Memories of Martha and Lorraine

I spent a good amount of time on my grandparents dairy farm while growing up. My grandmother, Martha was 71 years of age when I was born yet I knew her for 30 years due to her longevity of life. When you do the math, she was 100 when she passed in her rocking chair (at home) while reading either the Milwaukie Journal or the Oregonian newspaper. Her yard was always an inspiration to me. As long as she had mobility she kept it immaculate. Nary a weed was found! She had beds of bushy, blooming perennials and a couple rows of pink fragrant rose bushes. Along the side of the sleeping porch she had a small tree that when you rubbed the large teardrop shaped leaves they smelled like peanut butter. In the back she had Bing and Royal Ann cherry trees. At her back porch she had bushy fig tree that she would pick and eat the figs right off the tree.


Another inspiration to my gardening interests was my Mother-in-law, Lorraine. Before she moved to Portland from the San Joaquin Valley I have heard that she doned a garden wherever she was living no matter how hard and dry the soil was. She always leaned to vegetable gardening, although she did have flower beds. When I met her, after her move North, she loved to grow things that provided her somthing tasty. She was especially fond of raspberries of which she never had in the South. She was completely giddy with excitement when the first berry was red enough to pick and eat. She loved to share her berries with my daughters when the were toddlers. They would arrive at her house and run to the back door, which was always kept locked, and wait with great anticipation until she arrived to unlock the door with explicit instructions of where to pick so as to not disturb tomorrow's picking.

Now I am left in the absence of these two great women, left to struggle on my own without their wisdom and instruction on how they did what they did with soil to create the small miracles of growth and production every Spring and Summer. Why is it that by the time I want to learn something from my elders they are gone? All I have is my memory of how their hands moved through the soil or how they would rise up and stretch when having leaned over for so long while weeding, and wiping their brow as they glanced at their progress. Memories that become more cherished the older I become.

Bag-O-Bones

The other day I wanted to keep our older dog interested in life, with a new twist. I put on the floor the bag of bones that was half full. Before I knew it I heard the rustling of the plastic bag in the back hall and then for the next two hours the quiet onslaught and transporting of the treasure to his favorite rug led to sheer exhaustion over his conquest.

Nervous Expectations

The human body can be perplexing. My feet were a little sore back in January and I was sure I needed some new shoes. My cheap work shoes had cracks in the bottom and I figured they were the cause of my discomfort. Then, on Thursday morning and again on Friday morning the bottoms of my feet really hurt when I got out of bed, but only for about 10 minutes. Now I knew I needed new shoes! Well, the weekend seemed to give me a break. Then on Monday afternoon, I developed a fever of 101 that lasted for about 6 hours. On Tuesday I awakened to two large swollen ankles. Very puffy. No pain. I decided this was a good day to see a doctor. So started my search to meet as many physicians as possible in 5 months!

My general practicioner had lots of blood drawn to see if I was fighting an infection. Sure enough, there were indications that I was. On the outside of my left leg, just above my ankle, there were two red patches, just barely visible. After Googling my symptoms we thought a dermatologist was then next step. My visit with him came a few weeks later and he ordered a chest X-ray. The interpreter of the X-ray thought he saw some enlarged lymph nodes in my chest, just under my sternum. At this point, my GP ordered some more blood drawn and a CT scan of my lungs. The CT interpreter concurred and my next visit was with a Pulmonologist. Now it’s getting a little scary. I’m visiting with doctors who spend much of their days with victims of lung cancer. The pulmonologist couldn’t help a whole lot because my X-ray and scans didn’t show up for their appointment with me and the doctor. Two days later he called. The only way to know for sure what’s going on is to see a surgeon who would perform a Medial Stenoscopy under general anesthesia.


Yesterday, I went under the knife. The surgeon made an incision at the top of my sternum and went in underneath 6 inches to a point where he could clip out a few of the inflamed lymph nodes and send them to a lab for analysis. Now, we wait a few days to find out what the cause of the inflammation is….

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June 15th 11:30am. Got the results, and it's sarcoidosis. Whew! Could've been much worse. We'll watch and see how it plays out. It could choose to affect me in a multitude of ways, or never rear it's ugly head again. I like the latter.