Category Archives: Observations

Journal Of The Squirrel And Me

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Monday afternoon, 1:20 p.m.  I just now looked the squirrel in the eye.  She is enjoying the 70 degree weather as much as I am and is not even trying to tippy-toe around the rafters of our screened porch where she has built an admirable, protected nest that evidences not survival of the fittest, but God’s common grace.  From that perch, her offspring will have a long and prosperous reign over their inheritance.

For several weeks she snuck around at night pulling the stuffing out of the furniture until the fabric hung gnawed and the polyester filling frothed out.  The porch chairs look like flayed rabies victims.  But now that Andrew, b-b gun expert among other things, is off studying in St. Louis,  the squirrel veritably whistles as she works in broad daylight, carrying the chair cushions into the rafters nibble by nibble and dropping as much on the tile floor until my porch is more to her liking, more hamster-cagey. Cheeky, as Mary Poppins would say.

I didn’t begrudge her the chair cushions.  They were in their dotage.  But when I saw evidence of her pickage at the new coverings on the swing and couch, the question became what to do.

One of the many ways to divide humanity is into:
A) those who would never move the nest (possible babies; I’m in her habitat and not vice versa, blah, blah, blah), and
B) those whose only question is should I put on goggles while I do it (germs, maternal claws).

I come from a long line of group B, and storms are coming in tomorrow night. So my window of time is short, and I must engage.  It is not enough to hope the pecan tree breathes its last and falls in a lashing wind to obliterate the porch and its rodent. No, I’ve got the ladder in place, rubber gloves on, the broom in hand.  Courage.  Courage and faith.

I’m going in.

 

Ringing The Chemo Bell

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This week’s sober moment:  Hearing someone ring the chemo bell at the Kirkland Clinic in Birmingham.

I didn’t notice the bell on our way in, though it is mounted to the wall just inside the door to the Infusion Therapy waiting room.  Infusion Therapy is a kind word for chemo.  As I sat waiting for my friend to begin her 14th treatment, the bell clanged and the overfull waiting room broke into applause and weary but genuine smiles.

I turned to my friend and she explained.  When someone finishes chemo, when they have their last infusion, they ring that bell on their way out as a declaration of victory.

I don’t know what it is to receive a dose of Red Devil.  But I can attest to the hope that that bell gave me.  And if it gave me hope, what must it do for the drafted soldiers, there under duress and unable to leave.  The room, a little alternate world, was so full, and stayed full the whole time.  Old and young, rich and poor, black and white, cancer has no preferences, only a huge, endless appetite.

But the bell said, “It is finished!”

So many of my friends are sitting in life’s Infusion Therapy unit right now.  One buried her son Saturday.  One went back in to emergency surgery after a mastectomy.  One is preparing for her child’s surgery with an unknown outcome.  One friend’s child is suffering unexplained seizures.  Another’s child is fighting a decade-long battle with a seemingly unsolvable brain fluid leak.  Another is in the foreign country called Divorce In Your 50s.  And, of course, my dear friend on treatment 14 of a medicine so toxic that the nurse who administers it has to wear a hazmat suit and which brings side effects that take her right up to the edge of endurance and make her watching friends holler along with Job ‘Stop! Enough!’

But then, I hear that chemo bell. I hear it as a promise and a declaration of victory.  On the cross Jesus suffered cancer and the Red Devil.

And then he rang the chemo bell and said, “It is finished!”

For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Romans 6:23