On Coming Home

I haven't written a word here in almost three years.

And I have felt terribly guilty. Like my adolescent self when abandoning my diary, I feel the need to explain and apologize. I will try to avoid the guilty justifications and overly long renewal of a commitment to write again that I am not sure I will live up to. I want to write a few things that might work to piece together what brought me back -- at least for today.

First, as silly as it might sound, I have been writing on Facebook for the last three years. Regularly. Thoughtfully. I craft updates like others craft wedding invitations. I write them in my head while I garden, I think about them in the shower, and I strategically time my posts -- sometimes waiting for days to unveil a particularly good/funny/witty sentence or two. I really enjoy it. It has been my micro-blog. I enjoy the immediate response of dozens of people. I like that it doesn't take too much time or thought.

Yet Facebook has been royally pissing me off these days. I fantasize about quitting. I hate the increased adds. I hate that they now post adds in friends' names. I also hate that most of what people are posting on Facebook these days are reposts. Whether it is news stories, videos, or stupid inspirational memes.

So there's the Facebook factor, but there is also Rhonda. We had a long talk the other night in which she said that she doesn't remember a lot of our life pre-cancer. We have adjusted (I think pretty amazingly) to a post-cancer life that is full and rich. We have travelled, started raising chickens, grown an increasingly productive and rich garden, and I have worked hard at doing my job as well as balancing my work life with my home-life. And all of this work and play has been good, but it has never been outside of the shadow a life-threatening illness. And this has come back to haunt us even more in the last months as I have been diagnosed with celiac disease. I will write more about celiac some other time. But for now I will just say that it has been both terrifying (when waiting for test results that required a "second look") and a huge relief (it's "just" celiac. Whew!).

Ultimately, we decided that we wanted to talk more and remember more about our life pre-cancer. Rhonda suggested reading this blog because it was the perfect documentation of our early life in Marinette. At first I balked -- it made me squirmy to come back here and look at what I had written. Again I could liken this to an adolescent and her journal. But last night we took the laptop to bed and read through the first year. It was fun. It made us laugh a lot, especially this one which had Rhonda rolling around and laugh-crying (mostly, I think, because it is such an accurate portrayal of how different we are). It helped us remember a lot of things we couldn't quite remember including the age of our dog, the name of the paint color in our kitchen, the speed with which we tackled our new house and its problems, and the huge struggle of our first year gardening.

These things are important to remember because they are the small details of our now-past life. The posts and pictures paint a rich and vivid picture of a life lived in earnest. Last night I was amazed and grateful for this blog. It allowed us a generous glimpse into our lives circa 2007; the narrative was full and detailed and allowed us to go back in a way that the staccato Facebook posts of the last several years would never permit.

And finally, I miss writing, sorely. So here I am.