Abrupt turn in the story…

Photo credit Jo Dorr

For the past few months, I’ve wondered if I might want to take a different direction with my blog (head to Substack?, become more politically local?), but this blog will change, unbidden by me.

Monday, my daughter took me to the ER for severe abdominal pains. An elevated white blood cell count made the nurse reappear with bottles he filled with my blood and gave me the heads up that I might not be headed home that night. I was wearing my twenty year old Danskos and a wool sweater I’d knit years ago and have worn to felt. Slivers from the firewood I’d brought in were hooked on the sweater. My younger daughter and the older daughter’s boyfriend appeared. My girls texted my brother. The nurse kept coming and going, talking to me and my daughters.

I lay on my back for hours with very kind people around me, who gave me pain meds and noted a soaring fever. The ER doctor returned with the nurse who leaned against the cabinets. It was the briefest thing, but when the nurse walked in he looked deeply at my daughters and then at the floor. I knew then that I was not going to like what the ER doctor was about to tell me about that CT scan.

So, on election night, hospitalized with scepticemia from the cancer, a traveling nurse told me about the beaches in Alabama where he lives while he tidied up needles and tubes in my arm. We followed that up with a long conversation about housing costs. Home again on this frosty and promising-to-be-sunny morning, I’ve been humbled by the gifts of visitors and food and kindness that have poured into our little family house, which made me see what a shadowy unhappiness had been creeping into my being for these past few months.

With the hospital and my brother, a biopsy at Dartmouth was pushed. Things will change rapidly. In the meantime, I’m doing things like putting my electric bill on autopay and arranging immediate work leave. But more profoundly, this: this week centered me right back to who I am — mother/daughter/sister, friend, writer — and conversely narrowed and widened my lens, hammering home that day by day is where we are.

The other afternoon, my daughter Molly ran in the house and told us to hurry out to see a rainbow. November rainbows in Vermont are rare, indeed — rainbows in late fall of this glossiness and color even more so. I saw this as a harbinger.

Last, I was reminded of one of my favorite Jack Gilbert Poems, “A Brief for the Defense.” A few lines read:

… We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.