Cancer Selfies

Autumn Fog

I love a brilliantly foggy morning almost as much as a spectacular sunset, and today was one of those mornings. The problem is that sunrise is early. Today, however, my night nurse happened to notice I was awake and that the sky needed to be witnessed.

Ingrid, the mastermind behind this whole adventure, took the first photo. It's facing out a window the same direction as the one in my hospice room. The window immediately faces a support building that houses things like the emergency generator, and is surrounded by staff parking. Trees surround the lot, all are hidden by the thick, beautiful fog. It was mesmerizing.

The third photo is the same window, just closer to see more of the tree and park around the parking lot. The second photo is my nursing team for the day. It's unusual for me to be up early enough to see everyone at the same time.

The Elliot Lake Lookout

I went on an adventure! My brothers and a childhood friend made it up the Elliot Lake lookout to check out the autumn leaves. The sunlight didn't agree with us much as it could, but the sky made up a lot.

By the end of the trip I was wiped out, energy wise, but this is the longest I've been out of bed in perhaps a month, which is exciting, because Thanksgiving is next week and I'd really like to partake. And with more careful planning, that seems much more likely than it did yesterday.

The first photo looks out over the main section of Elliot Lake, on the far right is Elliot Lake itself, where the hospital, and hospice, is. Lake Huron's north channel and Manitoulin Island are visible in the far distance (if there are enough pixels).

Hospital Outside

If I'm going outside, but not leqcinf grounds, I say I'm going to the courtyard. It isn't really a courtyard, a small garden seperates the chapel exit (which is closer to the elevators, too) from the main entrence and exist, used by general admission, emergency, and all other patients. The garden offers some privacy, some quiet, although its frequently broken by people using the exit as an exit.

During the high summer, the heat in the courtyard was strong. Surrounded on two sides, with the other two hardly open, the heat could build. To a lapsed chemo patient like myself, that heat was desirable, but occasionally overwhelming. But there was plenty of shade on those dog days of summer (often literally) and those days were magnificent.

As the sunsets have marched steadily West, outside the angle I can see from bed (the change happened so fast I barely noted it, but I know I stopped talking about their magic and the importance of daily observance. ADHD recall is a real thing, after all, and apparently you can forget your own star). And the sun has decided to hang low in the sky, like a bauble I can nearly reach.

The sun hanging like this, and the long shadows it causes to fall, is my favourite time of year. The weather it brings, and the harvest festivals, and the flavours (I'm already waste deep in pumpkin spice, and I didn't even like coffee until last month) are all the greatest. But the way the sun hugs the horizon most of the day, taking a lazy trip low into the sky.

In the courtyard, in the afternoon, there's no escape from the sun. The courtyard is under direct sun until it falls far enough that emergency itself provides shade, when the sky itself is exploding in colour, and maybe someday I'll take a sunset hidden like that, but these days I have a hallway I can share, and sometimes do.

These long shadows are nothing like the kilometer long shadows Tiny Marsh used to provide me. But they're still beautiful, and still remind me of the unknowable, unrecognizable part of everything. Of the little bit of unknown and spooky we love about the season. I think the harsh winter of. Elliot Lake would render my little courtyard too cold for all but the smokers, and spring the joy of sunshine and the plants recovering. But I shouldn't be seeing those. And that's fine, the geese and shadows returned to me one last time, and we accept our little blessings.

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Pumpkin Patch

Growing up where I did (the forest, the swamp, the bedrock, no farmland), I missed a lot of experiences that were common to a lot of friends. This is no complaint, growing up with the woodland creatures and awesome knowledge of the true age of things helps define me to this day, but I didn't see a lot of corn or pumpkin or any other crop, Halloween associated or not.

All I got to see were the occasional stalks of corn in a neighbours garden, rarely more than a dozen plants. One year we didn't get to carving a pumpkin, the whole thing (with seeds) ended up in the compost, the eldrich horror that took over the back yard was as close as I could ever got to visiting a pumpkin patch. People planted other gourds and there were always displays at the grocery store, but it wasn't Hollywood, it wasn't the TV Halloween special.

Last fall my my friend Claire and I set out to try and fill this gap in my experiences. We researches pumpkin patches with selections of gourds, looked at the fields to find one appropriate for my state (I still had most of my energy, but the fall was running down, I was getting close to restarting chemo, and I couldn't run the risk of actually getting lost). Wagon rides were an added bonus.

We found what we were looking for, but in an uncharacteristic moment picked a location much, much too far for our day trip, and instead quickly decided on a different farm near Alliston.

This farm had a field of beautiful, delicious squash, some photo opportunities, plenty of farm goods to buy, but no maze. It just had a path through the corn. My maize maze dream remains just a dream.

After loading up on squash and buttertarts and sparkling fruit juice (most of which I accidentally froze and didn't get to enjoy, further proof the trip was cursed), we visited a little Friedrich Banting's home and failed to uncover the secrets of its giant concrete sphere. We visited a little English store (called the British Shop) in Allison, where I failed to procure a deerstalker in my size, but did get a lot of sausage roll, before moving down the highway to Shelbourne for lunch/dinner at a place called The Tipsy Fox (chicken Caesar wrap, very good).

I got my pumpkin patch, wagon rides, cider and snacks. I never, and still haven't, found my maze. And at this point, I never will. And there's beauty in that, it was a perfect day that stubbornly refused to become perfect, and instead became what I needed from all my little adventures: a distraction from the horrors of daily life and a memory to escape into when I need it. I cannot explain why this particular memory is so strong (I can almost step into it, and I see it all so vividly), but I'm glad to have had it, and especially to have shared it. Thank you, Claire, for a silly fall day that went perfectly by constantly going silly.

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