Spring is arriving here in east central Illinois. Not quite here yet, but with a few harbingers. 

This morning, Dave put two of our metal, nostalgic, colorful chairs out in the morning sun and we listened to the woodpeckers and dove and wrens enjoying the sun. He brought pansies home this morning to put out in the planters.  We noted that the arugula is up in the covered, raised bed and that robins have arrived. 

I walked around a bit and checked on the nearby plantings that we put in the ground 2 years ago, before cancer and when I still had the energy to help with projects like that. I think we put a total of two hundred seedlings around the edge of the woods that year. Dave has planted more last year and already this year. They are native, wildlife-loving bushes and small trees. The redbuds and plums and hazelnuts, sumac and nine bark and chokeberry are all showing life

It will be a beautiful spring….in about another month. 

Days like today remind me to have hope. Hope that even though tomorrow might bring cold nights and rain, today is warm and sunny and soon all of our days will be sunny and warm, encouraging growth and producing green of all shades. 

I wasn’t supposed to see this spring, according to my original diagnosis. Months, not years, is the life span estimate I was given a year and a half ago.  Those first months were rife with pain and medications and infusions of chemotherapy drugs that made life miserable, if I am honest. Once chemo was stopped, due to ineffectiveness, and radiation and immunotherapy was started, life improved. No more pain. No more morphine. Better sleep and appetite. 

Now, I have had to stop both radiation and immunotherapy due to adverse side effects. But not before they did their good work. The specialist surgeon in Chicago has told me that I am anomalous, one of a kind. Never has he had a patient respond to immunotherapy so drastically. A durable response, I am told is what I have had. 

A durable response to treatment was defined as a progression-free survival that exceeded three times the median progression-free survival of the whole population.

Still not curable, but definitely durable. 

So, I have so much to be thankful for. And seeing spring come again is something I will not miss and will not take for granted. Even if all I can do is take my chair and sit nearby and watch Dave plant our garden, I will do it. On days like today, I will walk to the river and sit for a while listening and watching spring arrive. 

Last weekend, we hosted our local kids and families for Easter. I will cherish the conversations and the frantic search for eggs, even though the grandkids are old enough to skip that, we still had fun with it. I made my family-favorite potato salad with dill pickles and didn’t worry about that being my only contribution if that is all I can do. I laughed and cheered on the football game that was inevitable. I marveled at the easy coordination of food preparation by others.

I’m thankful for so much. This woodland haven and simple dream home we built. A caring husband who cares for me in all ways.  (A simple gesture, he knows that I will appreciate pansies that remind me of my mother and will buy them and plant them near our front door.)  A devoted middle son who has Down Syndrome who spends weekends with us and will do anything I ask of him. Other offspring who get along and who care for me as much as I need and their busy schedules allow. And, I would be remiss to not mention our loyal and amazing black lab. 

It is not missed by me that I have responded to therapy better than a nationally recognized specialist has ever seen. I embrace the fact that our family has grown through a lot of difficulty and dysfunction and is able to be a positive and healthy unit now. I am slightly amazed and deeply appreciative that Dave and I have managed almost 50 years of marriage and are enjoying a comfortable, fulfilling oneness. I am happy to be seeing the end of another long and cold and wet winter and to know that spring is just around the corner. 

It’s good to be alive.