waves away

Here are a few things: 1. The first post in quite awhile. I have wandered very little outside my home base since spring, physically. On the other hand, I've been on a great big soul journey, maybe one of the biggest inside trips there is. Okay, Cancer, I get it, no one escapes -- you are going to sequester every single one of us at your ugly party for at least a little while. 2. The cancer log. When you're on this excursion, even as care-taker you're somewhat compelled to write about it, because writing is real good anchoring, relinquishing, sorting, sense-making therapy. Many a blog has been born from cancer. You should write about it, Robyn. Yeah, but I don't want to. I don't know how. I won't. 3. The NANOWRIMO effort. I had just been avowing to my good-night journal how I was not going to write about cancer, when the peeps at the Halloween party asked, what artsy thing is everyone going to do once a day in November? The original nationally sancti...

September 17 When I open my eyes I could be in Arkansas again, with tart juice in a urine sample cup and noxious light in the bathroom. Except now I don’t even have Kansas City and Colorado ahead of me. Only ten hours of Columbia Plateau. When I get home everything I left there will be waiting, withered; everybody’s life will be plodding forward, while I'm pulled back through a geography strewn with new views of a collapsing world.               We pack up our bags for the last time. I arrange my contents in ways that will be easiest to unpack, since I am kind of compulsive about unpacking the minute I get home. Before a trip, I have no problem slowly adding to an open suitcase on the floor of the bedroom over the course of several days, but I don’t want to be visually reminded that a trip is over instead of ahead. Brian (like a lot of people probably) is the opposite—he won’t need these summer...

September 15 Saturday brings room service: espresso and Eggs Benedict in bed (funny, how overpriced food and beverage, unlike fancy cabs and canvas campground tents, never seem too indulgent for us), and a gleaming dual-head shower. Then, bemused, I’m back on the road, and I miss the Chevy Venture, whose passenger seat foam had cast itself perfectly to my behind. I don’t care about the fine safe hotel once I’ve left it; I can now conjure the totally non-synthetic splendor of The Outer Banks and Savannah , the Southern places where I found the formula that was just right. I miss them. I miss the Atlantic spray, the weeping willows and Spanish moss, the hushpuppies and booze-walking, and I miss the Twin Towers , which is a weird sensation since all these things meant very little to me back in August.             The edge of Kansas City , and of Missouri for that matter, is tenuous and confusing, as there are two cities nex...

September 14 Brian sets a tray on the nightstand next to my face; I smell the watery flat zing of orange juice from concentrate and reach for the paper cup without opening my eyes. He’s been poking around the motel lobby and reports that outside on the soggy back yard, as well as on the lower stairs and corridor, are a multitude of frogs. So obviously I think I must still be asleep, in my common nightmare of stepping out of bed onto waves of the slimy creatures I hate covering the floor. But I can taste the orange juice. I open one eye and check the carpet: all clear.               “Where are we?” I ask.             “ Arkansas ,” he says from behind a thin newspaper, “and it’s Friday.” The national Day of Prayer and Mourning. Are people going to work? Are kids excited about a day off school already? Is anybody else high-tailing it across the Midwest with us? ...