Fall Feelings

It must be the change in weather the past few days. The nights are getting cooler, the days are warm but not suffocating, and the light is getting that peculiar "thin" feeling, like a fragile veil laid over the morning sky. I'm sleeping later, no longer up in the dead-dark just before dawn.

This year has been one heck of a process. How apropos that it all happened in September, that this time of the year is my retrospective milestone, my anniversary and my mental "new year." As a child and later as what seemed like perpetual college studentdom, the new year always started in September, not January.

I feel as if I've turned a corner, flipped an attitude, effected what the jargonists lately call a "sea change." Suddenly, I've stopped obsessing so much. My waking thoughts rarely include dwelling on what was and what's been lost, or even about the future and what it might bring. I truly feel as though I am "living in the now," and that now doesn't ponder so tediously about my body, my bionic breasts, or cancer.

I think most of the change is due to the fact that I can now do most anything I want physically, without pain. Oh, occasionally I'll bump into something with my chest (and bounce back, alarmingly!), or feel a twinge underneath, or catch a glimpse in a mirror, but for the most part it's all fading into the past. It's almost like...it's over?

I still take my handfuls of vitamins and supplements and anti-cancer drugs. That's a thrice-daily reminder. I have to massage everyday to keep my bowsprit from seizing up into "Iron Woman." But that big mental-amnesia bandage has done its job. Time has healed most of the physical and mental wounds, just like Mom said it would.

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On a practical note, my Mr. Mow-man, Keith, came to do the yard yesterday and provided the muscle to remove the new toilet from the back of my car. Hooray! I don't have to drive to Lexington with a giant KOHLER box in the back! Thank you Keith!