Making Strides

A few weeks ago after school, I got a bad case of the giggles.  And by "bad" I mean "really good," of course.  A small group of us was reviewing our dancer names, devised by taking our first pet's name and adding it to the first street we lived on.   Yeah, it wasn't exactly curriculum-driven, but good lord, they were funny.

And that's when old Ginger Sunrise lost her cool and let loose a mighty snort.   It's also when my friend Helen said something that stuck with me.

"You haven't laughed that hard in a long time."  And she was right.  I hadn't.

Man, it felt good.

And it also felt . . . transformative.  As though I'd started to slough the strange skin of the past two years, all those months of death and disease.

It's nothing new, the idea that we can't see the forest through the trees.  But when I finally got to pull back a bit and enjoy the long view?  It was something to realize just how much of my vision I'd lost in the short term.

Looking back over the past two+ years, I think I did what I needed to do at the time.  I put my head down and worked my way through it--through Mary Kay's death and Andrea's death and Dick's death and my cancer diagnosis and then--the strangest feather in my cap--my mom's death. 

But I gotta say that I really like looking up again. 

This morning, when Finn and I headed to Holmes Lake, I secretly hoped that the Making Strides Against Breast Cancer Walk wouldn't be underway when we got there.  For some reason, I didn't want to wear pink and walk with others, even if they'd gone on some version of this journey that I'm on.

I just wanted to be with my dog and enjoy the scenery.

I don't know if I've arrived at my post-cancer "every day is a gift" stage, but I do know that I'm laughing more and loving more and, sometimes, even roaring more, when the circumstances require it.

And I know that I'm lighter.  Happier.  More me than I've been in awhile.

Making Strides, you might say.