If you have not personally realized the dream of standard poodle ownership, let me let you in on a little secret: A standard poodle has more energy than 14 Golden Retrievers combined, hands down. Emmet, our 18 month-old standard poodle, thinks that the five to seven miles a day that the two of us spend walking is simply a good start. Sometimes, when the weather is perfect and I am up early, like it was and I was today, I walk him to the office to get a start on our daily miles. At almost exactly halfway on our route, there is a pet store with a wide selection of lovingly curated high-end dog chews, and as the one on the leash who has been better trained, I stop and allow Emmet to select his favorite. At the cash register I rue the indulgence only for a moment and then pop the (non-rawhide) roll into his mouth. And so the two of us walk the remainder of the way, the portrait of a woman and her delighted dog.

Even before Emmet got his treat on today’s walk, I found myself utterly delighted. There are times that I reach into my closet and find exactly what I want to wear, a combination of clothes that expresses exactly who I am and how I am feeling. And so it was today: a white blouse with the bow from which I successfully removed a chili stain, a black and white appliqued sweater, a black and white checked overcoat, and a skirt that I made. If you do not mind a wonky picture that may render you seasick, here is what I wore today:

The skirt was the first thing that I made and really liked when I started sewing a few years ago. To be more accurate, I started sewing again a few years ago. I grew up with a mother who sewed on a million-pound Singer machine in an enviable enameled seafoam green. I was not allowed to touch this machine. Instead, as a consolation prize in the late 70s, I received one Christmas the orange-and-white plastic Singer Junior Miss. I found this photograph courtesy of a Google search:

I love the expression on the young girl’s face, for she is not quite smiling and simply staring at the machine. That was my experience, too, for if you want to teach a child to hate sewing, give her a child’s sewing machine. The Junior Miss ran on batteries — at least when it actually did run — and skipped stitches and tangled bobbin thread like nobody’s business. This is unfortunate, and if I cursed as a nine year-old, this surely would have triggered that.

I did like the name, though: Junior Miss. In the late 70s, it could be a reference to only one thing — America’s Junior Miss Pageant — and the peculiar obsession of making every girl dream of being Miss America. In the early 70s, I had a pink swimsuit with a blue screen-printed sash that said, FUTURE MISS AMERICA. And I suppose I was to use my Junior Miss sewing machine to sew a pageant wardrobe to allow me to compete at the highest echelons of talent and beauty. This was a sad failure. I did not grow up to be Miss America. I say to this nation from the bottom of my heart: I am sorry, for I failed you.

But I did grow up in a school that prized home ec, and beginning in eighth grade, I learned to sew things: pillows, dolls, a wrap-around skirt. I learned to hand stitch and embroider and mend. In my senior year of high school, I made a jacket with a notched lapel and a skirt with a fly-front zipper, both in a fake linen-like fabric in different sherbet colors that would have made the Miami Vice wardrobe assistant proud. The jacket and skirt took forever to make, and I never wore them once.

I cannot say that at that point I loved to sew. There were things I liked about the concept. In a small southern town before the internet, I practically memorized Vogue magazine every month while I was in high school and college. (If you ever find yourself on a game show where the category is 80s Fashion Designers and Supermodels, do not hesitate to call me if you are permitted to phone a friend.) Sadly, this did not translate into any real ability to design, execute, and make my own clothes, and I suppose that it is hard to be a creative wunderkind when one faces the dreary business of sewing a wrap-around skirt on a school’s industrial machine.

But I did love riding my bike from my house on Quiet Cove to the local Belk in Sunset Plaza, which was a stone’s throw from Sunset Skate and the Sunset Nursing Home (a name whose irony escaped me all those years). Belk had fabric and patterns in the back right corner, just past the young men’s department and next to housewares. I remember spending so many hours opening the lateral files of patterns and touching every piece of fabric the store had. (I did not get in trouble there like I had that time at Friedlander’s Department Store, Moultrie’s finest place to shop. I had been minding my own business by trying on expensive hats, and a sales clerk informed me that they were destined for the heads of nice, clean ladies who most certainly would not want to wear them after they had been handled by some grubby child.) The Belk fabric section was largely unstaffed, and I bought just enough fabric and notions for home ec classes not to be run off when it was.

I am not certain now where I thought my life would lead me then.

Thanks to today’s skirt, I thought a lot about my life sewing on this morning’s walk. There was a time that I became convinced that the home ec requirement was a way to ensure that I would some day be a good wife and a good mother. When I announced several years into our marriage that I could sew, Chris seemed genuinely surprised; he had no idea. And while the children were young, I used it both as an escape from some of their demands and as a way to demonstrate to the larger world the depth of my care for them. There were nursery decorations and Halloween costumes and dresses and jackets and quilts — all sewn in furtive bursts, all to the end that I had an overwhelming sense of obligation with very little pleasure. In retrospect, I just wish I had taken the kids to the park instead — although I will immodestly admit that my daughter’s kangaroo suit was something special.

But I have things now that I did not have then. You know, little things, like time and patience. While I am decidedly Not Dead, cancer left me with a stomach that has scars in all the wrong places, places that make a lot of clothes really hurt. I have accumulated three Brother sewing machines: Larry, Darryl, and Darryl. I painted the children’s play room the color of my favorite purse and claimed it as my sewing room. I have watched every single episode of Project Runway. And at some point, I found that despite my best efforts to the contrary, I had grown into myself and became comfortable in my own skin.

So I started sewing again. There have been tremendous misses and horrible mistakes, and I have moved on without any regret. (It’s a novel concept, I know, but I highly recommend it.) There has been the improvement that comes only with practice. There has been an almost perverse delight in making the inside of the garment look just as finished as the outside. In a disposable world, I love having high-quality clothes that are made to last. In a life marked by undue concern about my physical size, it is a relief not to face the judgment of a clothing label. (I tell myself that I wear Size ALC.) In a time marked by isolation, I like wearing things that people ask about. In a political clime where everyone feels like things are completely out of our hands, I like using my hands to create something pleasing. In a life passing way too quickly, I enjoy checking in with that apparently grubby young girl who spent so many happy hours looking at patterns and touching fabrics. After a lifetime of hating pants, I feel the relief of finally owning a pair that I love:

I am making something now to wear to a black-tie event, and it has all centered around a single question: If Kate Spade made Madonna’s dress in the Material Girl video for a 51 year-old lawyer, what would it look like? I appreciate having a pursuit that makes me ask, and answer, these weightier intellectual pursuits.

While this is a recent thing, I am also acutely aware that it is not a recent thing at all. And I like that, too.

I was listening to a podcast from This American Life while I was walking Emmet this morning. The subject was “Delight.” The first segment was about a poet who had written down things that delighted him over a year and then compiled all of those things into a book, since the best part of delight is that it is a shared human experience. The poet read his essay about the time he carried a tomato seedling through the airport and onto an airplane. It befuddled TSA, garnered a number of happy looks, and resulted in many conversations with strangers. He never knew the power of such a small thing.

Today, I walked a dog with a bone tucked into his mouth in a beautiful city on a perfect day. I wore something that made me feel completely like myself. I was in the present but with appropriate gratitude for all the things that led me to this moment. There were interactions with strangers and a world that became so much friendlier and more manageable. It was as if I were carrying my own tomato seedling in the most improbable of places, and it was a delight. I recommend it highly.

ALC

Christmases past have often felt like a game of offsetting penalties: If you give my children an Amazon gift card, then I will give your children an Amazon gift card of equal value. It all seemed nonsensical. Couldn’t we just give each other’s children a hug and Christmas wishes and call it a day? This year was scaled back and thus better, and while my children probably rue the socks and miss the cryptocurrency exchange, it all felt more like Christmas for me.

I came from a tradition where spouses give gifts. I blame my grandparents Doris and Ray, who gave each other lavishly wrapped gifts bearing tags that said “To Doris-Worsy, Love Raisy-Daisy” (and vice versa). The exchange took place while Bing Crosby crooned on the enormous console record player and a giant wood-burning fireplace warmed the house. Typically Raisy-Daisy would give Dorsy-Worsy a lace-trimmed silk slip, and she would blush like no one had every blushed before. Those slips were absolutely gorgeous, and when my grandparents moved into assisted living, most of them were absolutely dry-rotted in the box. (It is extremely difficult today to find a decent slip; most offerings are a terrible nylon polyester with a scant nod to lace. They are wildly and sadly utilitarian. I worry that my grandfather’s purchases over-hunted those grounds, thus rendering lovely slips extinct.)

Chris and I do not exchange gifts. This fact bothered me at first, and in the middle, and indeed for many years after that. But a happy partnership is quite the gift, a recent realization (thanks, cancer!) that has shut down any bad feelings. A few weeks ago, Chris asked, “Would you like to go back to Paris?” (Gentle reader, there is only one response to that question, especially when one’s last and only trip involved figuratively wearing a referee’s shirt and blowing a whistle to negotiate disputes between one’s children.) Chris had found round-trip fares from Orlando for under $400 per person for October. There was an expenditure for seat upgrades to poor person’s first class — the two-seat row on the bulkhead immediately after the first class cabin with free drinks and Coca-Cola — and the need to carry on one’s luggage. Perhaps this was a major violation of the spousal no-gift policy, but I called it Christmas nonetheless.

We are going to Paris to eat and see museums, not necessarily in that order. We may take the train up to Amsterdam, largely to see the Van Gogh Museum. My love affair with Van Gogh goes back farther than you can imagine, and as many things tend to do, it all goes back to Moultrie.

I grew up in Moultrie, a town in southwest Georgia that had a population of about 17,000 people. It was the kind of town where one’s mother flung open the door and pointed to one’s bike frequently, ordering rides to the library and to the Sunset Plaza Shopping Center. In 1980, I was 11 going on 12 and in seventh grade, and in case you think that I was a beautiful and lithe preteen, let me disabuse you of that notion with my 1981 Colquitt County Junior High School yearbook photo:

These were not kind years, and it certainly did not help that the short haircut that I imagined (a short, shiny bob, very French) had been translated into a center-part butt cut by Barbara’s Cosmetique. Fortunately, in an inspired fit, I wrote “me” with an arrow to point out my school photo in the event that my 51 year-old self forgot that girl. If it helps you imagine the then-me as the now-me, that shirt (my favorite) was a very bright yellow, and I was undoubtedly wearing it with the bright green denim skirt that I always wore it with.

I had a rich inner life, and a bicycle, and one other thing going for me that I did not even know: I lived in southwest Georgia when Jimmy Carter was President. People were willing to do nice things for Sowegans (with southwest Georgia being “SoWeGa,” and its denizens “Sowegans”). One of those nice things — which was a very nice thing indeed — was that millionaire philanthropist Armand Hammer agreed to send his priceless exhibit of Impressionist art for display in the Moultrie Public Library. I am not talking about the B-side of Impressionism, either: In a room roughly the size of my current living room, there were 10 to 12 works by (among others) Cezanne, Cassatt, Degas, and Van Gogh.

This is an event that never could have happened in current times: priceless works of art crammed into a small public library in rural Georgia, all guarded by a local deputy. There were small posts with velvet rope separating the viewer from the painting, and on the school field trip, there was a line outside the door as we all shuffled in, single-file.

I preferred viewing the art while not on field trips, and on my blue and white bike, I rode to the library many times to look at the paintings. Someone recently asked me how long the exhibit lasted. I have no idea, other than it felt like my entire childhood. At that age, in that time, it did not strike me as extraordinary that I would wake up in my room on Quiet Cove, hop on my bike, pedal to the library, select a few books from the young adult section, and then stare intently at these paintings.

The Van Gogh — a painting of the Hospital at Saint-Remy — was my favorite.

I was telling my much-younger sister about this exhibit while we were in Orlando this October, and because the internet feels boundless, I googled it. It was not a dream, as I feared, and it really happened. On YouTube there are videos of Moultrie in 1980, Mayor Willie B. Withers’ Lincoln Continental spanning several city blocks, and a dinner to kick off the exhibition. At the end of the final video, there is Armand Hammer, expressing his hope that the exhibition could perhaps change someone’s life.

I almost burst into tears, for that life was mine.

Those were not easy years for me, the growing-up, and while I know now that those are not easy years for anyone, it seemed like such an isolated struggle. I dreamed of a better, more colorful, more sophisticated life. With a painting of a hospital in my mind’s eye, I took as many French classes as I could in high school. In college, the Francophone teaching assistant made fun of my accent and sentenced me to extra language lab. (I was definitely from the south of France.) It was in art history classes in college that I realized that Van Gogh was Dutch. (To be fair, he later moved to France where he undoubtedly spoke French.) He did not pick up a paintbrush until he was 28 years old.

I love the notion that change is not reserved for the young, that my favorite painter (then not-a-painter) awoke one morning and thought that perhaps he would dabble a little and see where it went. I started keeping a blog five years ago because I needed to make a change. I started painting three years ago because a friend at one of those wine-and-art places asked if I had ever taken painting lessons. I had never thought of myself as a creative person before those endeavors, and now I wonder how I lived with comfortably in my own skin. I do not think that I did.

Except when Christmas brought me new bikes — and especially the lowly Christmas that brought me a new piano — I have always preferred New Year’s Day. It is the promise of change. On one hand, change seems so difficult. On the other hand, it’s like that old joke: How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.

I have broader-reaching goals this year. I would like to have a showing of my art. I have been contemplating an Etsy shop. I have told my father that I would like to spend a week at his farm and do nothing but write, paint, and walk. But these changes, and the work needed to get to that point, seem easy to ignore.

So I decided to work on the small things in the way that I order my work life: with a to-do list. I have typed up a document entitled the “Good Habits Checklist.” Here is the an entry:

The days are the same, except that I allow myself a later bedtime on Friday and Saturday night, and I have exercise goals that are on a weekly checklist. I include one sweet a day not as a mandate to eat a sweet, but as a direction not to eat more.

Because there is still a bit of the overachiever in me, I have begun the Good Habits Checklist in advance of January 1. I have enjoyed the direction to express creativity in ways other than knitting for 30 minutes a day. I have tried cooking simple things, like candied kumquats, which brilliantly takes care of the “one sweet” limitation, a fruit serving, and 30 minutes of creativity all in one fell swoop:

I have begun quilting from scrap fabrics:

I continue to sew (and thus generate scraps for quilting);

And I am still painting:

It has been a far happier life to carve even a small time to make things. I thought that finding 30 minutes a day would be a burden, but it has not been. Staying off the phone helps. And in a gesture of good faith, I switched to Suave 2-in-1 Shampoo and Conditioner to shave off time in the shower. (It promises salon quality results, which is probably true if your hair maintenance consists of Chris’ cutting your hair on the back porch.)

I have promised to pay myself $100 cash for each month that I comply with 90% of the checklist. There is a sterling Tiffany olive branch ring that my daughter asked for, and received, this Christmas. With a couple months of diligence, I will have one just like it. I will wear it, and when I look at the olive branch, I will feel relief that I have finally made peace with myself.

ALC

I have been approaching the holidays this year with a certain amount of fear. Last year brought calamity, a season between Thanksgiving and Christmas filled with dread, pain, uncertainty, and tears. At least there was that highly satisfying binge-watching of all seasons of “The Great British Baking Show.” If you are to be sick, and I hope that you are not, “The Great British Baking Show” is perfect: Everyone is incredibly kind, the plot is simple, and if you nod off during The Showstopper, you’re none the worse for wear. Plus, you have a solid set of new life skills, for you can dazzle slightly drunk people at cocktail parties with your recently acquired knowledge of pastry lamination and Genoise sponge.

But one of the real pleasures of adulthood is its ability to throw a calamity into the mix as a distraction from all other calamities. And so it was on the Sunday before Halloween, when I decided to take Emmet for a walk around 8 p.m. after a frantic evening of painting my son’s bathroom. Refurbishing his room was a project that was supposed to have happened last winter, and did not, and was happening now for good reason: The room had a mattress on the floor and little else, and if you ever wanted a poster child for “Love Doesn’t Live Here Any More,” you had but to look at his room. But dogs — even smart poodles — are not particularly gifted painters, and after several hours of my painting and his being told to wait (a command that dogs — even smart poodles — do not particularly understand), Emmet was about to blast off. I leashed him up, and stepped out my front door, and 30 steps later, my neighbor’s dog had broken free of his yard and was literally trying to rip off Emmet’s tail.

And by literally, I mean LITERALLY. As in, I will never use again the idiom “rip someone a new one.”

Because it was completely horrible, I will not say much more other than to say

1. Emmet had to take so much Tramadol that I became worried that he would develop a raging opioid addiction and that we would become the unwitting stars of some ghastly made-for-TV movie bearing the name “Tramadoodle.”
2. Giving a smart dog several medications at once over a three-week period is exhausting. Hot dogs work only a few times, and as I’m writing this, I realize I should have upped the stakes and considered a monetary bribe.
3. He has healed from the attack far better than I have.

But at least there was Elvis Costello — or to be more accurate, Elvis Costello in the rain. Chris and I met 34 years ago in a college cafeteria, and it was a relationship that spawned a lot of mix tapes — an endeavor that took a dual cassette deck and hours of pressing buttons at just the right time. A year or two after we began dating, Chris put “When I’m Sixty-Four” on a mix tape, and with that, the future started to take focus. Last week a law school friend, who had no idea of this history, sent me a You Tube video of this song, and I almost broke out crying at this part:

I could be handy, mending a fuse
When your lights have gone
You can knit a sweater by the fireside
Sunday mornings go for a ride
Doing the garden, digging the weeds
Who could ask for more

Chris’ mix tapes often featured Elvis Costello’s songs. This was one of my favorite lyrics:

Whenever I put my foot in my mouth and you begin to doubt
That it’s you that I’m dreaming about
Do I have to draw you a diagram?
All I ever want is just to fall into your human hands

So when I found out that Elvis was coming to an amphitheater in Saint Augustine, rain-or-shine, I bought fifth row tickets, and I made up show up early. The evening brought a land war: I sat next to a man who occupied his chair like a much larger man, apparently emerging victorious in numerous coach class airline battles and intent on emerging victorious that night. There was an older pot-bellied white-haired man who danced all night and had more fun than anyone. The couple behind us, over the decades of their relationship, had grown to look exactly alike. They wore matching red T-shirts with the iconic Elvis Costello photo depicting him in the mid-80s, a thin and wiry man, looking ironic as he sang into an old school mic.

Here is what I learned from the Elvis Costello concert:

1. He is no longer a thin and wiry man.
2. The sound engineer must have been a rank amateur selected at random from the audience, for that was how it sounded.
3. His voice sounded terrific on all of the new songs he had written, all of which were in a smaller, less ambitious range.
4. His voice sounded not as terrific on all of the old songs, which was what everyone came to see.
5. The audience helped him out on all of the old songs, and that was just fine.
6. I am glad that Elvis Costello had no expectations of me to be the same person as I was in 1985, for I am no longer a thin and wiry woman who sounds just like she did over 30 years ago.

Perhaps most importantly, I learned that if I ever become a back-up singer, I would like my name to be “Kitten,” just like the singer to the left. (Brianna (to the right) was pretty incredible, too, but really — she should contemplate a name change.)

There have also been trips to visit family, both mine and Chris’, and a contemplated return visit to his family that required some horse-trading: I have agreed to see his niece’s little theater production if he takes me to see a University of Georgia basketball case. It seems only fair. And then there was the story I told at my Dad’s house about the time I stayed at room 1214 of the Ritz Carlton in Buckhead, a trip necessitated by government travel and permitted by the low government room rate.

It was after midnight and the phone rang. The woman on the other end asked to speak to Jack. In my drowsy voice, I told her that she had the wrong number.

The phone rang again a few moments later, and the same woman insisted on speaking to Jack. Again, I told her that she had the wrong number.

And of course, the phone rang a third time. The woman was certain that she very much had the right number and that I very much knew Jack’s whereabouts. She told me to put him on the phone, for she was his wife.

Reader, I am no harlot. I was instead a tired government attorney who needed her sleep before court in the morning, so I asked, “What number are you calling?” And she replied 214-xxx-xxxx. I knew two things: 1) My father, who was living in Texas at the time, had a 214 area code, and 2) I was staying in room 1214. So I asked if she was staying at the Ritz Carlton in Buckhead. She paused, said she was, and asked me how I knew. I told her that if Jack lived in Dallas — and I was pretty sure that he did — she needed to dial a 9 to get out of the hotel switchboard. She apologized and hung up. And having saved Jack’s bacon, I fell soundly asleep.

I was in Buckhead the day after Thanksgiving, yet that was not the story on my mind. Chris and I had taken MARTA in from the northern suburbs, and as we left the station, I remembered some of my favorite times growing up. My dad would travel to Atlanta for meetings, and he would often take me with him. We stayed at a little hotel — the Terrace Garden Inn — across from Lenox Square Mall, and during the day he would stay there and go those meetings. But I would have breakfast in the hotel restaurant, which I would sign to the room, and a $20 bill in my pocket, which Dad would give me to last the day. And I was free until the time I was supposed to meet him for dinner. I would walk across the street to the mall, and just walk around in Buckhead, and take stock of all the people, the colors, the buildings, the stores. I had plenty of money for food, and if I was careful and saved, a little money for a treat, and when I was 12 and 13 and 14, I felt like I owned the whole place. There was so much freedom and so little care and so much trust bestowed in me. There were limits, to be sure, but I set my own rules. And as a 51 year-old woman walking through the streets of Buckhead on Black Friday, it all came back.

Thanks, Dad.

But then it was back to normal: the house, the job, the responsibility, the whole notion of being an adult. That included a grocery shopping trip on Sunday. While Chris lovingly scouted out the perfect olive oil, for he cooks, I not-so-lovingly scouted out the Publix-brand mild dishwashing soap, for I clean. (On a budget apparently.) My phone buzzed in my pocket, and a text said Craig passed away last night.

Craig was a friend of mine from my swimming days, and by everyone’s count, on the short-list for the title of the Kindest Man in the World. We live in the same neighborhood a few blocks apart, and even after my pool days ended, I would see him out walking. “You need to write that book!,” he would yell across the street. Or “My wife loves your painting!” or “It still makes her cry in happiness!” for he had hired me to paint a picture of their home as a Christmas gift. He was a constant ray of sunshine, Craig was, and a loving father whose girls flung themselves into far-off places, like the Czech Republic, where Craig would visit them (and no doubt, make a million friends).

If I had cancer, then Craig had CANCER, and while he never complained or even much talked about it, a story made the rounds. He passed out at work. There was a horrendous operation. He survived. He continued to work. He went to an event honoring him as Man of the Year while he was living in Hospice. And I suspect that he willed himself to make it through one last Thanksgiving so that he could tell everyone that he loved them, and was grateful for them, a final time. He was only 65. I miss him. So does everyone else who knew him.

And so I stand in the middle of this beautiful, sad, and funny life. I just finished reading Prairie Fires, the door-stop sized biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder, and I came across one of Wilder’s observations: “Now is now. It can never be a long time ago.” While I know that it is true, sometimes I wish it were not.

ALC

I have had two conversations looping in my head recently.

The first occurred at a garage sale where the word FABRIC had been prominently advertised. I have a friend who is a retired ATF agent, and he told me that during agent training, everyone had to get in touch with his “price”: the tipping point that could convert one to the dark side. As I grow older, I have come to the sad realization that my price could be as little as an armful of wooden bangles, a subscription to a luxury skein-of-the-month knitting site, a vintage basket purse with Bakelite handles, a perfect pair of red shoes, and a cache of colorful fabric. (I suppose this is good, because except for the subscription, I’m pretty much living my own dream.) So I saw the garage sale poster and became blinded by FABRIC. I drove as if the entire world was stampeding to this yard sale for the same reason as I — yet much to my surprise, I found that there was plenty of fabric still to be had.

Go figure.

I selected from the bounty an eight-yard parcel of an African block print and a couple of yards of a Kravet zebra print, and as I mentally waxed rhapsodic about the enormous skirt and sleek shift dress that were my destiny, the seller confronted me. She first wanted to educate me about the fabric I had selected, which I assured her was completely unnecessary. She next wanted to show me what she was sewing, which was also unnecessary but I went along nonetheless. And she then wanted payment (which even I will concede was necessary).

This was also embarrassing, for in my haste to beat out the undoubtedly millions of Savannahians who had heard the siren song of FABRIC, I saw the sign after my Hot Pilates class and went straight there, equipped only with a towel and yoga mat, and no wallet or cell phone.

Oops.

So there was awkward conversation, followed by a dawning realization that we had an awful lot in common. There was my promise to Venmo her the money (I did). There was her request for all of my contact information, because she announced many times that we were going to be new best friends. And as I gave her my cell number, I thought, “Oh no. Oh please no.” Stressing our similarities, there was her repeated insistence that I have a glass of wine.

Of course. A glass of wine at 9:30 on a Saturday morning with a stranger at a yard sale.

The second conversation was a few days later with my family physician. Like the little Dutch boy who put his finger in the dam, she currently is my only line of defense against all health crises. I love this woman, the one who put together a single day of pain with a few months of farting to arrive at the conclusion that I needed a colonoscopy now. She is younger than I am, and I selected her in part because she would not reach retirement age until I was safely dead. She spared me from any blood work, for I had been poked and prodded enough in recent months. And when we were talking about the care and maintenance of ALC, I blurted out almost apologetically, “I’ve sort of quit drinking and definitively started meditating. Is that okay?” And dear Dr. Cowart told me that she was happy to hear that I had made some positive health changes.

I had declined that Saturday morning glass of wine with my new yard sale BFF (who, thankfully, never called) — just as I have declined every glass of wine and tumbler of bourbon that have come my way recently. This sometimes seems a shame, for I am the friend who can reliably select a decent yet moderately priced bottle of wine from the menu. All of those delicious years of bourbon tasting have gone the way of the angel’s share. Buffalo Trace Distillery will not be sending me another birthday card, like it did when I turned 50.

I tapered off. I told myself that alcohol should be like chocolate cake: a rare pleasure to enjoy in celebration with friends. I then limited myself to one glass a week. And when even that seemed like too much, I quit completely. I recently ordered a mocktail, and when the waiter asked if I knew that the drink was non-alcoholic, I replied, “Yes. And so am I.”

There were no addiction issues, although there have been times that I will allow that I have drunk too much. My oncologist told me that there was no link between alcohol consumption and colon cancer, although the CDC disagrees. (And if you can’t trust the government, who can you trust?) As I roll into the first anniversary of my diagnosis, there was just the realization that with all the work that I had done to get better, both physically and emotionally, it was simply time to quit. I just don’t want to be sick again.

I did not think it would be hard, but it kind of was. I remember so many nights of being the life of the party, of having a delicious meal with a really nice bottle of wine, of having a bad day at work that suddenly seemed not as bad when Jim Beam held my hand. I cannot decide whether it Is harder not to drink in a small group or harder not to drink at a cocktail party. It somehow feels implicitly judgmental, even though it is not. It’s like you’re having a rager, and the Church Lady has suddenly shown up.

On the bright side: At 51, no one thinks I’m pregnant when I decline a drink. And I’m getting quite the reputation as a designated driver.

I am convinced that I have suspect coping mechanisms, for I am embarrassed to admit that the following things have helped:

First, I got a Kindle for my birthday, which has really upped the amount I read. (As an occasional insomniac with arthritic hands, I find it much easier to hold and to read in the middle of the night.) I am cheap, too, so I look for sale books. I made it exactly 32% of the way through one of those 99 cent books — “Drink: The Intimate Relationship Between Women and Alcohol” — before putting it down in a mixture of boredom and disgust. Buoyed by the success of targeted marketing toward women in the cigarette markets (You’ve come a long way, baby!), alcohol manufacturers decided to focus on an under-served market: women. This angered me.

Second, I read the CDC fact sheet on alcohol and public health. It was sobering. (Yes: three sentences, two puns!)

Third, and probably the most motivating thing of the bunch, I started banking the money I did not spend on wine at dinners out, all to the end of seeing the world. And before I know it, I will be stone-cold sober in all sorts of regions around the world known especially for their wine production. I understand the irony, and I offer myself this simple solace: cheese.

Fourth, there will be no Shirley Temples for this girl. Coca-Cola, especially the bottled Mexican version made with real cane sugar, is such a luxury at my age, and in accordance with Dr. Cowart’s good counsel about triglycerides, best enjoyed rarely. Like at a cocktail party.

Finally, I went to Disney last week with my sister. Y’all, I had no idea of the drinking culture at Epcot, where “drinking around the world” (i.e., drinks from all eight country pavilions) is a thing. I saw so many T-shirts with mouse ears and wine glasses that I lost count, with sayings like “Drinkerbell” and “Bibbidy Boppity Booze” and “Hakuna Moscato: It means no memories for the rest of the day.” (You can sing it. That’s okay.) Most of the wearers had sunburned skin the color of hot dogs on rollers at a convenience store, and one of them sort of pawed at me repeatedly in apology after she crashed into me when I was leaving the Frozen ride. It all seemed so upside down, to go from Elsa to a sloppy drunk. Let it go, indeed.

So here I am. Unsure of exactly how to feel about all of this. Turning down wine offered by a stranger at a yard sale. Occasionally uncomfortable in my surroundings. Saving money. Hoping to dodge more cancer. Bewildered by the combination of Mickey Mouse and margaritas. Really listening to people at parties and then driving them home. Swilling Coca-Cola and eating cheese. Searching for FABRIC.

I console myself with this much: I’m still having a whole lot of fun.

ALC

If you fill five bowel preparation prescriptions for a single patient in a three-month period, there is a fear on the patient’s part that that is the only way she will be remembered: incessantly chugging gallon-sized jars of laxative, all with Miralax for an appetizer and Ducolax for dessert. I have been working hard to leave a different impression on my seriously introverted pharmacist, all to the ends that he will not immediately think “bowels” when he sees me and that he will look at my shoes instead of his own while speaking with me.

Mission accomplished.

It began with a call two days after my birthday with a reminder to get a second shingles shot. Perhaps the only thing worse than the shot is shingles itself, so that night after Hot Pilates, still in workout clothes and probably smelling terrible, I drove with Chris to the pharmacy to get inoculated.

I went first, and the pharmacist held the syringe like a dart. It stung, and he yelled, “WHAT THE HELL?!,” and I smelled blood as he kept applying bandages. Thanks to fully warm and dilated blood vessels, my right arm looked like an explosion at the ketchup factory, and when I asked for gauze, he handed me a wad of three dozen squares. I stopped the bleeding with some pressure and then tended to the pharmacist, for he looked like he was having a very bad day. (He had not been wearing gloves, and I resisted the urge to tell him that the medications had rendered me asymptomatic, for that joke would have laid him out on the floor.) As recently as last week, he asked Chris if I was fine.

But so began the second half of my summer: unpredictable, freakish, slightly painful at times, and all together for my own good.

In late July my daughter finished her gap year working conservation. She had spent from May to November in Bozeman, Montana, and had left for Flagstaff, Arizona in mid-January. Ever since she left the second time around, we had talked about another road trip at the end of her stint. So for months I had planned to fly to Flagstaff, visit the Grand Canyon, and make a leisurely drive up through eastern California and down the Pacific Coast Highway, before hanging a giant left turn and driving home to Savannah — all over the course of a couple of weeks. After a lot of prodding from my daughter, and some complications from the appendectomy that needed to be weathered, I finally purchased my non-refundable one-way ticket to Flagstaff.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that travel plans invariably and dramatically change after the purchase of a non-refundable one-way ticket. There were earthquakes in California. My daughter hurt her back (uncomfortable, but not terrible). And about the time I was supposed to fly out, there had been a wildfire raging near Flagstaff, possibly necessitating an evacuation. Thanks to a blizzard a few months prior, her work schedule changed, and her time obligation had been extended. And there would be a boy who would be arriving at our house at a date and time certain. So instead of 14 days to drive cross-country, my daughter and I had four and one-half: Four and one-half days to drive from Flagstaff, Arizona, to Savannah, Georgia, a drive that at its most compact encompasses 1,955.8 miles.

So I bought a new non-refundable one-way ticket to Flagstaff. The schedule change allowed me to go to Chris’s family’s beach vacation for a few days, meaning I would fly out of the extremely small airport in New Bern, North Carolina. I carried a nylon bag — a Le Sportsac — that I had purchased from T.J. Maxx. And when the young TSA agent looked at it, he said, “I bet you got that in Paris.” With a new, slightly self-satisfied view of myself as the most cosmopolitan traveler flying out of New Bern, North Carolina that morning, I set off.

The three flights were mercifully unremarkable except in one respect. I am a notoriously cheap traveler, well-versed in Google flights, price alerts, and discount ticket brokers. So the fact that I blew $30 on an aisle seat on the Charlotte to Phoenix leg was a big deal. After I was settled into that seat, somehow having figured out how to buckle the seatbelt even without the safety briefing, I looked up to see a young woman, roughly my daughter’s age and wearing a Little Mermaid T-shirt, smiling at me and staring expectantly. “Pardon me,” she said. “I prefer the aisle seat.” I replied, “I do, too.” Then she stressed that she REALLY preferred the aisle seat, and I stressed that we had something in common, for I did, too. After she waited expectantly for a beat too long, she finally crawled past me and the hulking man in the middle seat to occupy her assigned window seat.

I felt incredibly old, for at that moment I was mentally railing at the entitlement of the young. (These thoughts included: How could she be so presumptive? Why was it okay to put me out? And — sadly, I’m serious about this one — had she no respect for her elders?) But then I caught sight of her arm as she closed the window shade and saw the six inch long row of neat and deep parallel scars on her left forearm. She was a cutter. And when I saw all of these physical manifestations of a deep-seated pain, I remembered how hard it could be to be young.

(I struggle here with whether to lie to you, but I will not. I did not reconsider my seat decision. So now you know the person I am.)

But I eventually landed in Flagstaff, and my daughter and I left about 24 hours later, and because I am her mother, I insisted that we see things along the way. With Google maps directing us to the Petrified Forest National Park, we hit Interstate 40, which largely runs along historic Route 66 — except when it does not. When we left the highway, like in the 20 miles it took us to drive to the national park, we saw the ruins of Route 66: salvage yards, abandoned gas stations, motels with names like The Buckaroo and The Wigwam (which had teepee-shaped cabins) and bearing signs that typically had only one word: CLEAN.

The Petrified Forest National Park was exceedingly hot, lightly populated, and unbelievably beautiful, with its expansive skies, painted-on clouds, unbearably bright light, and sweeping vistas. It was like a supermodel: I could take no bad photos.

All over the park are signs telling tourists not to take petrified wood. In a nice bit of synchronicity, I recently heard a podcast that referred to these very signs in this very national park: Apparently telling people not to steal petrified wood leads to an increase in the thefts of petrified wood. And honestly, it had not occurred to me that anyone would steal this stuff until I saw the signs. (While I was pretty hard-hearted about the aisle seat, I left all petrified wood in the park.)

We meandered through the park and returned to I-40, driving and hoping to avoid the rain. There were black bands on the horizon, and even in the near-desert, we saw standing water on the highway that reflected the deluge. We drove into New Mexico, where the hills look like the tops have been amputated and bear polka dots of scrubby bushes, and watched lightning pop both vertically and horizontally. There was a rainbow, and nightfall, and just a little rain, and then we were in Albuquerque.

It is funny when you feel very far from home and then find out that you are not. For when we checked into the hotel that night, the clerk looked at my driver’s license and asked if I had ever heard of a town called Metter. If you’re from southeast Georgia, there’s a single response to that question: Everybody knows it’s better in Metter. The clerk — who had only recently bid farewell to his 912 phone number — reminisced about growing up in Candler County and his boyhood trips to the big city of Savannah. After a few minutes the twang crept back into his voice and more of a twang entered mine.

The next morning I discovered that my beloved daughter had delivered a false assurance: Her boasting that all the conservation work had made her an early riser simply was not true. I occupied some time at Starbucks with my journal, and around 9 a.m., I practically threw her over my shoulder and placed her in the passenger seat of the little car. As my daughter dozed that morning, I could detect the peculiar sweet and sour smell of her childhood, and I tried not to cry. I wended through the mountains encircling Albuquerque and into the flats of eastern New Mexico toward the Texas panhandle.

A lot had changed in the year since we drove to Bozeman together and this year’s trip home from Flagstaff. Her gap year left her confident and free, and while I have often felt in the past like a solid D- in the strong-and-confident-woman department, she suffers from no such infirmities. She speaks her mind, and I like that. She knows what she wants, and I like that, too. After two decades of telling her, “I’m your mother, not your friend,” I began to hope that I could be both — a complicated source of advice and love, to be certain, but one coupled with a strong sense of companionship.

Last year was my own gap year, too, thanks to the diagnosis. I didn’t ask for cancer, but I would be a fool not to learn something from the experience. My perception of health is different, no longer confined just to the number of times I go to the gym every week. It now includes more sleep, daily mediation, and more time doing things I enjoy. To make that time, I started timing everything obsessively. I hated emptying the dishwasher, but after I found that it took exactly four minutes, I would do it and move on. I work much differently now: my day is governed by a to-do list. When I have checked everything off that list, I leave work — whether it’s 3 pm or 8 pm. It encourages me to focus and not to waste valuable time.

I paint more.

I sew more.

I knit more.

And at 51, I am starting to feel more like the person I am supposed to be. Creative. Adaptable. My own.

My daughter interrupted my reverie to make me listen to a podcast about the difficulties that women of color have with Euro-centric beauty ideals, a premise that didn’t surprise me given that I have had the same struggles, and then to play a travel playlist curated by a friend. As we listened and sang along, we drove through the miles of wind farms in the Texas panhandle, an alien sight if ever there were one. It probably didn’t help that we found ourselves in the midst of a convoy of government trucks driven by identical looking men with beards, ball caps, and aviator sunglasses. (I was reluctant to take a picture of them.)

We stopped at Cadillac Ranch, although the Bruce Springsteen song about it is far superior to the actual experience.

And only a few short miles from strip malls containing a Bed, Bath & Beyond and its ilk, we stopped at the second-largest canyon in America, conveniently located in a state park just outside Amarillo.

Unlike the Grand Canyon, the Not-So-Grand Canyon had a paved road going all the way down and back up. My daughter told me the rule of the Grand Canyon itself: going down is optional, coming up is mandatory. As she was talking, we interrupted a young man’s DIY modeling photo shoot on one of the trails, his wearing pressed jeans and a crisply laundered shirt, a silver belt buckle and black hat — and a stalk of alfalfa lightly clenched in his teeth.

And then we drove some more. My daughter flat-out told off a man who was bothering us at a McDonald’s in Shamrock, Texas; we spent the night in Elk City, Oklahoma; and then we drove straight through all of Oklahoma and Arkansas to Memphis. There was a stop at the National Civil Rights Museum.

There was a trip to Nashville to see my dad and stepmother, and a lunch in Atlanta with Chris’ parents. And then — finally and quickly and after almost 2,000 miles — there was home. Home is the best part of the road trip, for getting there safely is the goal, and it is the worst part of the road trip, for the adventure ends.

I suppose, though, a new adventure has begun for my daughter. She has started college, and after an indifferent stint as a high school student and a year of very hard physical labor, she is embracing her studies. She practically glows with happiness. She is sure of her place in the world. She met me last night in Atlanta, and I had one of the most enjoyable evenings of my life.

We first visited the aquarium, where we spent a lot of time admiring the otters. Since they are impossible to photograph well, I offer this jelly.

Before heading to a nice dinner, where we spoke of all sorts of Important Things, I asked if she would ride the Ferris Wheel with me. We were both a little scared, but we went nonetheless. Above the city with all the lights below, I took a photo of her, and she took a photo of me.

And while we both look a little nervous, I felt in that moment that things were completely fine. To be sure, the future may hold more hardship and not-so-welcome surprises, a certain lack of predictability and stability, more time spent up in the air, whether literally or figuratively. But it is all part of the adventure. The view up there was undeniably beautiful, and when I relaxed into it, I found that I could actually enjoy it.

I credit the gap year.

ALC

I got my start as a writer in the usual way: I swam on an adult swim team, and when we had a coaching change, someone needed to write the team’s newsletter. News-wise, swimming — and especially adult swimming — is hardly college football. So after earnest articles about chocolate milk (nature’s most perfect recovery drink!) and the importance of paying one’s dues to United States Masters Swimming, I started telling my teammates stories. Sometimes, they had something to do with swimming. Sometimes, they did not. If I saw my fellow swimmers most mornings at 5:45 a.m., it seemed only fair to think that I had seem them at their essence: bleary-eyed, slightly tired, barely clothed, floating weightlessly. If that was the case, then certainly I could tell them about the time my daughter may (or may not) have stuck a coin in her nose, about my dog’s going blind, about the violent end of a particularly stupid cat. (It was the last story that garnered one of my favorite responses: a swimmer who was a pillar of the community offered, unbidden, to help me TP the house of the dog’s owner who had carelessly let him get at the cat. It seemed like a fitting solution.)

I began swimming with this group in 2001, shortly after a stress fractured foot sidelined me from 95% of the physical activity in this world, and left the group in early 2008, when a chlorine sensitivity rendered me asthmatic and breathing only through the aid of four different prescription medications. It took pleas from my pulmonologist and a come-to-Jesus meeting with Chris (by then known to all as the Swim Widower) to make this decision. I swam for a few months with a few guys in a saline pool. It wasn’t the same. My swimming career ended for good courtesy of a car wreck several months later.

But for a few short years, there was Gutter Talk: The Weekly Newsletter of Savannah’s Most Serious Adult Swim Team. I wrote it when my children were young, and I still remember the furtive delight of sitting down at the computer for however much time I could spare on Sunday evenings. Those days seemed much more primal: Swim. Work. Raise children. Fall into bed exhausted. Sleep too little. Start again. I wish I had the same discipline now — to hide away at an inflexible time, to sit and write; perhaps the story of my last few weeks would be laid to rest in an essay rather than rattling around in my brain. Alas.

But like an old and fond friend, Gutter Talk called last night at 9:56 p.m. My friend the archaeologist, a woman who has a real name but will be forever known to me as “Indy,” found three old newsletters rattling in the basement of her inbox. She sent them to me. With old and fond friends, I have found that if I loved them then, I love them now. This was true with a high school friend that I called out of the blue on Thursday afternoon, having not seen her since 1985. And this was true with Gutter Talk.

I enjoyed a brief return to a life where when Chris missed me, he joked that he would simply let the aroma of a bottle of bleach waft out — which would summon the smell of his favorite swimmer. Where I would write down every single set I would swim. Where I met the friends that meant so much to me then and mean just as much to me now.

Sometimes when I come across drawings by my children, old receipts, long-ago postcards, the occasional college party flyer, I will simply tuck them away for future discovery. It is wrong, I know, for I should purge and say good-bye. Perhaps that was what Indy was doing as she cleaned out her inbox last night. Who knows? But for me, I was grateful to see it, and with some delight, I share with you now Gutter Talk — 28 January 2007 — in all of its copied and pasted glory, for I am completely without the necessary skills to change the spacing or the font.

Some things never change.

**********

My mother’s question haunts me every time I put on a swimsuit: “Does [Swim Widower] like you all beefed out like that?” (When I later read in Swimming World Magazine that Australia had hired a sports psychologist to work with its female swimmers, I understood exactly the type of question that prompted that decision.) She also religiously tracks my (nonexistent) shoulder injury. I love my mother dearly, but as we’ll both acknowledge, we often have a difficult relationship. So I’m not sure which of us was more surprised when I called to tell her that I was coming to Bowling Green to swim in a meet. I blame it on a swimsuit. Splish’s pink elephant suit instantly reminded me of Bowling Green. As a kid, when we’d visit my grandparents, I loved passing by a local liquor store whose sign featured a smiling pink elephant, sitting in a martini glass, spraying liquid from its trunk. I adored that sophisticated and merry pachyderm, and I would beg my teetotaling grandparents to drive me by the sign at least once a day. (Although they hated liquor, they loved me.) Whether it was fate — or a shrewd marketing decision by a swimsuit manufacturer — I felt compelled to make the trip. What can you expect from a trip mandated by a swimsuit? I had a safe flight, but as often happens in my life, things went slightly haywire. For instance? My brother offered to host a pre-race meal of grilled chicken and pasta, but at the last minute, decided to surprise me with that traditional training meal, mouth-of-hell chili. (It was the classic bait-and-switch.) The chili, in turn, gave me bad dreams that night, my favorite being that I was stuck in a van with my lanemates as we grew increasingly lost on the way to the meet. At one point, Lysette burst into tears and yelled, “You didn’t give me a Christmas present!” What could this all mean? Apparently, it did not mean that I was cool, calm, and collected, which (let’s face it) has never been my strong point. On the morning of the meet, I was bouncing around the house like Jerry Lewis — Jerry Lewis after a double espresso and a few pep pills. I was making my mother crazy. I was making myself crazy. I had been out of the water for 54 hours, and I was about to blast off. To get rid of me, my mother suggested that I get ready for the meet while she packed the snacks. I am still not certain what my mother had in mind as she prepared this spread for a swim meet that (for me) lasted 90 minutes, but here is what she packed: 1 gallon of Gatorade, 4 bottles of water, 3 cans of Coca Cola, 12 packages of raisins, 8 packages of Lance’s Malt crackers, 4 bananas, 2 apples, 2 Power Bars, and a gallon-sized Ziploc bag filled with shredded wheat. As I lugged the canvas bag and cooler into the natatorium, I encouraged her to share with the other swimmers. (She plied a banana into the hand of an unsuspecting man in a Speedo, which now that I think about it, sounds awfully Freudian.)  I ended up consuming 1/2 quart of Gatorade, a bottle of water, and 1/2 of a banana.  The other 12,000 calories remain unaccounted for. I suppose I should mention here that I swam. Western Kentucky apparently fields two types of breaststrokers: Those who swim a lot faster than me, and those who visit France solely for the purpose of swimming leisurely, heads-up breaststroke. As their very own breaststroking problem child, the organizers placed me in the fast heats in both the 100 and 200, where I promptly got smoked.  Happily though, I met my time goals and swam faster than I’d swum before. I also won my age group in the 100 and 200 — perhaps aided by the fact that I was the only one in my age group in both events — and placed, respectively, second and first overall among the women in the 100 and 200. (And yes, there were other women swimming.) My other events served only to remind me that I should stick to the 100 and 200 breaststroke. My 50 breaststroke time was the same as the first half of my 100. Also, have you ever met anyone who goes the same time in the 100 breaststroke and IM (which supposedly has the benefit of 3 “faster” strokes)? Or who negative splits the 100 IM by over three seconds? You have now. Before we left the pool, Mom hovered over the awards table and loudly demanded my ribbons:  She wanted to pin them to my jacket and then prance me about town, flush with success. (Sadly, I’m not making that up.) To my infinite relief, the ribbon table had run out of awards, so Mom had to content herself with telling the ice cream scooper, the store patrons, the video store clerk, my family, her neighbor at the newspaper box, the waitress at dinner that night, the waitress at breakfast the next morning, and the short order cook that I was a champion swimmer. I suspect that by now, in my absence, Bowling Greenians have been informed that I set world records in the events. In a fitting grand finale, the airline lost half of my luggage on the way home — the half that contained my swim gear.  It reappeared in the middle of the night, dazed, bedraggled, and smelling funny, but it’s back. And so, here I am, too, dazed, bedraggled, but hopefully not smelling funny, and back.  What is my next goal?  While I liked my times, I know that I can do better at the April meet in Hilton Head.  I am now focusing on becoming the Six Million Dollar ‘Snipe (we can rebuild her better, faster stronger); making a national qualifying time in the 100 breast (I’m not very far!); and staying away from swimsuits that lead me to do strange things. I hope your week goes swimmingly. The Guttersnipe

Work has taken me lately to outlying county seats, places with names like Claxton and Reidsville and Ludowici. To enter courthouses now, one must pass through security stations — usually a deputy and magnetometer. In my home courts, I breeze right through. But in the smaller towns, no one seems to gather that I am an attorney, despite the fact that I am wearing a suit and usually holding an overflowing file. “Who do you work for?,” I get asked. And I respond, “Well, me. I work for me.” This never seems to answer the deputies’ questions, but I eventually make it into the courtrooms.

In Ludowici last month, the deputy spared me the questions and let me in. I was pleasantly surprised and sort of relieved, and I decided to thank him on my way out. But he stopped me first and told me that he was sorry; he had no idea that I was an attorney. I missed a golden opportunity to ask him what he thought I was, and I said instead, “That’s okay. With the glasses, most people think I’m a teacher or a librarian.” We chatted for a moment, and I left, and as I cranked up the car I thought about how librarians weren’t exactly what they used to be.

If you remember librarians as older women with blue hair rinses and lingering cat hairs clinging to their cardigans, think again. I recently read “The Library Book” by Susan Orleans, which is largely about an unsolved 1985 arson that nearly destroyed the main branch of the Los Angeles Public Library. My friend Jessica insists that most non-fiction books could be successfully distilled into an extended-length magazine article, and this one proved her point. While the book was interesting, it seemed to need more information to justify its existence as a book. So the plot line sent tentacles into L.A.’s historic preservation moment, which the library fire spawned; the changing role of libraries themselves from inception (where they were populated by men, with almost exclusively male librarians) to its current iteration (where L.A. just hired a full-time social worker to help the homeless population, which often lingers at the library); and the national pivot from a book-based culture to one obsessed with electronics. And overseeing it all was the new breed of librarians themselves, often young, tattooed, and pierced.

I saw this new breed of librarian in February, when I convinced my friend Sharon to join me at a continuing education seminar run by librarians. The seminar was largely forgettable, except for stoking the fire of my fears that technology is beginning to pass me by. I thought of my mother, who recently switched to a cell phone that she has no idea how to answer. To be fair, she manages sometimes, but mostly she elects to call me back at the least convenient time. (I have noticed that this whole “least convenient time” is a practice creeping into my own parenting.)

But in the midst of learning at the seminar that I was clearly on the wrong side of the information gap, my own phone silently vibrated at what was a very convenient time: It allowed me to stride confidently out of the room for a moment, thereby avoiding a few minutes of a presentation about cataloging governmental documents. With the purpose in my stride at that moment. you would have thought that I was about to single-handedly deploy all 27 years of my legal acumen to save the entire free world. You would have been wrong, for as I saw the caller ID, I realized that the call was from the agency from which Chris and I had rented a beach house for the last seven years. And when I saw the number on the screen, I knew that this year’s vacation was about to be ruined.

Chris and I began renting a little cottage in Saint Simons Island, right on the beach, at a time when our marriage seemed to be overwhelmed by children and work and the unhappiness that accompanies one’s mid-40s. Those were bad days. I remember the nagging feeling that if one of us just struck a match, then the whole thing would burn straight to the ground. We began renting Beachview to remember why we liked each other, and through the years, with the lack of other responsibilities and with plenty of time staring at the ocean from the shade of the back porch in the heat of the day, we alternated bouts of silence with talks about growing old together and plenty of books, painting, and snacks.

Last year was nearly perfect. We had clawed our way up to the week of the Fourth of July. There were fireworks. We danced to a funk band on the lighthouse lawn. We had packing down to a science, knowing exactly what to leave at home. Even better, the unhappiness had passed. There were no matches to strike. And we talked about Beachview itself: who owned it, and why it was rented at a below-market rate, and whether this would be the year that the entire bathroom floor finally collapsed, probably with me standing on it. I even painted a picture of Beachview as a souvenir:

After the diagnosis came down, I wrote a new will, instructing my children to trespass discreetly to scatter a few of my ashes there.

So the call in February was an unwelcome one. The rental agency began by telling me that I was the last person it had called because they all knew how I felt about the place. But Beachview had sold, for the owners had divorced. (If I had known about their marital difficulties, I would have gladly sprung for counseling.) It was gone, and the rental agency placed us in a cottage not on the ocean, but on Ocean Boulevard, which despite its tranquil name is a busy street. This year I sat on the screened porch watching not the waves, but passing traffic.

The best thing I saw from that perch was a golf cart on the Fourth of July. The driver — a red, white, and blue-attired husband — had constructed an Uncle Sam hat to sit on top, and with “Yankee Doodle Dandy” playing on tin speakers and bubbles swarming extravagantly from a machine in back, he appeared in his element with the patriotic bunting and streamers floating about him. His wife looked like she had never been more embarrassed, and at that moment, I loved the whole institution of marriage more than ever. I have been meditating since January, and one of the tools that the app has suggested is to view thoughts simply as cars that pass on the road. Don’t engage; just view. When confronted with a particularly thorny thought, I now think of that golf cart and watch it pass, trailing bubbles and patriotism behind it.

But the golf cart wasn’t enough, and we left the vacation early. It was there that I felt the evaporation of the structural integrity of my stiff upper lip. Like the rest of this whole stinking year, I found myself in a place that I was not supposed to be. My birthday is tomorrow, and on that day a year ago, I remember thinking to myself that it would be a wonderfully memorable year. I was partially right — it certainly was memorable — but staring down this birthday, I feel less sure-footed than ever, especially in the “who am I?” and “what am I supposed to be?” categories.

And so I found myself at Pilates class on Saturday morning. My favorite instructor called me “birthday girl” before class began. At the end of class, she told the room that we needed to sing to the two birthday girls, Kim and Ashley, and as she said it, she gestured to my immediate left. Kim, whom I know, sat two spaces down from me, so I assumed that Ashley sat between us. And I could see where singing to “Kim, Ashley, and Amy Lee” would be simply too much.

I grew up Southern Baptist, and Chris swears that you have to pass a vocal test to join any congregation worth its salt. (He grew up Episcopalian, home of small choirs and hymns that bear with legend “with great solemnity.”) So with my loud and exuberant voice, I gave it my alto-all in singing to Kim and Ashley. And when the song was over, I turned to the woman next to me and said, “Happy birthday, Ashley!” And she replied, “It’s not my birthday. And I’m not Ashley.”

Then it dawned on me: I was Ashley, even though I am not.

And so begins my new year.

I have been unnaturally subdued about my birthday this year, a day that I have always viewed as a high holy day on my personal calendar. There has been no countdown clock for the last month, no ham-handed gift suggestions, no squeals in endless contemplation of cake and ice cream and culinary excess.

But there is hope. In bed last night, I nudged Chris and said, “Do you know what tomorrow is?” He said he did not. So I reminded him that it was birthday eve. He leaned over, kissed me on the forehead, and said, “There’s my girl.” I have that, and I have the joy of turning another year older, and I have (I hope) time to answer all the questions that I ask about myself. I have learned better than to ask for a big year because sometimes those things can be overrated. My birthday goal is to make it out of this year with all of my current internal organs, whether vestigial or full-blown, intact. It is a small goal, but it is mine, and if at this time next year I still have a gallbladder and a spleen, I will have won the lottery.

ALC

On Thursday, Chris and I celebrated our 27th wedding anniversary by doing one of our favorite things: We ate well. There were shared plates, a glass of champagne, an incredible dessert, and a dozen raw oysters from Washington state, the mid-Atlantic, and South Carolina. As a life-long Easterner, it was hard to concede victory to the west coast oysters on the plate, but I had to. They were just better. But they were all good, and we were all smiles, for we had tested that whole “in sickness and in health” vow and come out on the other side. In celebration, I wore a black and white dress that I’d had forever and that Chris really likes, and when I looked in the mirror, I realized that at my age, it had become a little too short and a little too low-cut (both of which may explain why Chris likes it). As I wore it, I figured that the anniversary meal was a perfect send-off for a dress that had served me well.

I did not think of the oysters again until Saturday, when something inside me was just not quite right. I went through my regular routine in some discomfort, and by 8:30 p.m., the time we came home from dinner with friends, I told Chris that if I made it through the night without a trip to the hospital, I would be surprised. I am not one for dramatic pronouncements like that, for I have a healthy dose of the pioneer spirit in me, and a little before midnight, I became convinced that it was only food poisoning (which I’d had a few times before). Then this thought arose in my mind: What kind of knucklehead eats oysters — even west coast oysters — in a month that has no R in it?

And then the dam broke.

Five hours of absolute hell followed. I could not stand up. I could not sit down. I could only lie in a fetal position on the floor, a pose I punctuated with frequent trips to the bathroom to vomit violently. My belly was distended, and I had the chills. There was pain everywhere in my body. A little before 5 a.m. Sunday morning, I decided I did not want to die on my living room rug, so I drug myself up the stairs, woke Chris, and asked him to take me to the hospital. My ever-sensible husband began to run down a list of questions that felt decidedly health-insurer approved, at which point I offered to summon an Uber — quite possibly in a tone of voice that could peel paint.

And that got his attention.

By 5 a.m., I was doubled-over and staggering into the emergency room, stopping first to allow the on-duty officer to check my purse and to summon me through the magnetometer. I clutched a plastic grocery bag just in case. After a time that seemed like forever but was probably 30 minutes, I found myself lying on a gurney in the hall of the emergency room — moaning, shivering, and using the hospital-approved bright green emesis bag — and after 60 minutes, I got the first of three morphine and anti-nausea doses fed into the line running from my left elbow.

If you are going to be in tremendous pain in an ER in the early morning hours on the weekend, I highly recommend both the painkillers and the lack of a private room. The ER hallway, especially after the drugs kicked in, was compelling television. Police officers and shackled arrestees paraded by steadily. People had been in some terrible fights. There was a crazy man (apparently a regular visitor) who parked himself in the bathroom next to my stretcher, kept the door unlocked, and made noises that did not sound quite human. The nurses would come and go, and when the doctor finally came to see me, she asked where the pain was. When her hand reached the lower right side of my abdomen, I let out a loud shriek. She ordered a CT scan.

And there it was: acute appendicitis.

A hospital can mobilize pretty darn fast in an emergency, and by 10 a.m., I was being wheeled into a surgical prep area. The operation was short and done by laparoscope, and I was in a private room by noon.

I tell you all of this not to gross you out — and if I did, I’m sorry — but to pass along several things I learned. First, as my family physician told me when I was describing the symptoms that eventually got connected to cancer, pain is never normal. As I was pondering the length of my life on the living room rug that morning, her words stuck with me. I am grateful for her wisdom, because if I had postponed going to the ER, my appendix could have ruptured. That may have alleviated the pain, but then I would have been facing the possibility of a septic abdominal cavity.

Second, that I had appendicitis never crossed my mind until the doctor touched the magic spot. I am just glad that I got to the hospital when I did — after 24 hours of symptoms — because it’s a short time frame from the display of symptoms to rupture: 48 to 72 hours. If you have what seems to be the worst case of food poisoning in the world, please — remember my experience.

Third, if I’d known I was going to have appendicitis, I NEVER WOULD HAVE EATEN MEXICAN FOOD FOR LUNCH AND DINNER. Oh, lord. That may have been my greatest tactical error in the whole ordeal.

Fourth, after encouraging everyone to choose one’s own adventure, I found one that had been chosen just for me. A few days ago I was coming to terms with six scars on my stomach. Now I am coming to terms with nine scars on my stomach. With all of the travel that I had planned for the summer, I am so relieved that it happened at home.

Finally, Monday — the day after my emergency appendectomy — I celebrated six months since my cancer surgery. I was doped up, ragged, and tired, but thanks to the kindness of a nurse, I was happy to have a chocolate-covered ice cream bar in my stomach. Chris suggested that I celebrate the one-year anniversary a little more conventionally (cupcakes, perhaps?), and I think that he is correct. Life changes on a dime — a message that I have proven yet again, having discovered it yet again the hard way — and clearly all my efforts to get back to health were to get me to the point where I could handle another abdominal surgery. Which I did.

Around noon on Monday, the doctor released me. Chris had been tasked with bringing me something to wear home, and when it came time for street clothes, he reached into the bag and pulled out the black and white dress that I had worn to our anniversary dinner. When I asked if he thought it was a little much, he replied that he knew I’d want to look nice leaving the hospital. There I was, belly wildly distended due to the surgery, tape residue and antiseptic goo everywhere, unwashed, tired, slightly defeated. I loved that my husband imagined me dressed in a party dress after one of the most painful nights of my life. I decided that I would like to imagine myself like that, too. So without complaint, I stepped into it — still a little too short, still a little too low cut — and let Chris zip me up. I rode out of the hospital in a wheelchair, head held high.

ALC

In case you are wondering — and undoubtedly, you have not been — Emmet is alive and well and living his best life. He acts like he owns the entire living room:

We accede to his requests to watch documentaries about dogs:

And he somehow perseveres when he accompanies us to Chipotle for Taco Tuesday, despite the fact that he has been invited to dinner but receives no food:

But mostly we walk. Tuesday marked the year anniversary of Buddy’s death, and on our walk the next morning, I thought about Kintsugi, the Japanese art of mending broken pottery with metallic lacquer, which repairs the vessel but makes the flaws obvious. It occurred to me that in a heart fissured by the death of a beloved dog, a new puppy is like solid gold that has been poured into the cracks. (Please: Don’t tell Emmet this, or we’ll have to watch more dog documentaries.)

On that walk, and on all of our walks, I think about how if I wrote 1,000 love letters to my neighborhood, it just would not be enough. It was love at first sight for me followed by an enduring love affair. (I have even forgiven my neighbors for the years where everyone clearly hated me, an animus demonstrated by my election as president of the neighborhood association.) There are massive live oaks and swaying Spanish moss. There are parks, whether circular, square, or rectangular. There are plenty of other people out walking their dogs. And within a radius of a few blocks, there are three schools.

Even without children at home, the schools remind me of the rhythm of families. There seems to be a frenzy for months — heavy traffic, loud buses, Kamikaze cyclists, children with bedhead in wrinkled uniforms, tall people coaxing small people out the door — and then it stops abruptly. When I saw some friends sitting in rockers on their front porch and drinking coffee at 7:30 one morning, the door flung open and children in pajamas playing tag on the lawn, I knew that school was over. And I breathed a sigh of relief. It was officially summer.

The last week of May and the first week of June have traditionally been busy times. Through the magic of Facebook and my new Android phone, I am reminded that five years ago, I was on the Appalachian Trail; four years ago, my daughter broke her elbow in a bike accident that forever demonstrated why one does not dangle large shopping bags off one’s handlebars; three years ago, I was in Paris (as with all family vacations, it was the best of times, it was the worst of times); and a year ago, I was confronted with an empty nest, Buddy’s death, and my first cancer diagnosis of the year, for skin cancer.

But somewhere in all of this busyness, I decided to quit complaining about the heat and really enjoy summer. (Living in Savannah, the former pledge is often quite taxing; there are days where it feels like we’re all walking around in a large hot wet blanket.) I was kind of uncertain about what the latter pledge really meant, and some times it just seemed like an excuse to eat more ice cream and ride my bike everywhere. But I heard a friend with small children talk about a book series — Choose Your Own Adventure — where the reader makes choices that determine how the story ends. And that seemed like a perfect description of summer to me.

Some adventures have required advance planning. A few years ago, I decided to start cleaning my own house and banking that money for travel. This decision has had consequences. Some things I expected, like more travel. Some things I did not. If you clean your own house, you must reckon with the mess you make. While I wasn’t exactly smearing ketchup all over my walls, I was faced with the fact that I owned too many things. I have been paring down my possessions, and just as importantly, I have been working hard not to accumulate things. While I am failing miserably in the yarn and fabric categories, I have done a better job in others, and when I went to place something in the laundry closet this week, I was confronted by something absolutely astounding: shelf space. The angels sang.

Another unexpected surprise has been the travel itself. If you scrub toilets to pay for a trip, your notion of the perfect trip changes. Fine hotels and legacy airline carriers are a sucker’s game, and in my current life, I find myself never sitting next to Chris on a plane, sharing a single checked bag with him, and getting unduly excited about the words “complimentary breakfast” in the hotel description. I may be the world’s cheapest traveler, but I am going places. This summer holds trips to Boston and Denver and a road trip with my daughter along the Pacific Coast Highway. I will see all sorts of things beyond human understanding, like the Red Sox on the heels of their World Series season, the Rocky Mountains, and Los Angeles traffic.

There is also a trip to the beach, and this brought up its own conundrum. One of the delightful effects of resection surgery — other than saving my life, that is — is the appearance of my stomach. Your intestinal cavity is apparently a pretty well-packed affair, for when a surgeon removes a foot of colon, you spend a few months feeling a bit like a packing crate that has had one key piece removed. Things rattle around and you feel all jostle-y. Fortunately that feeling has gone. But I have been left with a stomach that can only be described as a pot belly with a little belt in the center right over my belly button. (Yes, It is just as attractive as it sounds.)

This depressed me for a while, I must confess. And then I looked at it one day and decided to use it as a reminder of one very important thing indeed: I DID NOT DIE. (I have even come to view that little belt as a stamped leather belt bearing those very words.) When you view being alive and having a functioning body — belt and all — as a real privilege, misshapen abs seem inconsequential.

I chose my own adventure on that one, too. I have abandoned everything I ever believed in and all my dignity, too, by taking hot Pilates and hot yoga classes. The classes are sort of a good hot in February. They are sort of a terrible hot in a spate of 100 degree weather, just like we had last week. The weather even prompted my favorite instructor to tell us to take it easy if we started to see Jesus. At one point, fearing the good lord’s premature arrival, I removed my tank top and exercised in my sports bra and tights. My shirt came off before I knew it, a glancing thought given to whether or not my current battered 50 year-old body would embarrass me, an almost immediate reassurance that it was a very good strong body in all the right ways.

With a really sweaty tank top on the ground in front of my yoga mat, I made peace with the weird little I DID NOT DIE belt, for the world did not end.

And it answered a big question facing me this summer: Would I still wear a bikini to the beach? I began wearing them about a decade ago, when I realized that even at the height of my body’s beauty I believed that I should not be wearing a two-piece. If that was the case, what exactly had changed? What would be different? I would still feel all wrong, and perhaps unjustifiably so. And why exactly would that matter? Since I did not wear a bikini at 20, I decided to wear one at 40. This year, as a concession to the belt, I have ordered ones with higher waists — a black and white check, a red and white stripe — and as long as I do not care, no one else will either. (In the off-chance that someone says anything untoward, there is the nuclear option: the cancer card, followed by a PSA about the importance of getting a colonoscopy. Nothing says “surf’s up” quite like that.)

It is summer, and I don’t know what your adventure is. For me, it is not complaining about the heat, which I cannot change. It is realizing that imperfections can enhance beauty. It is walking through one of my favorite places, budget travel, a sense of wonder, a high-waisted bikini. It is an excuse to eat ice cream, a reason to jump into a cold pool, and a dog and a belly that serve as reminders that life very much goes on. It is accumulating less and making space for more and hearing the angels sing.

ALC

I am very much alive and mostly well, and as far as these things go, I have been on the receiving end of all sorts of good news. The nodules that appeared in a December CT scan of my lungs disappeared by a February follow-up, and I had a successful and clean colonoscopy. My oncologist fired me on March 11, citing the lack of any need for an oncologist, and I officially lost my status as a cancer patient. Shortly after that, as I waited for the other shoe to fall (figuratively speaking), I walked into my closet and one of my favorite shoes — a blue suede ankle strap — fell onto my head (literally speaking).

As happy as all of these events have been, I have found it difficult to think. Don’t get me wrong: I successfully work, drive a car, make impulse purchases, get 38% of the Jeopardy! questions right, and complete the Wednesday New York Times crossword puzzle in pen — just like before. But I sort of reached a conclusion that perhaps the unexamined life was worth living, at least for the moment, and once I started down that path, it was bye-bye blog. I began to berate myself, and then I remembered my surgeon’s advice: Avoid heavy lifting for a while. I followed her counsel when it applied to my body, gingerly lifting five pound dumbbells in the weeks following surgery, and it got me through. Flush with that success, I decided to apply the advice to my mind.

When one historically thinks too much, where does one go when thinking is not the answer? On Valentine’s Day, I signed myself up for a class that violates everything I hold dear: Hot Pilates. What type of sick mind corrupts Pilates with 95 degree heat? Years ago, I made it through a single hot yoga session with a solemn vow never to do that again, and when I read someone else’s assessment of that type of class — if someone breaks wind, we’re all dead — I felt positively vindicated. But now, my sick mind drags my battered body to Hot Pilates three days a week, and practically delirious from the oppressive heat, I leave happy. On March 26, when I found myself for the first time since surgery holding a full plank, and then full side planks on each side, I started crying. Thanks to the pouring sweat, no one could tell.

I have also spent a lot of time making things. I am knitting an oversized fucshia sweater that I fear will be too small:

And a shawl made from yarn that I purchased in Bozeman, Montana, in a colorway named Bozeman:

And a wool hat for my daughter, who faces cold nights even in April sleeping outside in her conservation job:

I have been sewing, including this dress that I made for wedding where Chris and I danced all night, the skirt twirling pleasingly around me:

The garden is being overhauled:

And for Lent, I decided to paint each of the 40 days, which really turned out to be painting more often than not. (I know, I know. The good Lord and I will have to sort it out.) I have painted two things I really like, an abstract of a view from a boat ride a few years ago:

And this almost completed commemoration of the rarest of all rarities, a grocery store orchid that rebloomed on the study’s windowsill in my negligent care:

I do all of these things, and I go to bed tired every night, and I wonder when I will return to the old me. It has finally begun to dawn on me that I will not. The old me is a ship that has sailed.

I talked to my daughter last night. She had a few days off from her conservation job in Arizona and loaded into her Mini Cooper with a couple of friends and drove to San Diego. These days I cannot even imagine the delicious freedom of being 20 years old, with meager needs and wants, on a road trip to a beautiful city with perfect weather while in possession of an indulgent parent’s Visa card to defray the cost of $5 a gallon gas. She tells me she is doing these things, and while I worry about her, I tell her to go. She, in turn, appreciates how supportive I am. How can I not be? Children are the gangsters of love. So I face a Hobson’s Choice: either wish her well and marvel in her independence, or discourage her and wonder why she resents me. I am comfortable in my roles as the financier of this expedition and as her #1 fan, hopeful that it will lead to her adult life either near me (unlikely) or near a major, easily accessible airport (slightly more likely).

My reward is that she calls. In last night’s dispatch from the front, she told me that she had had so many good memories lately that she worried she was losing the old memories — of Montana, of home, of summer camp, of childhood. It is a wonderful problem to have, this overload of happiness, and although she does not know it, she will not lose all of the old memories: Some will filter through the cracks, some will be insistent, some will await years to rediscover. There will be a song, a person, a smell, a situation that will open the vault, and she will have to deal with what she remembers. I am thankful for her for the good.

While I am not officially thinking yet, not now, I hope to remember this time by its artifacts. I can point to the scars on my belly. But I will be able to point to a too-small sweater, a shawl, a hat, a few paintings, a garden, a dress. While the rest is there (and not going anywhere), these are the things I want to remember about myself from this long winter: the color, the motion, the industry, the joy.

ALC