Day 348, Year 8: Acceptance
Date: Thursday, October 17, 2013
Weather: Mostly Sunny and Warm (low 70’s F)
Location: Eel Pond, Woods Hole, Massachusetts
I know there are ‘official’ labeled stages of acceptance when one finds out they have cancer, but somehow Mark and I both skipped those stages when he was first diagnosed. I think he is skipping them again, but this time I am going through something between grief and anger. But with each hour that passes, I begin to accept. The wonderfully supportive emails and calls from friends and family surely help. And tonight we launched into our characteristic research mode trying to find out everything we can. The main problem is that we don’t have the information we need. We will get that next week, so in the meantime, we research and try our best to piece together the best case scenario.
Today both Mark and I went to Heather and Jed’s for the day. Mark spent a great deal of time doing his public radio consulting work and I spent the day with Ollie. But it was great to have Granddad there to pitch in with Ollie when I needed to get cooking or laundry projects done. I’ve said it many times before, but I’ll say it again. Ollie is just the easiest-going, sweetest little guy in the whole world. Unfortunately, part of him is starting into the ‘terrible twos’ stage, but I try to ignore that and focus on the positive. After his nap, Mark took him to pick Sam up from school. When they got home, we had an after-school snack, practiced the week’s spelling words for a Friday test, and then headed to the cranberry bogs to try and forage for cranberries left-over from the harvest last week. When we got to the bogs, Sam wanted to dive right into the waterway that runs between the fields to collect cranberries, but we restrained him and foraged in the matted vegetation along the edges of the waterways instead. That is, we did this until Heather and Jed arrived with Jonah. At that point, Jed jumped the ‘ditch’ and started hand-picking cranberries from the field. Sam and Jonah wanted to join him but there was no way to get them across the waterway. We weren’t even sure Jed could get back across, but he did, and we came home with the equivalent of three bags of cranberries. We didn’t really care how many cranberries we harvested. We just wanted the boys to experience gathering.
Tomorrow Mark and I will return to Heather and Jed’s to spend the day with Ollie. Mark will do more consulting work and Ollie and I will go to the public library for a tot’s reading time. Sometime this weekend we will either move back out onto a mooring so we are not paying a daily dock fee or we will move the boat to Fiddler’s Cove for the winter. The problem is getting there. We have to go through the Woods Hole cut at slack tide and enter Fiddler’s Cove at absolute high tide. And the timing that makes those two things possible is tricky. Then we have to add in the wind factor. And that makes it even trickier. But we are paying $30 a day to be here on this dock and that is more than we can afford. So sometime SOON we will either move back out onto a mooring in Eel Pond or head to Fiddler’s Cove. As with any ‘passage’, it will all depend on the weather.
