Writings of Constance Ore ( 1937 – 2010 )

Perfect days of September continue in Sanctuary. The Monarch butterflies are here in the gardens and the forest – they flit about, in pairs or trios, gathering food and strength for their long flight southward into Mexico. Most of the spiders have packed up their webs and returned to the mysterious places where they must stash their food and propagate their species. On our morning walk, Alphie and I pass under a number of dead cottonwood trees where birds love to gather upon their topmost branches to catch the first sunlight of the day. On one of them, I have noticed flickers in groups of four to six – they seem to be having intense discussions while rapidly climbing up and down the branches, now getting closer to each other, then moving to a different branch and carrying on with a different bird. Perhaps they are deciding which one gets the best dead tree trunk for a winter’s nest, or whether some must leave town. I do know that flickers are a part of our winter residency, but I don’t know if they limit occupancy.

I went back into the archives of this blog and read what was happening a year ago and behold, the commentary was about the perfect September days and flowers and birds, etc. A circle complete, with myself enjoying a time of peace from the illness and planning activities just I have been doing this year. The greatest difference is in the Alphie report, since he had not yet been to reform school. Now, at the great dog age of about 17, Alphie is mostly mellow and we can have guests in the house without having to worry that he will fling his body on them and deposit dog spit on their persons. He does live an exceptional life of several long runs through field and forest each day, at least one ride in the car on an errand into town, and our polite stepping over his body as we work in the kitchen or elsewhere because he chooses to fling himself down in the midst of wherever the action is taking place.

Always, the weeks go forward in the framework of the blood readings. As long as the white blood cell count remains above 2.0 (which is low, average begins at 4.5 and goes upward), I do not need additional injections of Neupogen. When it sinks below that number, the oncologist orders more of the medicine to encourage the body to work harder on the project. On Tuesday, the reading was at 2.2, going down from the previous week’s 3.3. I still feel quite good, with energy to enjoy life and nature’s nuances in this small quiet place in the universe. There are many hymns that live in my mind that put words to the emotion and make me smile as their words spin past – for example, to the tune “Lasst Uns Erfreuen”, (a melody that has verses and verses of happy thanksgiving) I can hear:

“To you O God, all creatures sing, and all creation, everything, sings your praises, alleluia!
Your morning rises with a song, and lights of evening sing along, sing your praises, alleluia, alleluia, alleluia!
Your wind that blows the tempest by, your clouds that sail across the sky, sing your praises, alleluia, alleluia, alleluia!”

The winds sound different this morning, and the air is cooler – fall is coming nearer to Sanctuary. On the first of this month, I was astonished to see a single oriole on the topmost branch of the hackberry tree on the south border because I assumed they all had migrated. Perhaps it was stopping for a few moments, because I didn’t see it again. Now we are getting more deer into the forty acres since the farmers in the area are starting to cut their corn fields into silage, and the creatures have to literally “get out of the dining room”. Alphie does a brief chase of the startled fawns because they do appear to be about his size, but they outrun him so easily, he soon returns to me with a canine shrug of shoulders as if to say that he wasn’t really interested anyway.

The bee story ended happily. We found a beekeeper who was delighted to gather a swarm because he’d lost twenty hives to the unseasonable freeze in late spring. He put on a beekeeper’s hat and long rubber gloves, and put a box directly under the great clump of bees. He struck the branch a mighty blow, and the bees fell as one, with queen in the center, into the container. He estimated that there were about 30,000 bees of the Italian species. Apparently, these are docile and devote their time to making great amounts of honey. This is not a good time to start a hive, but he said that he would feed them through the winter and hope for good outcomes next season. The next day there were about twenty bees sitting on the branch, forlorn and lost without their queen and mother, but later, all were gone. There was some scoffing at my hope that they somehow figured out how to find the rest and commenced to fly over the miles, but then who knows?

Two days ago, son John-paul and daughter Heidi drove “up to Iowa” with me. I put that in quotes because that has always meant a journey to my farm birthplace in western Iowa. My parents spent their entire lives in the county and now lie buried in the cemetery near the little white church on a hill. This place with an old Kilgan pipe organ and stained glass windows from Germany was built by my great-grandfather, and it embraces the story of my people. My parents were baptized, confirmed, married, and buried to the ritual words of the faith there and as their child, I was also baptized, confirmed and married inside that space where the view in all directions is one of undulating fields of corn, soybeans, and alfalfa.

The day was perfectly beautiful, and we arrived via “The Ridge Road” so named by the locals because it followed a trail formed by buffalo along the tops of the hills. From here we saw a family cohort of a bull, several cows and numerous calves of varying ages. (This is rare because now most cattle are in huge confinements and don’t have the luxury of roaming pastures at will.) All stopped their grazing to look at the sound of John-paul’s quite authentic mooing sounds.

From the church we drove on to the “home place” which is still farmed by my brother and nephew, and walked about under trees that stood there when I was a child but have since grown huge in the ensuing years. Large combines, planters, cultivators and tractors stood memorialized in aging sheds around the place – we were told that they were all outmoded and too small to be useful anymore. If ever times’ passage could be measured, it might be in the sight of these pieces of machinery; silent, dusty and cobwebbed with only the echoes of being essential hanging muted in the rafters.

After completing twenty-two days of injections, my tissues are gleefully moving forward sans chemical infusions. I feel more energy returning, and delighted that I can begin to pick up more activities. The other day I said that I would vacuum and Charles replied, “I will vacuum. Surely if you have limited energy, you don’t want to waste it on vacuuming!” Now this is reason enough for sainthood, however, doing more of the ordinary things of life without collapsing into a heap is huge and I am actually looking forward to life with household tasks included in the days to come.

When I did the morning walk today I had to think about the first time I saw the spider webs outlined with dew at sunrise. At that time, I felt as though I had stepped into an enchanted place, and perhaps I would never see such a sight again. This season, there have been many mornings when the scene is repeated, and I still greatly enjoy it; I am starting to note which spiders make the largest webs, or weave most symmetrically, or place their webs most creatively and so forth. The one that seems to speak a moral lesson is the very tightly woven web that lays out over the grasses like a handkerchief with an entrance funneling downward into a mysterious center. The creator of the web must place some irresistible lure in there and wait for hapless takers. Obviously, the method has success, because there are hundreds such webs tucked in between the myriad species of grasses residing in the meadow.

Many things in my new life that were beyond my imagination have become routine, and I now can call myself “an old hand” at the lifestyle of the cancer patient. Last week, I came into the oncologist’s waiting area and watched a woman come from the treatment rooms and begin to cry. The receptionist moved out from behind the desk very quickly and hugged her while handing her a tissue. Words of comfort were offered, and my first time came back to me clearly – entering the room and seeing all those very sick people and thinking with shock that I was one of them. Now it is as much a part of my life as breakfast. Today’s routine, for example, included the injection of Neupogen – daily injections of anything at all were unthinkable in my former life, now, they go on and on because the bone marrow is unwilling to manufacture white blood cells without the insistence of the chemical. The battle is waged there in the core of my physical self and the bones hurt. . . but so far the pattern is one of eventual victory, the shots conclude and a time of good days arrives.

Something not previously experienced at Sanctuary is a swarm of bees that have gathered on a branch near our neighbor’s house. It is a large group that seems to be in search of a new home, and we are beginning to realize how little we know about the nature of bees and what they need at this time of the year. I will report the outcomes when they are made clear.

Since we live in the grasslands, our meadow is a beautiful place filled with many kinds of grasses in many shades of color. All those childhood instructions to color the grass green simply do not apply to what we see here. This sight changes day by day as the season moves onward; now many species are heavy with seed as they reach the conclusion of their life cycle. The privilege of walking amidst God’s plans and patterns is a grand one – it helps to have the daily reminder that life moves onward toward endings and new beginnings. While not all of it is beautiful, or tidy, or gentle, or kind, it remains a joy to participate in and I do so, with ongoing delight and thanksgiving.

A good friend in Santa Barbara remarked that Nebraskans seem to obsess about the weather – since Santa Barbara resembles paradise to a far greater degree than our own Sanctuary, it seems logical that here, the weather topic would provide much fodder for chewing through. As this week begins, the storms seem to be resting and our hot and humid summer days have eased up a bit. Trees seem to hold a stillness within them as they begin to retract their essences from the leaves in preparation for the coming winter; their formerly dark green foliage is starting to show yellow hues in the afternoon sun. The cricket chorus is a constant background accompaniment to the rising and falling cadences of the cicadas and the sound of recurring blue jay squabbles. In the mornings, I see birds that are strangers to our place, pausing in their travels southward. How very fortunate Charles and I are that we don’t awaken to a given slant of the sun’s rays and feel compelled to hit the road for other climes no matter what the obstacles!

I have had “down” days since coming back into the Chemotherapy cycle, with its sickness, etc. Now autumn is advancing with all the plans and changes in the air, and I am contemplating my life – the breaking back over and over again, climbing back up toward feeling well only to be flattened and having to start again. Then, on a morning, I sat on the edge of the bed and imagined that my legs were gone. . . or my hand, or arm or other bodily parts as is now the reality for thousands of the young people returning from Iraq, and I thought about being young, and having THAT until death does part, and I got over my sorry feelings. These young people do have their moments of communal gratitude as they return, but then, life goes on. They must return to the fabric of their towns and villages and become a part of it, and that means every day, they sit on the edge of a bed and have to either strap into some device to walk, or brush their teeth, or whatever, and manage. I know it is an oft used mental exercise, to think of all the lives that are not as fine as one’s own, but it does help to stiffen the upper lip. (There’s another of those sayings. . . I have never heard commentary about people’s upper lips being floppy, or twitching, or unstiff in any manner – more to think about while viewing the morning mirror.)