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8:30a
This day was cleaned over night by a rain so drenching that even though the sun is bright and warm (for an Oregon September morning), it is still dripping and tinkling with moisture. The air is fresher and the details around me sharper. The calm after the storm is mirroring in my mind a peacefulness that is long over due.

The birds seem to like the wetness too. I wish I knew how to identify them by their song. All I know of them is that these birds singing this morning are not the geese I heard honking late last night. This is the time of year that the first of the geese flock across our neck of the world on their annual trek south. The early birds get the sand crabs, I reckoned.

I can’t help but imagine myself among their caravan heading for warmer climes. I was planning on being south already, myself. Who knows when I will follow the geese now? I must not have been as done with Oregon as I thought. Maybe Oregon is just not done with me, I don’t know.

I don’t know much of anything. I used to think I had it all figured out. Remember when we were eighteen and knew it all? We knew then that the old people were stupid. And little did we know that we hit the nail on the head with that evaluation. It’s just that the nail we hit wasn’t the one we were aiming at.

What those bright eyed, eager new adults that were us didn’t count on was that as we would grow older and wiser we would realize how much we didn’t know. Thus fulfilling our own prophesy. Because the more you know about living in the real world, the more you come to know that you have so much more to learn.

If life would just listen to our naive younger plans, it would be so much more fun to grow up, don’t cha know.

“Futures have a way of falling down in mid-flight”

Now I am sitting here contemplating the past 105 days. Wondering who planned all of this? Not me, that’s for sure. If I had to write in a diversion for the story of my life, I might have placed a tree (OK, a grand huge sequoia, if I had to) across the only road to Texas. We could have pulled over and chopped the road block into firewood and had the mother of all bonfires, sang girl scout songs while holding hands around the fire pit, and then moved on down the cleared out road. That would have been diversion enough for me. But it wouldn’t have made for a block-buster movie I guess.

Nothing like a big scary Monster jumping out of the hole in the fallen log in my version. No shoot-em-up, kick butt fight scenes in my preferred saga. Yet here he is, the CancerMonster, all fangled toothed and hairy, jumping up and down on the itinerary of my life that I so carefully scheduled and typed up in triplicate. How wwude!

One more week of easy resting and I have to fight the campaign of my life. The final showdown of this battle between the Mother and the Monster. (Cross your fingers behind your back so that IT doesn’t see . . .) If all goes as planned (see the irony there?), Dr House, surgeon extraordinaire, will chop out the fallen sequoia and I’ll be done with it. Get this freaking thing out of me! Then I can move on into the search and rescue scene of this story I am playing out.

I just wish someone would slip me the script for the next act. That’s all I want right now. To know what next week will bring. Has this all been a build up to a passive ending? Will I just get up out of my hospital bed and walk off into the sunset? Will I have to be carried into the sequel? In the long run, it doesn’t really matter, I guess. I will play the part that my agent secures for me. Let the sequel run its course and “Get’er Done.” I just want someone to give me a heads up on the script. Not too much to ask.

The only end I will not play is one with an end.

Whether I come out of this as a full fledge Biped or not, is not the important plot point, you see. I just want to come out of it as Sheena, Slayer of Monsters. I just want to come out of it. Period.

End of discussion.

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11:00a
I have so much to do today to get ready for tomorrow’s move. The pain in my leg has backed off a bit, but I am still a slow poke. I am going to post this early and get to work.

My mind is full of tomorrows. I’ll let you know about this one, don’t worry! I am anxious to get going! Meanwhile, since I won’t make it to the beach today, I will imagine reading on the dock of my favorite river with the reflection of my Survivor Tree looking back at me through the ripples.

I’m coming Tree! Keep a look out for an old duck-mobile coming down the lane . . . With a transplanted red-neck yelling “Yee-Hah!” following close behind. You’ll know her by the bump on her butt.

That will be me!