Here Comes the Sun

I am slowly conquering the car. This weekend I have survived a three hour car ride with only mild discomfort, and made a two hour drive myself. The drive was a bit more twinge-inducing. I could have used a longer break once every hour. But I feel a level of freedom opening up in this ability to get further from my house without a lot of accompanying pain and annoyance. Saw my surgeon late last week and he corroborated that my ass is healing rather nicely. I won't see him again for another month. And I hope by then that the incision is even closer to a hundred percent healed.

It's already September, and I am having a difficult time getting my head around that. Even though a lot has happened this year, it doesn't feel like I've been through an entire eight months. I'm sure a large part of that is that I've missed many of the events and activities that typically mark off the year's passing. But I believe another part is my lack of doing much of anything these past couple of months. Time passes strangely when the atmosphere and timbre of your days stay much the same. I've also lost the rhythm of weekdays to weekends. The passing of time seems to be something outside of myself, that other people do, but not so much me anymore. My sense of time is much more fluid. It is all around and stretches out in front of me like the horizon, visually tangible but never attainable. But I heard a flock of geese beginning their fall migration one morning this week. Fall recipes involving pumpkin and apples are beginning to appear. The walnuts and first leaves are falling from the trees in my yard. The days are still long though, and delightfully warm. There is still time before the cold starts to take hold and the color begins to drain from the outdoors.

It has been a blessing to go through some of the hardest recovery (so far) in the spring and summer months. The dark, colorless cold of the winter can sometimes be long tiring months for me. I imagine my cheery mood is often helped by the sunbeams streaming through my windows. The permeating warmth of summer afternoons that induce soft, easy naps. Even in the first weeks of surgery recovery, I could briefly escape to my porch and pretend I wasn't trapped, housebound, by my body. As much as I love the night and worship the moon, I am very much a sun child. So I guess I could tell you that it has been a pretty good summer for me. Although it definitely won't rank in the top ten (or twenty, or thirty...). I'm still up, around, and kicking. And I'm definitely feeling sunshine-y.