Betty has been home for several weeks now. She’s starting to get “cabin fever.” I can tell by the way that she is occasionally a little snippy! Nothing major just little things. For example, I asked her the other day if she will still love me when I’m old and run down. She said, “I do.” You know, just little things. “Well, honey, would you love me if I were broke and penniless?” She replied, “Yes….but I would miss you.” Really, just little things. So we’ve been trying to find ways to break her out of the routine of being cooped up everyday. Last week, she had an idea of something that might help. On the way home from her last treatment, she said, “Honey, I’d like to spruce up the house a little.” I panicked just a bit because I wasn’t sure what she meant by “spruce.” Then you add the word, “up,” and it could get very expensive. Suddenly, in my mind, I heard her asking for granite counter tops, and marbled floor bathrooms with bidets. (The only thing I know about a bidet is not to be looking into it when you push the handle down! Personal experience will last a lifetime!) “So what did you have in mind my dear sweet little cup cake?” “Well, I was thinking…...uh….........new flower baskets for the front porch.” Now I know what you’re thinking, I should have been relieved at this point, but you don’t know what new flower baskets for the front porch means. It means I’ve got to go the flower nursery for one whole afternoon, maybe two. I’ve got to follow her around with a little red wagon like I’m 3, and carry all the baskets she picks out for miles and miles. She’s gonna ask me about colors and fragrances and whether or not the sun strikes the porch at three o"clock or five. Should we go with pink, red, yellow, blue,or blue, yellow, red, pink? This nursery is covered in hot house plastic, and they call it a hot house for a reason! It’s as though they brought the equator to east Texas and glassed it in. Like Texas didn’t already have enough heat. It’s like setting your microwave on high and putting it inside your cook stove as you turn on the broiler. It’s just crazy HOT! I said, “Betty, sweetie pie, sugar dumplin’, if you don’t mind, I’d rather you go by yourself to the nursery, I think we’d both enjoy it more….....
So we pull up at the nursery, I get my little red wagon, step in line behind her, and off we go. I pass other men who are wearing the same look that I have on. I recognize the look, it’s identical to the one that Betty wears when I take her to Home Depot for a special night out. These guys are just staring off into space like it’s December 21st, 2012, and they’re glancing at a copy of the Mayan calendar. So, I do my job, I load the wagon with plants. It’s hot and I begin to feel a little queasy. My head is throbbing and my feet are dragging. I’m sloshing through dirt and mud and some really bad smelling fertilizer. My shoes are caked with it and the odor is horrible and the temperature is rising and I asked the nursery man what kind of foul fertilizer am I walking in and he says, “Oh, that’s not fertilizer, it’s throw up from the guy in front of you. He said his head was throbbing and he was feeling a little queasy. Next thing you know…he Ralphed his cookies. You really should walk around it. Can I hose you down?”
One of our flower baskets died this week. Betty asked if I could take her on a quick trip to the nursery to buy another one. I said, “Have you thought about new granite in the kitchen, or maybe a bidet? They have all that at Home Depot.”
Betty is doing great this week. She felt so well, that we made a trip to Colorado for our son Caleb’s birthday. It was better than a whole bottle of pills for us both. Today, Friday the 30th, she took her hard chemo treatment. She’ll be fine until Sunday, and then it will hit her hard. For about a week, she will curl up and ride the waves of this awful medicine. There are so many side effects and they all seem to come at once. Thank you for your prayers and continued support. We love how you love us. Your prayers are like the rain we’ve had here in Grand Saline lately. They bring refreshment everyday. We have one more of the hard treatments left and then we have radiation treatments to battle along with other drugs for the rest of the year. We’ll make it. We get weary, but He does not. We love you all, and by the way, the front porch looks beautiful with all the new baskets!