O-Dark-Thirty

Photo by Rachel Kramer Over three weeks. Sometimes I sit and stare at the back of my hands and wonder. How did we get here? I know the reasons, in my mind. My emotions? An entirely different story. Men aren't supposed to cry. Right? That's a rule my father taught me, with both harsh words and harder looks. And I don't want to cry. I can blame it on my current cancer treatment, an ongoing chemical castration that strips me of testosterone. Apparently my cancer feeds on testosterone. So the current method is to starve the cancer. The medical community developed this treatment in the 1940s. I'm praying that MD Anderson has something more...up to date. In the meantime the dark clouds that surround my mind plague me. Part of me broke when I left Michigan, a place I so blithely thought would be my final home, and returned to Texas, a place I so desperately fought to escape for forty years. The pain sears my heart and sneaks up on me when I'm not looking. I don't see i...

  Moving is a nightmare, no matter how little you have. When you have a lot, it is a exponentially worse. Moving to Michigan, we brought two trucks of furniture and items. Things I thought we'd just keep with us in our final home. Let the kids worry about having a garage sale after we die. Yet plans change. Moving back to Texas we're doing it differently. I got rid of almost all my books. That broke my heart, but at least my good friend John managed to keep my large collection of Studies of the Future books together in a single library. (Thanks, John!) We've sold almost all our furniture, and given much of it away. We've given away (literally) pickup trucks full of items. We've boxed and packed and boxed some more. Our new local hero neighbor Sarah managed to sell a number of items for us. I sold or gave away a lot of my newly acquired tools. If it snows in the next two weeks I'm in trouble. We have two bedrooms that need to go with us. We have rooms full of box...