Since July 4, 2007 and the start of our lives with cancer, I have always been a little underwhelmed by the holiday and usually just hang at home. Easy. No energy output.
Recent weeks have brought the hot, humid air of a Midwest summer and we’ve succumbed to using the AC. Lovely air conditioning, so that we can all grab a good night’s sleep in order to face the next day.
It’s really been a lovely spring and summer around here so far. We have had lots of rain which saves having to water the plants in the garden and helps the days to cool down.
We’ve finished another school year, this one without any cancer craziness. The kids have both enjoyed a very typical summer. They sleep late, do their jobs, go to the lake with friends and stay up late. Typical, good, reassuring!
This has been a hard holiday for all of us since 2007. We chose the path of least resistance again this year, no plans to celebrate, we’ve enjoyed being home and not putting too many demands on ourselves. But then Sunday morning dawned and we woke up to realize we’d been robbed in the night. A very uncomfortable feeling of having someone violate our security here at home. Without going into detail, we are all okay, only a few things are missing and we’re working on getting things secure again. And everything will be okay really. Mostly it’s just a hassle. There’s the funny things like the dogs made NOT A SOUND, or we were sleeping very deeply. And the yucky things, like, eewww, someone opened a window to our kitchen and came into our house. And back to funny again, like the dogs did NOT MAKE A SOUND!!!!!! We learned a new word. The police called the intruder a ‘tweeker’ - someone who does a lot of meth - gggrreeeaaaattttt.
And then the real gift. Always one to find the bright spot in as much as I can, I did feel thankful that this lovely ‘tweeker’ gave us our first July 4th holiday since 2007 that we didn’t focus on the cancer. So I will get my fill of using ‘tweeker’ and then I will go back to the old definition - someone who adjusts something just so and changes it just a bit. We tweaked our cancer story this time around and it came out a little differently. A welcome change.
Happy 4th of July!
love,
Maggie
