Nov, 23, 2012-Jan 10, 2013   6 weeks at home

The house looked almost the same as when we had left 3 weeks before.  The unfinished projects still sitting where I had left them.  Spent Thanksgiving with Audrey’s family while Chris and Molly were in Chicago.  Monday morning I took all of the clothes that I had left in the closet, my sewing machine and piles of unfinished sewing projects and moved into my new apartment at Kaiser.  It is still hard to believe that they provide free housing for people who have to undergo daily treatments.  My only complaint was that there was no internet.  I had to walk several blocks down the street to the main hospital cafeteria to get wifi.

Tuesday I reported for my first treatment.  For the next 6 weeks except for Sundays and holidays, I walked down the street and reported in for my daily dose of radiation.  I lay down on a table and my head was clamped into a restraining device that looked somewhat like a hockey mask.  For the next 20 minutes lay there and listened to music, did ab exercises or made plans for the day while machines buzzed and whirred delivering a minutely targeted dose of radiation to the inside of my head where there was an enlarged blood vessel that was threatening to do bad things if it was not stopped.  When it was done I was released to go about my day.  The staff was wonderful.  I had no side effects except for a couple of bouts of vertigo when the inner ear became inflamed by the radiation. Mostly it was an inconvenience.  But possibly an inconvenience that saved my life.  So I am not complaining.

Most of my time, when I was not at the hospital, was spent helping Chris clean out and repaint the house.  Despite almost two years of cleaning, sorting, tossing and sending to relatives, the house was still full of our stuff, everything from clothes and files to books, records, pictures and rocks and shells and “cutsies” collected from all of our travels.  If Chris and Molly were really going to live here for the next several years while we were out sailing the seas, they needed to make it theirs.  So, room by room, the real cleaning out finally started. 

First the living room, starting with the music.  CDs were boxed and put into the attic for Chris to go through later.  We had already transferred what we wanted on the boat to an iPod.  Vinyl records were sorted and boxes were taken to local record stores or thrift shops.  Boxes and boxes of books were given to the library.  Many more were boxed and stored to be looked over later.  Only two boxes were marked “save”, the rest were expendable.  Pictures that I wanted to keep went into the attic, the rest to the thrift shops, etc, etc.  We never really had much furniture and most of that had come from the thrift shop in the first place.  Out it went.  The room was finally empty.

Now it was possible to see the damage done by years of too much stuff and not enough time.  Plaster was cracked and several window frames were rotten.  Wiring projects hidden behind furniture had never been finished.  Eventually the room was ready to paint.  Chris had picked a beautiful blue, with the fireplace wall a darker shade, with glossy white woodwork.  Quite a contrast to our cream and beige.  Very beautiful and very much Chris’ colors.  It was done and clean and ready for furniture Monday before Christmas.  The dining room table and cabinets with china and glassware went into one half of the living room.   Two easy chairs and a coffee table went into the other half by the fireplace.  The dining room had been painted and the floor refinished in August and it now became a den.  They found the perfect sofa and hutch in a thrift shop.   Speakers were rehung and a sound system put together.  The tree was purchased and voila!  it was Christmas. The house was ready to welcome Molly’s parents for the holidays.

It was an intense time but a good one.  We had left the house as if we might be coming home any moment and taking up where we had left off.  After 6 weeks of sailing, I now knew that we would not be coming back any time soon.   Time to really say good-bye to all of this.  We had almost 40 years of living in this house and it defined who we were to a surprising extent.  The yard was huge and wild and climbed up a hill, a place where kids could escape and climb and play and dig and create racetracks and rivers.  The house spilled out into the backyard in the summer so that it was no problem to have 50 people for a party.  Walking the many stairs from the street to the living room to the bedrooms, out to the backyard and up the hill to the garden kept our legs and our hearts strong. It was never really clean but I always thought that it was more for kids to be able to have fun and be creative than to live in a immaculately clean house.  There were  always projects that needed to be done, and usually were not.  There were always fresh herbs and lemons or limes and plums and apricots in the summer.  There were always animals, dogs, cats, rabbits, birds, snakes, fish, raccoons, possums and skunks.  And the bedroom with 3 walls of glass where we could watch storms over the mountains and the squirrels and birds just outside the window. There was never any place to park and the noise from traffic, fire engines and helicopters was irritating. It was a wonderful house and a difficult house.  I never expected to stay there more than a few years and ended staying so long the the grandkids got to climb and dig in the garden.  Who knows if we will be back to live there again.  If so, we will be very different people, creating something new.