Spring, at last...?

Easter is over, now maybe spring can come.

Our granddaughters from Baltimore were fascinated that there were clumps of dirty, multi-times frozen snow still dotting our yards when they were here for Easter. But now Bern is outside raking the front yard and their are flowers poking their heads out of the long dormant earth.

Lucky for me, I don't rake up to Bern's standards so I never have to rake, or cut the grass with our push mower or do anything in the yard. That's her exclusive realm and she's welcomed to it!

She had a birthday this week and it would be improper to reveal her age though she is 3 years younger than me and I turn 66 next week. Plus she's been getting SS checks for a year so you might be able to figure it all out. If you saw her you might think she was in her early 50's or late 40's. If you saw me you might wonder if I could drive myself to the crematorium.

But, I'm healthier than I look. I saw my urologist today. I think it's been seven or eight years since my prostate cancer surgery and radiation. And it's been a year since I stopped taking Lupron to drive my PSA down and my PSA is, as Dr. Kurz said, 'undetectable'. He told me I was the first man in 5 years to go off Lupron and still have no PSA a year later. So I don't have to go back for a whole year. I've never quite said it, but I think it's safe to say now that--at this moment--I'm a cancer survivor. That feels good though the truth is I'm so good at denial that if  you asked me if I'd ever had cancer and I didn't think about it for a moment, I might say "No"!

There's something to be said positively about denial--at least you don't dwell on things and worry yourself into a tizzy....

I wrote a poem once about watching Bern work in the yard. I tried to find it in the two 2 foot piles of stuff on the second shelf of the bookshelf beside the table where my computer is. To no avail. I have to be at St. James, Higganum tomorrow all day 9-4 because they are hosting a safe-church training for folks around the diocese who deal with children or old people. And, for reasons beyond my comprehension, they want a priest 'on site' for the training. I've tried to imagine why. Would someone freak out remembering how they sexually abused a child or beat up an old person and took their Social Security check? In either case a police officer and social worker would make more sense than a priest. Am I supposed to hear confessions? It all seems suspect to me but I'll be there in the little library some of the members created in what would have been my office if I ever had need of an office. I didn't have an 'office' the last decade of my full time ministry. It just seemed silly to me. I had the 'office' where I'm typing this so what did I need with one in a church 12 miles away? I preferred to walk around and talk to people.

Anyway, what this is about is that I'm going to load my 4 feet of stuff I've written into bags from supermarkets and take it with me tomorrow and try to find that poem and see what all that stuff is....

Tomorrow promises to be warm again and sunny.

Spring is struggling to get to Connecticut.