words “a week from tomorrow.” Jiminy crickets, this is happening fast.

Of course there is lots more to the story, and that’s the news to come later. I don’t mean to be a tease.

the art of persuasion

Me: Here is this stack of seventeen gorgeous books for us to choose from for our next readaloud

Huck and Rilla: No, we want the next Moomins

Me: Twist my arm why don’t you

That’s my girl

Me: “Our family uses a lot of hyperbole.”

Rilla: “Mom, I would NEVER do that.”

“…strange archaic sympathies with the world”

The black curagh working slowly through this world of grey, and the soft hissing of the rain gave me one of the moods in which we realise with immense distress the short moment we have left us to experience all the wonder and beauty of the world.

—The Aran Islands, J.M. Synge

This week Beanie and I reached the J. M. Synge episode of The Irish Identity. The quote above found me at the perfect time, as I neared the end of Emily St. John Mandel’s lovely Station Eleven, and on the day the President announced his intention to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement.

Even after the people of the south island, these men of Inishmaan seemed to be moved by strange archaic sympathies with the world. Their mood accorded itself with wonderful fineness to the suggestions of the day, and their ancient Gaelic seemed so full of divine simplicity that I would have liked to turn the prow to the west and row with them for ever.

“Consider the snow globe.”

What happens when you read Station Eleven in bed before opening your laptop to Paris Agreement discussion: profound discombobulation. What are these fossil fuels you speak of? Here in Year Fifteen, electricity is a distant memory and the children have never seen a lit screen. Uh, like the one on which I’m reading this book, these posts. I’m addled. Somebody fix me a plate of wild boar.

He stood by the case and found himself moved by every object he saw there, by the human enterprise each object had required. Consider the snow globe. Consider the mind that invented those miniature storms, the factory worker who turned sheets of plastic into white flakes of snow, the hand that drew the plan for the miniature Severn City with its church steeple and city hall, the assembly-line worker who watched the globe glide past on a conveyer belt somewhere in China. Consider the white gloves on the hands of the woman who inserted the snow globes into boxes, to be packed into larger boxes, crates, shipping containers. Consider the card games played belowdecks in the evenings on the ship carrying the containers across the ocean, a hand stubbing out a cigarette in an overflowing ashtray, a haze of blue smoke in dim light, the cadences of a half dozen languages united by common profanities, the sailors’ dreams of land and women, these men for whom the ocean was a gray-line horizon to be traversed in ships the size of overturned skyscrapers. Consider the signature on the shipping manifest when the ship reached port, a signature unlike any other on earth, the coffee cup in the hand of the driver delivering boxes to the distribution center, the secret hopes of the UPS man carrying boxes of snow globes from there to the Severn City Airport. Clark shook the globe and held it up to the light. When he looked through it, the planes were warped and caught in whirling snow.

Related: How the United States Looked Before the EPA