swallowing that is… no colour for it because it is not visual alone… swallowing is actually, a feast of sensory imagery.. still not being able to truly swallow really takes away because it is an essential part of eating enjoyment. I saw a movie with Sally Fields, she has two weeks to live from some sort of cancer, and her children come home to wait it out. Two Weeks. She has no stomach anymore or something like that and the family joins her in a chewing feast. They chew and then spit out into cans what cant be swallowed. I saw that movie long before my own diagnosis and i was very touched by that scene. Well, i have done alot of that form of eating recently and it just isnt the same.

why should my blogging world be any different from my “real” circle? I WANT TO EAT… full shebang, and yesterday, not one minute longer.

more dreaming… My friend, Peggy who has been lots of places with me in this world… once said to me when i was caught up in self-pity, wondering how i was going to have a normal, happy life again (whatever that is,) Peggy said to me, “you are the best i know at re-inventing yourself.” again, we have few threads we have to tie together here… that was thread one…

next thread… for the most part the physical changes from cancer have all been taken in stride. But my hair growing back is not coming so easy for me. People around me say it is still growing, to me it seems to have stopped. It is largely salt and pepper, and mostly salt or mostly pepper depending upon your angle. Whatever… for me, it is way too masculine and harsh and not me. RE-invented or not… not Beth, or Valerie for that matter either.

Dying the hair has been ruled out by medical personnel, and there is not enough to work with to style, trim, or alter. Katherine thought of Heather’s headband… a simple plastic type of headband with a fluffy tulle coral flower. Heather bought it from Anthropolgie.

Talk about re-inventing me… i came full circle. I discovered the heartbeat of me. (billions of blogs dedicated to the subject. one young writer in her profile said, “if i could i would live in an Anthroplogie catalogue.” totally, I say, me too.) I have never had the branding of a product effect me so. The combination of non-frou-frou femininity, vintage, eclectic, stylistically sleek, verging on the shabby chic of the nineties pulls together so many impulses of mine, and seem to echo as i said femininity, but natural, flea market refurbishment, strength not afraid to get on a motorcycle (although i am ,) this woman can change a tire, argue with customer service (ever so politely,) and she can drop her hankie to catch an eye.

problem is the re-invented Beth is not fabulously, famously wealthy, and if she were, i dont think the old or the re-invented Beth would be able to justify spending those bucks for  things, for “stuff.” I mean i could splurge and get a darling brooch, but then we would have to re-coup before the next purchase. Next step for Beth in such a dilemma is ebay or kijiji. Used anthropolgie items are more than the original product because now “gently used” adds to the cost… Valerie Beth shakes her head.

Now my chiquita darling niece, Heather is to blame for all of this. Somewhere in a previous website for her business, Antique Key Photography she said that she aims to re-create an Anthropolgie catalogue in her photos, something i didn’t understand until i spent some time in their catalogue and then on the blogs of un-wealthy women wanting to re-create that world.

in my search i began by wanting to make a headband… but i also wanted to make some of the incredible retro-brooches they sell. which led to the knock-off lamps… her whole website is a dizzyingly powerful injection for creative mojo… ashley ann photography “under the sycamore tree.”

the anthropolie product… 148USD for smallish lights.

and the knock-off diy

click on image for instructions.

okay so this is blog post is not entirely an ad for anthropologie.

i want this necklace…can’t afford this necklace… so i am trying to figure out how to make it. (from the shophandmade site.) i have become over the last months, fascinated with all things handmade, and with the women creating stunning pieces of art in their homes, when their babies and husbands are asleep, after she finishes the job at the temp office or as her boss, sometimes with no family, sometimes with obligations we cant begin to understand. I know men do this all also, but for me, thinking of the woman creating an artful life in spite of the circumstances has completely consumed me.

and they cant seem to stay in one medium, one form of expression, they are cooking with a bit more zest, they cant seem to stay away from flea markets and then they have to add a dab of paint, or a bit of bling… and it is all about being personal, not settling for hallmark to say it for them, about knowing the recipient and letting it show, this appreciation for the details of our lives.

a blog i love for all of her creative, artful life… A New Design by Ashley Newell Cannon. click on image and scroll down for instructions…. then travel all over blog; read about her sister, how she was swept off her feet by her husband, how precious the love of her parents was to her… and the amazing recipes.

and these women are generous.. they want to help us be creative also, they are urging us to test our wings, so they give us links, templates, recipes, ideas, instructions… (and no, they are not all generous and we will not get me started on what i think about that.)

some of these womenfollowing are my friends, and some of them I am related to, and some are in both categories !

Laurel is making washer pendants from photographs, covered with resin> stunning… but i cant find a photo of  her finished product. Before the pendants, she was custom-designing baby shower cupcakes, and taking and framing amazing nature photographs.

Melly, has in the last few months taught herself to crochet and she is busy making new kinds of art…

this link takes you to specific post.

and Lois, how does one describe Lois.. well, probably with her real name, which Lois ain’t. She has created an entire web persona and hops back and forth between virtual and real blogger. She is living so artfully from her RV and her stationary home whipping up meals and artisan bread, sewing quilts, and writing… and looking after those she loves. (me. included.) She needs three or four blogs to cover it all…

 
click on image to go to Lois’ post where you will find link for recipe. and eat it with plugra butter, a tip from Lois, which i passed onto mary who loved it!

and then there is angie who is so busy creating she rarely takes photos… what touches me the most, she makes blankets for special babies that she is praying for to let them that while people in the world might have preconceived notions about them, she knows for a fact they are a blessing. below is a favorite Angie-craft of mine… she loves Christmas trees, yeah me too.

one last creative giant for me today… she needs a blog, i would be there everyday hungry for ideas and inspiration… back to anthropologie troublemaker, Heather. This are snaps from her house…

and a couple of her client photo-snaps…

so in the process, some wild dreaming going on… join me on my hot-air balloon, or perhaps my zeppelin (steampunk is on my brain)… and i need to give a nod to a generous digi-designer, Gypsy Chick. She has free designer palettes, she is giving out inspiration left and right, encouraging us to get into the mix, letting us know our art matters, makes a contribution.

i don’t know where i am going, but come with me, okay?

and this post doesnt’ nearly cover the people i admire in terms of generous creativity, more to come.

Three streams of influence take us to the main point of today’s post… i  hope the kids will take the time to read this, and the rest of you? well, you might something useful which will come to you when you last expect it.

A.  Back in the day, Peggy, Becky and I would without fail put this book into the hands of every new believer we knew.

The Fight

it was a boot camp manual to this new life breathing heavenly air. What the Christian life looked like, how to do Bible study, how to pray, how to find a church. When Joel made a profession of faith, we ordered the book for him. I plan to soon re-read it. I recommend it.

B)    Another ministry that i loosely follow is Ransomed Heart Ministries. by follow i mean i read their books from time to time, read their newsletter, etc. I am a romantic in the literary criticism sense of the word: The movement validated strong emotion as an authentic source of aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on such emotions as trepidation, horror and terror and awe—especially that which is experienced in confronting the sublimity of untamed nature and its picturesque qualities, both new aesthetic categories. It elevated folk art and ancient custom to something noble, made of spontaneity a desirable character (as in the musical impromptu), and argued for a “natural” epistemology of human activities as conditioned by nature in the form of language and customary usage. from wikipedia…  a simplification but does the job here… a greater simplification is that  it was a reaction against rational criticism which insisted upon only measurable and tangible  qualities in discussing literature.

Ransomed Heart Ministries has written some powerful essays and explorations of masculinity and femininity. They have three basic tenants they are forever trying to remind us of… 1) there is more going on than meets the eye, 2) there is a fierce battle being waged all around us, and 3) you and I each have a specific role or purpose in this battle.

C)    Believing God by Beth Moore is a study i have written about before. Beth seeks to take us from believing in God to believing God. She has five major points…

I believe God is who He says He is
I believe God can do what He says He can do.
I believe I am who God says I am. (ephesians 1 says that i am blessed, chosen, adopted, accepted, forgiven and redeemed.)
I can do all things through Christ.
God’s word is alive and active in me.

okay now we swirl our ingredients together, lol…

there have been times in these last months when i was too beaten physically to do anything except lie there… where i had envisioned i would spend glorious hours in prayer and spiritual warfare, I often did nothing but lie there. I was not letting empty thoughts or wrong thoughts fill me, but there was in my mind nothing of value going on… Sandy P reminded me that God’s definition of making me lie down in green pastures might be different than my definition. That was an important thing for me to hear and accept.

God is in His mercy has me in a new place. I am still fatigued and often wish i could be “doing” more. And sometimes prayer is still too much. I have much scripture memorized and have been able to pray God’s word in doing battle for loved ones. However, the nature of this chemo and radiation induced fatigue have made that near impossible at times. Leona gave me a beautiful journal and a cross pen which i have begun like an illuminated journal of old… with small sketches, a list of my spiritual “house” (the people God has given me a special burden to pray for,) and specific scriptures written out that i will often pray through with each person on my heart. Even with such an awesome “cheat” sheet, it can be too fatiguing for me.

But as i said, I have more energy than before… so what do i do?  in the night, when pains, phlegm prevent sleep i can waste time online, or fretting, or i can recite the five steps of Believing God. And as i hit each step… I believe God is who He says He is, I recall and repeat who He says He is… creator of the universe, holy, perfect, my redeemer, Lamb of life… as they come to me, I repeat them, I believe God can do what He says He can do… make me into a writer, heal me, bless me with every spiritual blessing; I am who God says I am… i am loved, i am forgiven, i am a writer, i am a redeemed sinner, i will eat again; I can do all things through Christ, i can do radiation, i can swallow more everyday, i can walk around the block, i can write, i can be creative; God’s word is alive and active in me,  He inhabits my praises, He is my shepherd and i have everything i need…. get the idea? i begin with a spiritual truth (the 5 principles of Believing God) and piece by piece, i talk about it; piece by piece, I rehearse it.

Bringing these three streams together> there are practical ways of walking out, fleshing out this life of faith and it does us much good to learn and practice some of them. They can be turn into tools of comfort. Because there is so much more going on than we see with naked eye and because we each play a role in this great battle, we need to use our time wisely. I bring to bear those two truths to the greatest task I have currently… trusting God.

** for my children, bonus and birth… if i dont write down the things i have learned in this life, how else will i remember to speak of His great mercies to them day and night

i was remiss in not explaining the post title, “Unquiet Ghosts".” I was impressed with all the stabs that you folks took, similar to some of my answers on the written portion of my Master’s examination. William Faulkner, the legendary Southern writer, had his fictional world described often as a land “haunted by memory.” And his events were embedded in the landscape itself. The term “unquiet ghosts” was used by more than a few critics in describing his writing. Since i was writing about the landscape of my south and particular memories, I borrowed the phrase.

And now for part two of our literary interlude… I have watched (much of it  against my will) the impact of cancer upon my family and chronicling it more in my heart than on my paper, but on my last trip to Winnipeg, as part of a writing exercise in a book, I wrote a poem that on the surface appears to be about Hannah. But it speaks to a common thread i have seen in all 11 kids… a sort of enforced growing up boot camp.

Cancer has demanded so much of all of us… Katherine’s freshman year has been consumed by trips home, Mary’s senior year, which should have a dizzying exhilarating time of options and possibilities instead had this cancer looming always in the vicinity, I was having outpatient surgery on Bethany’s birthday, my mother caring for me in the last years of her life… so while the poem names Hannah, it screams of the experience of us all.

this is a poem to my baby, Hannah
who was robbed her last year of childhood;
whose gold-flecked, lash bedecked eyes
have stared unblinking at my hairless head.
Timid voice and words rushing crashing into one another
impossible to understand; we falsely thinking
she is frail
not seeing she is not young, but old
beyond the spill of her years
my cells growing wildly: a mother
      from my baby shaped
as day by day concede the weakness
the fear inside her fighting to be
      will not reach her eyes
though she wills her grip firm;
her soft touch betrays her.

We thought we knew
     the future held a girl lingering in reckless abandon.

But now we know that was
     only a many-yeared illusion
and the girl who encompasses the hamster with
     whispered love murmurs
     and who fashions flowers from sugar
This girl, she stands strong in my place.

I write this for life demanding its’ way
     for hope we might yet
     mama and baby girl be.

thank you for sharing it with me.

and still miraculous… i was so happy with that last post, and today’s post has no focus (as of yet) but i have been asked to update and i want to update…

the intervening dates have been tough… i was throwing up more, eating less, and growing so much weaker. My outlook was taking a nose dive. I was sleeping about 3/4 of the day.

Tony, girls, and I did random  brainstorming… finally settled on soy protein shakes and gatorade infusion through the peg tube hourly. Add some liquid vitamins. Add Dr. D changing my prescriptions… it seems with the heavy doses of narcotics i was making myself nauseas and giving myself withdrawal symptoms when i didn’t need the medication… caught coming and going. He lessened the strength of the medication. He also prescribed something new for the phlegm problem. Early in the afternoon yesterday i was despairing, an hour later i was awake, alert, feeling like i might have a life after all. Seriously, don’t ever give up because things can turn around like that. Makes you think of Easter weekend, alot can happen in three days.

We are still coveting your prayers for the scan results, and what the next steps will be, and for me to be able to eat again. In all of this i really had not been yearning to eat. And recently, I want to eat. I want to wrap my hands around and mouth around a juicy burger, twirl up some creamy pasta, dig into a huge bowl of multi-coloured vegetables in a homemade salad. I want to eat.

Mary has taken my mom to Duluth today for an appointment with a retina specialist. Pray here also, good news, not the best news… but not what we were afraid of. Vague i know, but i don’t really understand it all myself.

We did not make it to Grand Marais for the fourth and i was fairly disappointed, but we had a super menu (again i would have loved to eat) buttermilk fried wings, yummy.

But as i wrote, things are turning around… and on the upswing. ANd always merciful, our Lord is to be praised.

I am the heart of it all, a southern gal. We have been sort of overdosing on The Closer and it really hit last night watching the “Christmas” episode of the show. Brenda’s usual machinations land her and Fritz home in Atlanta for Christmas. Her mama’s home is done to the teeth and as Fritz says,” [he] can’t recall having ever seeing a house so ‘festive’ before.” The house glitters from wainscoting to wainscoting with lights and lots of homemade crafts, gathered over the years from countless church bazaars. I fell asleep wistful for Crockett, Texas… for Shreveport, Louisiana, my Aunt Siddie’s home where I spent so many holidays, summers, greedily stolen weekends when we could sneak away.

Watching Willie Ray Johnson (Brenda’s mama,) and even Brenda herself I sighed myself to sleep amidst many physical discomforts last night. (I could write at length about the absolute genius of the writers and actors, but we will leave that for another post.) Hmmmm, southern women, what to say? We are drawn to recipes calling for cool whip, mayonnaise, canned cream soups and cream cheese. The more of those ingredients the better. Even if we have no penchant for crafting we can’t help but be attracted to crafts and craft bazaars and we will not throw away craft instructions for anything calling for us to glue together a bottle cap and margarine tub lids creating some wonderful holiday “gift.”

We feel duty bound, called even to be “delicate,” and yet we are worse than the much clichéd mama bear with cubs when our litter is threatened. We are led through our life by a worn stereotype and often feel displaced and lost because that stereotype is simply not functional for today’s world. I will admit that there exists in the south the Appalachian woman of utter abject poverty and also the women who have migrated from the other parts and has found themselves not so vivid in her surroundings. But that’s the thing of it, the geography and its mythos seem to demand a vivid persona.

My good blogging friend, Lois wrote of “chicken salad palaces,” describing the tea rooms pocketing the south where southern women gather to lunch oh- so- delicately on chicken salad with glasses of slightly sweetened ice tea. Cauley Square Tea Room in Goulds, Florida. Living in very urban Miami, my friends and I trekked way out of our way to eat lunch, wander through the gardens, pick up a hand-crafted trinket in sweltering humidity and feel restored before heading back to Miami and our real lives as big city dwellers.

Tonight, finds me quite homesick for the lushly carpeted rolling hills of the south of my childhood. The geography of the south varies from region to region, but I spent so much time on back roads, swooping up and gently back down again as I traveled with my great uncle headed towards the “wet” county where he could buy beer on a Sunday, and then back again to his “dry” county where Aunt Siddie’s gargantuan spread of buttermilk fried chicken, (how could chicken be so crisp and still so juicy?) deftly whipped mashed potatoes, angel yeast risen biscuits, and a myriad of homemade pickles and vegetable dishes waited for us on a crisp white linen cloth with lace placemats that Aunt Siddie had crocheted. It was Sunday afternoon after all.

Also on the vast cherry wood table were scarlet red peppered pickles in a vinegar filled mason jar. My mother and my uncle would place a single brilliant jewel of a pepper on their plates and mince off a tiny piece every so often with a forkful of mashed potato. My father would scoff muttering “why on earth people would ruin perfectly cooked potatoes with that tongue searing pepper?” adding that it was an insult to the cook. Aunt Siddie laughed; I would create great drama dipping my spoon into the Mason jar for a few drops of the vinegar as if I were concocting an explosive formula with the innocently clear liquid and my seemingly bland mashed potatoes. Bringing the spoon to my mouth, eyes tightly shut, puckered lips opening against their will, one hand tensely gripping the glass of iced tea.

After Sunday dinner, my mother and my Aunt Siddie did the dishes while my Daddy and my Uncle Frank debated football. The men oh so careful to avoid politics: University and years traveling abroad had “liberalized” my father and my Uncle struggled to understand where had the sensible boy that he had raised disappeared into the man who came for visits. I changed into my dungarees and made a quick dash across the street to Johnny Smith’s (for real: his name,) oak tree where the neighborhood kids gathered for planning adventures. My parents would take a walk down the tree shaded streets before calling me in for dessert, either a thick slice of fresh fruit pie (light-refracting peach pie) or my top favorite, Italian Crème Cake. (a densely flavored buttermilk cake with coconut and pecans gathered from the trees in the yard, slathered in a rich vanilla cream cheese icing.)

We had made some progress recently… walking a little bit every day, I have been wearing makeup again, some creative planning with Tony, trying to eat every day, and then yesterday seemed to fall apart. I didn’t go to church even though I had planned. Not only nausea struck but full force vomiting and I slept the entire day. The phlegm was back with a vengeance and the heartburn (which carries a secret and nagging fear of cancer) suddenly reappeared. Plans I had had with Tony didn’t materialize. I was feeling defeated. I lost any sense of where God is leading.

I wasn’t really watching the television with the girls at first. I was feeling, as I wrote, defeated. I am not sure I ever really started watching: I was more like absorbing. Brenda Leigh behaved particularly badly and she had a few hard-hitting doses of southern Mama and Daddy wisdom and gentle rebuke. (Now Mamas and Daddies are wise all over the world; but I was raised with strong doses of the Southern variety and it left me, as I said, homesick.)

There is not a culminating conclusion here, rather a sharing of my heart today.

We with God’s grace made it on time to my MRI and I am unclear as to when to expect the results. The last days have been a mixture of steps forward and backward and forward… yet, there is a comfort in what I wrote above… because I am a writer and to quote Billy Crystal, “writers write.”

*tiny prize for those who can offer insight as to the post title

** edited to include the correction… Cauley  Square as per Rainer’s comment… lol that might be a senior moment and cannot be blamed on chemo fog.