Quality of life is something one talks and thinks about a lot with cancer. Most of the time it’s an easy conversation with oneself: Is it worth it to undergo this treatment, that might be difficult and will certainly have side effects, for the good chance of killing more or all of the cancer? Yes, yes it definitely is.

As cycles of treatments progress, it becomes more clear: I’ll trade off quality of life in the next six months for the possibility of six months, or five months, or three months, or two months, of high quality life afterward.

For me, the only thing complicating the decision was that I had no pain from the cancer itself. We were making the decision to go back to chemo based on what we saw on a scan, “disease progression,” even though that progression wasn’t affecting me physically in the day to day.

Now, though, things are different. The treatment gives me “stable disease” and reduces the fluid in my right lung, though the little tumors (which aren’t bothering me) don’t shrink on the films. No spread. But thickening of the lung lining and persistent fluid.

The fluid is a problem. The state of the lung is such that it’s difficult to drain the fluid, and the lung doesn’t really reinflate. I seriously hate the thoracentesis process used to drain fluid. I now have pockets in the lining, not a single large area of fluid, so we get only a small percentage out anyway. For me, it is no longer worth it.

The main symptom of that lung fluid is shortness of breath. I used to pride myself on my 2-mile walks, but yesterday a half-mile walk (albeit in cold and snow) left me gasping for breath and needing to sit down and recover. My lung was on fire. Of course, it’s much better walking through a grocery store. Even carrying laundry up two flights of stairs, though, is something I feel.

I had a treatment option that would have started on December 14. I had been on a break from treatment since August 30, so that’s not bad– that’s a good amount of high quality life. The new treatment was supposed to be mild, and I’d convinced myself it wasn’t really chemo but a “maintenance” drug. Reading and hearing about it from the nurse and pharmacist, however, I realized this was still chemo, albeit a pill instead of an infusion. I wasn’t ready.

I had too much food to eat.

The big thing for me right now is the taste issue. For me, the quality of life I realize I enjoy maybe above all else is eating. Cooking at eating. And it was two weeks from Christmas! I had cookies to eat and bake and eat, cocktails to drink, a Mangalitsa pork roast to braise and savor, some bison steaks, chicken paprika, Thai butternut squash soup, pie, and did I mention cookies? For me, Christmas is the cookies. My step-daughters sent a huge tin of ruggelach from NYC. The lights and music would not be enough. It is the food.

I’m so glad I took the extra month. I really enjoyed it. And before Omicron arrived, we had two lovely restaurant meals as well. Now it is time. The lung hurts, and its hurting is making my shoulder, ribs, and arm hurt, too. Massage helps, but not enough. Now the quality of life scales are unbalancing, and chemo is needed. If the scan next week shows the cancer is still stable, has not progressed, I’ll go on that “light” pill. If not, I’ll go back to the “heavy” regimen.

I’ll focus on the other qualities of life that are so nice in the winter: my husband off work and full of reading and writing and ideas, my novel to promote and several starts of short stories to develop, lights and music and podcasts and movies and time with friends, even if mostly on the phone as Covid surges again. Looking at the snow and light in all its forms, walking around out there some days, snowshoeing even if not too far. Life has so many qualities. I like pretty much all of them.

This book has been in the works since 2013. It is inspired by a true story from central Minnesota. In 2012, a police officer from Cold Spring, where I lived for two years before getting married and moving to nearby St. Joseph, was ambushed in an alley behind a bar. His partner, a part-time police officer who also hung drywall for a living, panicked when the shot was fired and backed out of the alley. The killer got away and in that one moment the slain officer became a hero and the partner was branded a coward. The officer who was killed had a funeral attended by the governor and seemingly every police officer in the state, and had a stretch of highway and the post office named after him. The disgraced partner had to change his phone number, get off social media, and move out of town.

This story stuck with me, as a way to explore concepts of heroism and cowardice in a small town setting. I’d been looking for a story I could write that would celebrate Cold Spring particularly, an exemplary small town in this beautiful part of the country. For a year I worked to get my own story crafted, then I revised and revised. I did my research at the St. Joseph police department, going in repeatedly to ask about the ins and outs of small town policing, officer training, interactions with locals. I got sidetracked, I went down internet rabbit holes, it took me three drafts before I figured out who the killer was. In the end, though, I was super happy with the story, the characters, the way it is infused with the landscape and culture of central Minnesota.

I spent six years trying to find an agent, and when I’d gone through “the list,” I tried to find a publisher, submitting it to contests and more agents as I identified them. I wrote another novel in the meantime, this one set in North Dakota, and started looking for an agent for that book. I published a book of poems with a small publisher. I finally decided this fall to self-publish Officer Down, which seems to neither fit into literary fiction (too much a police procedural) nor in the police procedural genre (too literary). It is a heck of a good story, and you will love these people as much as I do. They’re well worth getting to know. There’s a romance in there, too.

There are also kids who ride their snowmobiles to high school, swimming in the quarry, and baseball under the lights of a stadium that glows at night like the field of dreams. There’s my favorite character, a guy fighting with his father to take over the dairy farm and convert it to organic. There are super sweet children, and there’s some real ugliness in the public shunning. Though the administrator at the St. Joseph police department, Mary Beth Munden, who was my first reader and very helpful, says the real guy had it much worse. My question to her was, “Is it believable?” Her answer: “Oh, yes.”

By the way, at the time I was writing the book, Mary Beth worked for the police department and also waited tables at the El Paso, known for its meat raffles. She was a student at the local community college and, she let me know, on weekends she sorted worms and packaged them for the local bait shop. I had to shake my head. I would have loved to put this in my book but, thanks to Fargo, it would not be believed, or would reduce the “seriousness” of the book. The Coen brothers took a lot– there are no “you betchas” in this book, though I heard more than a few when doing research interviews. Still, the German Catholics have their say.

What pushed me to get this thing done, was the great experience of having people read a short story I recently had accepted for publication. It was so gratifying to have people read the story and respond to it– not just a close circle of friends but a wider set I contacted through email and Facebook. If you want a sense of my writing and the stories of this area, read “The Long Way,” inspired by an event related to the Jacob Wetterling abduction, which took place less than a half mile from our farm, at the Pigeon Review here.

Then, you know, buy the book! It’s a good one!

They wanted me to come to the Mayo Clinic, 250 miles away, and have the scan (out of network, costing me $1,000s) this morning. Then I’d have an appointment/consult with the doctor in the afternoon. Beforehand he would look at my pathology (more cost to me). I insisted that I wanted to have the scan done at home in network and that I wanted a virtual/zoom appointment. The woman on the phone was surprised by my request, but she made it work. I made sure the CT scan got to them and did all my questionnaires on the online portal and practiced with the zoom link and was in place and ready early to click in.

The doctor went through my treatment history with me then asked what was next for treatment. “Well,” I said, “the reason I’m here is because I want into that measles trial.” This was news to him. It had been the entire subject of my initial contact/email to him, but it seemed I needed to get fully in the system before an answer could be formulated. The answer was immediate. “You’re not eligible for that trial, because you have cancer in your lung and this is for cancer that is only in the abdomen.” Well that was my whole question! We could have established this in two sentences in an email!

HOWEVER…. he did have news of another upcoming study, a combination virus/immunotherapy study, that I probably would be a good candidate for. The parameters of the trial aren’t written yet, but the concept wouldn’t exclude me. The study agent has been approved by the FDA and the company is negotiating budgets with Mayo now, which could take three months or more. As long as my cancer is still stable, I could qualify. We talked it through. And because my cancer is stable now, I can wait and have another scan in two months and see if it’s available then.

So now I’m in the system, and from here I think I can contact the oncologist via message (I’m officially a “patient” now with a portal and a patient number and access to the records and messaging system, etc.) and he can let me know the status of the trial and more information related to my qualifications.

Also, it does feel like we’re in a new stage. It feels like maybe these trials, these new agents and therapies, are coming one after the other, more quickly into the pipeline. (Is this a result of the “cancer moonshot” Obama and Biden launched five years or more ago?) It feels like there might be something other than chemo coming my way the next time around. And to be honest, I’m not that sad I won’t be getting an abdominal port, which sounds kinda unpleasant.

About a minute after I found out I had Stage IV ovarian cancer, back in February 2016, I learned the word immunotherapy. For at least a year, and occasionally since then, people sent me links to videos and articles about immunotherapy. And although there was no immunotherapy treatment available for ovarian cancer (and still is not), it was obvious that this was the future of cancer treatment. And what a promising and magical treatment it seems to be.

I’ve read the articles and watched the videos. I particularly remember a 60 Minutes segment, which aired deep into my first awful round of chemotherapy, about treatment for brain cancer that seemed to be working fantastically. Although these programs and articles always have an very upbeat tone, this one also talked to at least one woman who was in a trial where she suffered intensely from the treatment. The treatment involved injecting a modified version of the polio virus into a brain tumor to get the body’s own immune system to attack the tumor.

There are two main kinds of immunotherapy being tested. One type does what the polio immunotherapy does, injects a (modified) virus the body will recognize into the body to get it to attack the cancer. The second type works with super T-cells, or Killer cells, immune cells already in the body, super-sizing them or injecting ones that recognize a specific cancer that otherwise goes undetected, and these immune cells duplicate and do the work of eradicating the cancer.

About three years ago, at a one-day conference at Mayo in Rochester for ovarian cancer survivors, I heard a talk by a researcher who was conducting trials using these super T-cells. The researcher showed us a little animation where a T-cell was designed to attach to the ovarian cancer cell and flip a switch, turning off something that allowed the cell to remain undetected. However, the crafty ovarian cancer cell had some other mechanism that allowed it to just flip a different switch on the other side of the cell! This was infuriating. The ovarian cancer cell in the animation had not one but two invisibility mechanisms. Still, the researchers had kept at it and now had some kind of additional agent or superpower to go over and flip off the second switch. They were going to start testing it. I almost knocked my chair over running up to see if I could possibly qualify. I did not. At that point we had just detected the return of the cancer, after an 18-month remission. Eight months after the conference, I was getting my second round of chemotherapy.

I occasionally look at the list of trials available. My sister-in-law Tina also occasionally does searches and sends me possibilities. Usually I can just go down the list and see that I do not qualify. I am not BRCA positive (a primary genetic mutation for breast and ovarian cancer). I am not carboplatin-resistant (the toxic but most effective treatment that eventually the body can’t tolerate, and which I’ve had four times now, in combination with other chemotherapy agents). I’m so done with carboplatin.

However, about a week ago she sent me a list of three trials, and one looked right for me. It is an immunotherapy trial, and involves injecting modified measles cells into the peritoneum (abdomen) to rally the forces to fight cancer there. I sent the link to my oncologist, who confirmed that it seemed like I would qualify, at least given the broad criteria.

It is a Stage I/II trial. That’s early. Early trials can be scary, because they push limits. Stage I and II trials are the first tests to see if a therapy will work, and also involve increasing the amount of the therapeutic agent to higher and higher doses to determine which dose works best– and find out when the dosage becomes too toxic or harmful.

I tried to get more information on the trial from Mayo, but I can’t talk to the researcher until they have reviewed all my medical records to see if I truly am a good candidate for the study. That meant contacting my oncologist and my surgeon (two different offices) and mailing requests around. Some information can be faxed (believe it or not, these offices still depend on fax machines, which I guess is a secure way to exchange information). Some information will need to be burned to a CD and mailed to Mayo. I also had my oncologist office fax recent information to my surgeon (a gynecological oncologist) to get her opinion on my participation in the study.

It was an intense week. After all, I am on a break. A break!! It is very difficult to think about signing up for something that will at the very least cause me discomfort and some pain, treatment, when one is on a break. Then there is the issue of “the devil you know.” Because when I think logically through things, I know that the only other option out there is more chemo, maybe in a few months. I mean, yes, I know those side effects, I can deal with the fatigue and the taste issues and the blood issues and some nausea. I know how to do chemo. But I really don’t want to do more chemo. And the chemo is becoming less effective.

It seemed to me that some people in those immunotherapy studies with the polio to the brain really suffered. Like hospital-stay and near-death suffering. I have had relatively little suffering so far. Quality of life is important. I don’t want to screw that up for whatever time I have left. It was a lot to think about. It was super heavy.

Then I found, deep in the interwebs, a report on an earlier study that seems to match this one. It started in 2014 and ended in 2017 and there were results. Results! Published in 2019. Holy cow. This was exciting news because it means that a) the results were positive enough that they decided to do another study, and b) I could find out something about the results and the side effects when I talked to the doctor at Mayo.

Actually, I found some of the results right away. Not about how effective the treatment was, but about side effects. It was just a chart with numbers, but it was revealing. First of all, none of the side effects were dramatic. ALL 39 women in the study completed it– no one left the study either because of death through progression of their disease or because the side effects were so bad they couldn’t go on with it. In the second phase of the study, where women got higher doses, all 16 of 16 reported abdominal pain. Most had flatulence (don’t we all) and some had diarrhea. This makes sense given they’re injecting the cells directly into your abdomen to fight cancer that is in your abdomen. I remember the first time I had any treatment at all, when the cancer seemed to realize it had been discovered and something was coming to kill it, I had intense abdominal pain during treatment. That stopped, though, by the third treatment.

The other side effects reported were familiar to me. Some nausea, some blood count issues that resulted in fatigue. I haven’t been prone to nausea, but also there are meds for that. None of these side effects scared me at all, and the fact that all the women made it through the trial was beyond encouraging.

So here I am. Now I wait for the medical records to be sent out and reviewed, and the appointment with the doc at Mayo. Now I find myself not scared but hoping that I am a good candidate. I realize there are things that can disqualify me– do I have “enough” cancer in my peritoneum? Do I have too much cancer in my right lung? I know that my overall good health improves my chances of qualifying. The trial is for women who have had multiple recurrences (I’ve had three) and who are Stage III or IV. Stage IV means it has spread elsewhere, so maybe my lung won’t disqualify me.

Immunotherapy. I’ve been waiting and hoping treatment would get me to the place where this magical new treatment option would be available. Let’s hope it lives up to the promise. Let’s hope I have made it there.

I’m seven weeks from my last chemo treatment. This round I had one infusion a month for two cycles, six months in total. After three months I had a scan that showed, for the first time, not progress but stability. The cancer was no worse and no better.

I don’t think that was entirely accurate. One reason we went back to treatment when we did, the main reason in my mind, was because my right lung was filled with fluid, to the point that it always bothered me and I was short of breath all the time, even climbing stairs at home. The fluid is there, but it isn’t bothering me these days.

The scan after six months showed the same thing: stability. My oncologist mapped things out for us on a piece of paper. Responses to chemo are categorized: full response, partial response, stability. All are, of course, good responses, though obviously some are better than others! To have arrived at stability was disappointing. I felt so depleted from the treatment, and my sluggish blood numbers (WBC, RBC, hemoglobin, platelets) were a source of fatigue, and I was still short of breath. If this was as good as I could hope to feel, well, that was discouraging. That was different. We’ve also shortened the break time– my next scan will be in two months, not three. I realize how much I liked telling people that the cancer was/is a chronic illness, and that I was in a pattern of six months on, six months off. That was a pattern I could more or less accept. Now I am mostly hoping things will still be stable after two months, and we’ll move to four months, maybe make it again to six before starting treatment again.

That oncology visit was four weeks from the last chemo treatment. In these three weeks, however, I do feel better. I always forget that I will bounce back and have more energy. The blood must be back in normal range, because although I’m still tired and don’t do nearly as much in a day as I used to, I have done yoga; I have gone for a long walk in my favorite place, Quarry Park; I have had long visits with friends. The long walk was especially encouraging. Though I was tired afterward, I was not breathless during the walk itself. With everything, I say: I can do this.

Last night I parsed out my week’s worth of medications. Gabapentin for neuropathy and a low-dose antidepressant I’ve taken for decades. Vitamin D. Melatonin. But no more Vitamin B-12, since the platelets seem good. And I rummaged around in my basket of medications. No more dexamethasone, or the other two drugs I take after treatment to limit nausea. I can put those bottles away, far back in the cabinet. Or just leave them in the basket. Psychologically, though, I have put them away. I am putting away, one by one, the habits and patterns of treatment.

Break times are the best. And October is a month I love. We’re still eating from the garden, including lettuce, tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, and cucumbers. The most delicious Greek salads with olives and really good feta. I ordered eighteen boxes of high end broth, six with turmeric and ginger, and six with mushrooms. I picked up lamb from my local lamb farmer.

My garden was small this year, and drought-stricken. I grew potatoes in potato bags, and from the four pounds of seed potatoes I bought, I harvested seven pounds of very small potatoes. I really missed growing my own garlic this year, so I pushed some cloves into the one raised bed I have left outdoors (I have five more in the greenhouse) and piled it with straw. I’d like one more bed so I could have a large potato haul next year. I will miss the potatoes when we’ve eaten them all. I’m used to them lasting until spring. We took out fifteen raised beds last fall, and I have to say I only miss a few things. I am mostly happy and relieved I didn’t have to water that large garden through ten weeks without a drop of rain.

I am waiting for my brain to come back after treatment. It’s better, but not where I need it to be to do the writing I want to be doing. Meanwhile, I am reading, and thinking, and writing in fits and starts. With my neuropathy, and after breaking my ankle falling on the stairs last November, I am much more tentative going down stairs, and I don’t carry any large things up and down. I am tentative. And yet. I am putting chemo and all it entails far back in the cabinet. I am stable.

I grew up in Park Forest, Illinois, a south suburb of Chicago. Until I was 6, we lived in a neighborhood of co-op townhouses that faced onto forest preserve. That was an early and enduring term for me, “forest preserve.” Later, when we lived across town, a block from Route 30 and with only school parks nearby, we’d sometimes drive to “the forest preserve” to walk the paved loop. By then, though, it had lost its sense of innocence for me, of magic and adventure. It was dense with undergrowth and there was drinking, loud music, some crime at the small lake and parking lot in the middle of it. Much later, a man I knew from the local theater was killed there. It was a more human space, too, like you see in many films and television shows. Shaped more by culture than nature.

As a very small child, I’d venture not too far into the woods in front of our house. I collected and pressed down a little moss floor once for a private space for myself, at age 5, and I often sat beneath the trees looking at bugs. The space felt wild. It was a space that could shape a small person. Once I found a major cache of real red ladybugs (not the persistent orange Japanese beetles we have now that bite and smell bad when you squash them). I put some of those ladybugs in a coffee can, a vivid early memory. Toward the end of our time at the Co-ops, a new neighbor tied his mean dog to one of the trees all day every day and I stopped going there.

I realize only now that I had a longing for natural spaces that wasn’t met in our house on our 1/4 acre plot, where I lived until leaving for college. I didn’t learn the names of anything but locust, maple, and birch, all of which we had. I’m not even sure if the backyard trees I climbed were elm. I didn’t know the difference between any pines or firs or cedars, any “evergreen” trees, though our kitchen window looked out through the carport at a gorgeous pine in the neighbor’s yard. We looked out that window to see if the bus was coming to the corner for school, as we hurriedly chomped on our homemade granola.

Denise Levertov was one of my last poetry teachers, and she chided me for “not caring” about nature, and thought I should be a fiction writer, not a poet, because I cared more about human relationships than nature. I gave her too much power over me and my art, but it’s true that I was shaped by human-made spaces and by human relationships more than any kind of raw relationship to the natural world. All the spaces in my early and even early-mid adult life were spent in cultivated spaces, controlled spaces, lawns and sidewalks where worms congregated when it rained. Bike rides through neighborhoods where all the houses looked the same. Big, empty, mowed parks with man-made sledding hills and man-carved ice rinks on them. Chlorinated pools with hot pavement that immediately evaporated our wet footprints. The library. My childhood was rich and privileged, but with people more than natural spaces.

For the last thirteen years, though, I’ve lived on prairie. It is also human-made, a formerly agricultural space sprayed with herbicides and tilled and sometimes no-till-drilled into prairie, with flowers and grasses. Paths carved into it. Burned and weeded. White pines and red pines planted, and at first two rows of majestic cottonwoods (called poplars here) along the driveway. Red cedar. Arborvitae along the house. Burr oaks coming up in oak savannah in the prairie. Red oaks now planted around the end of the driveway to shade the screen porch and provide privacy.

It took a few years to get used to and truly appreciate the prairie’s wildness. A few winters of cross country skiing and snowshoeing deep into our woods, observing buckthorn, Siberian elms, the invasives, along with the variety of pines and aspen, birch and maple and occasional oak. Observing animal and bird tracks. I cultivated, too, an ever-expanding garden where I hoped to feed at some point all three families on the farm through the summer and us year ’round. I could have done it some years, though my in-laws weren’t so interested in this project. I did keep us fed year ’round on fresh and canned and frozen produce for a time. I scaled back when I got my cancer diagnosis, but even this year, with drought and heat and after taking out a dozen vegetable beds, the produce has been consistently available and sometimes plentiful. There aren’t jars and jars of tomatoes and pickles, but there is tomato sauce and pizza sauce and we’ve feasted on cucumber salads. With the recent change to a rainy pattern, I’ve planted some fall greens and lettuce.

Yesterday I sat in the yard, my chickens around me, and just looked out. Looked up into the branches of a gorgeous white pine, which makes the loveliest sound in the breeze, and the loveliest dappled light. I can see the same pine through my bedroom window. My chickens walked around me, curious and pecking at bits on the ground, or chasing grasshoppers.

The laundry line stood like another small tree, with a couple clusters of purple aster growing alongside the metal trunk. Behind it the single outdoor garden bed and bags of potato plants. The potatoes are still working away, growing, and I can’t tell you how much I love garden potatoes in the fall and winter. Beyond that, around that, the fullness of goldenrod, goldenrod and aster being the last prairie profusion before winter.

I’ve been thinking about this because I watched a DVD a friend loaned me, a pilgrimage to a Celtic landscape, western Ireland, by John O’Donahue. His is a truly wild landscape, and he was shaped by it very deeply. Ancient people’s runes and ruins, rock and fragile-yet-persistent plant life. Bleakness and life alongside one another.

It is like that here in winter– bleakness and life alongside one another. Though the snow sparkles and is bright, too. We Minnesotans (can I call myself that, after 15 years?) love moving through snow. I did as a young adult, too, when we first discovered cross country skis. Most of the snow in my childhood was cleared away before I went out in it. We went out to create– snow forts, igloos, snowmen, angels. But then later we went to golf courses and skied. In America, all my landscapes except maybe a few forays into the Sierras, have felt cultivated and shaped for my access. I am a person who stays on the trail. I like a dedicated campsite. I am also a person who doesn’t seek or respond thoroughly to grandeur. America doesn’t have much in the way of runes and ruins. Petroglyphs here and there. All of those spaces made accessible, too, not often stumbled upon.

And that is what has shaped me and continues to shape me. I swim in an excavated quarry pool, that is cool and deep. Children jump off the rock ledges. They come with their life jackets, floaties, and rafts. Birds, including sandhill cranes and giant blue herons, come closer than I ever thought they would. And I am in awe of the world where I find myself.

Every year of this cancer journey, I’ve found a reflection of my physical state in the life of my garden. I have always seen the cancer as akin to a noxious weed, something that just keeps coming back and which one has to treat again and again with poisons to get rid of.

For years, I maintained a very large vegetable garden, but last summer it officially became too much for me. Depleted by my third round of chemotherapy, which went right through June and whose side effects were worst in May, I had trouble managing the planting, watering, and weeding required. I have five beds out in the greenhouse, a fair distance from our house, and it was a real chore to get out there and maintain the more finicky plants, the tomatoes and eggplant. Still, it was a good year.

At the end of the season, we ripped out that garden, thinking that area would be replaced by a large shed for the heritage pigs we’re going to get to root in the woodlands. However, after more consideration, the hog barn got relocated to another spot closer to the woods. Still, I don’t miss those 15 raised beds. This year I had one, close to the house and the hoses. This was also the first year I had chemotherapy right through the summer, after a 9-month break instead of the usual 6-month break. I just had treatment #5 of 6. Six is about all a person can take before a break is required (and after that, the treatments also start to show diminishing returns).

This summer has been one of the most challenging seasons for growers on record. We are in an extreme drought. In 13 years here on the farm, 16 in the area, I’ve not seen anything like it. The ponds are dry, something I thought was impossible given our water table. My husband dug up some deer-ravaged bushes by the house and regraded the area to help push rainwater away from the house, and in a month not a single weed has sprung up. It is astonishing to walk on that bare ground every day to go feed the chickens or water the garden.

Fields of corn that often get spiky but always survive have dried up, shrunken, in the fields. Soybean fields have burned up. And though we have had food from the garden, there have been many more flowers than fruit. The plants spring to life, then start shedding their flowers, shriveling up, hardly producing. Bugs rush in to devour the weakened plants. After a couple weeks and a successful fight against the striped cucumber beetles, the zucchini succumbed to squash borers and squash bugs. The one butternut squash plant that survived has a single fruit on it, despite its many early flowers. The shishito peppers, after a first yield, are full of giant seeds. The cucumbers, too, are full of seeds. Everything is trying to reproduce, turning its attention to next year. Even the tomatoes, on eight plants, are coming in a tomato at a time, or producing none at all. The tomatillo plant put out a bunch of husks the size of ground cherries, then shriveled up and died.

I have been too sick to water. For an entire week after treatment, now more like 10 days, I can’t even get out to the greenhouse. My husband has done some, and the peppers in truth are thriving under the automatic watering system. But even they shrivel up shortly after I bring them into the house. The cantaloupe, also plentiful, get soft while still unripe. Nothing has water in its cells. Everything is fragile. I can relate.

At this point my visualization of what can happen is much like the bare earth by the house. I want to so bombard the cancer with these poisons that it just loses strength and gives up, if not forever then for a long time. I had a friend who after ten years with ovarian cancer stopped treatment when a spot appeared in her pancreas. And yet she continued to live for two more years without symptoms or spread. To me it just felt like she had so weakened the cancer it struggled to get a hold. However, I am also aware, by then her short-term and long-term memory were shot, a major and to me the most disturbing side effect of so much chemotherapy. The drought doesn’t just affect the weeds.

Home with my harvest and my seriously compromised taste buds, I struggle to find the energy and motivation to chop it all up, stuff it and bake it and serve it. I’m only keeping up because, in fact, there is less of it.

It is time to plant the fall lettuce and greens. But I’m not putting in any seeds until there’s at least one rainfall of an inch or more. Watering with the hose is never the same as rain.

This season is barren. But for me, knowing part of the hope is a barrenness that stops the weeds, not just the fruit, I can live into it. We have so much prairie outside our windows that even now the goldenrod is blooming (and occasional bursts of sunflowers or coneflowers) and there is green. Whereas for much of the area, where there is grass or cultivated crops, everything is brown, here something is blooming.

Here something is blooming.

My freezer and fridge are full of fancy food. I have a quality steak. I have a lamb roast and lamb chops from a local farmer. I have frozen mussels, and scallops, large shrimp, salmon. Frozen salmon ravioli I made from scratch. I have fresh noodles and bok choy and some pork shoulder to thinly slice for a stir fry. I have garden fingerling potatoes and sweet potatoes.

I keep thinking about a cake.

Lately I’ve been thinking cheesecake. But there is a bakery that would make me a fancy rustic cake with fruit filling and confetti sprinkles on top and that is tempting.

I am at an anniversary point, a milestone, something that requires celebrating, and I am ambivalent about it. I just keep buying fancy food.

It has been five years since I was diagnosed with stage 4 ovarian cancer. At the time, the oncologist said the average lifespan with a scan like mine was 2-3 years. I said, “No, five. I need five.” Soon after, I met a woman who was in year 11 and started thinking about living to 60. And who knew what treatments– there was a lot of talk about immunotherapy– would be available in a decade.

Five years is important in terms of improving the statistics. I am now in a new category, the five-year-survival rate. Women being diagnosed now will hopefully see a higher percentage of those living five years. The oncologists might start saying the average lifespan is 3-5 years. For me, hearing 2-3, I thought, “Well, that’s long enough to treat, to kill it.” It was different than, say, months, even 18 months. When they express the lifespan in years, well, you have some living to do! You have some cancer-killing to do.

I got into remission after that first terrible year. They removed my port, through which I received my 24 weekly chemo infusions and which came in handy for blood work and contrast dye and during the debulking surgery. I was in remission for two years. At that three-year mark I was preparing to go back to chemotherapy. Since then I had chemo for six months then had a break for six months, then chemo again for six months, then a nine-month break on a maintenance drug. A month ago I had a reaction to the maintenance drug, my platelets crashed and my hemoglobin crashed and my white blood cells crashed and I ended up in the hospital with pancytopenia for a couple days. My first hospital stay since surgery.

In another month we’ll have another scan, and probably return to another round of chemo. I’m okay with that. I have a chronic disease and we just kick it back then rebuild then kick it back again. I’m still responsive to the most effective forms of chemotherapy. I have options.

So how does one mark this milestone? I’m still here! Taking inventory, as I do, I can say my quality of life is quite good! I have good work, I live in a beautiful place, I’m starting leeks and shallots in the basement again, I am surrounded by people who love me. A Covid vaccine is coming. I broke my ankle and had surgery in November, but now I’m walking around, even driving, in a brace and gaining strength and doing some “hurt foot yoga.”

After the broken ankle, I had some trouble with my stomach. Six weeks ago my main goal in the morning was to not throw up, and I employed all kinds of strategies and superstitions related to that goal. I didn’t have an appetite and had trouble eating for a couple months. It was probably partially the maintenance drug and partially the ankle business.

But now I have a freezer and fridge full of fancy food. In the past two weeks I have made pizza crust again, and pizza sauce, and salmon ravioli, soba bowls, and chocolate cake. In my fridge right now there is leftover salmon chowder, leftover chicken masala, leftover venison chili. It is safe to say I am back and I am back Big Time. The first outing I took in months was to a suburb of the Twin Cities to return the knee roller I borrowed from my friend Joanne. We met in the Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s parking lot. It had been three months since I’d gone grocery shopping. Next was the Asian market, the Co-op, and today, the meat market. This is a huge part of getting my life back after a pretty dark winter with no weight on that ankle, stuck in a dark guest room, and feeling, really, pretty sick.

Time for a celebration.

Or, you know, I could just keep on as I have been.

No cake.

A series of good meals cooking up the fancy food. Putting more weight on that foot. Working my way back to Downward Dog. Planting the plants. Watching for the lakes to thaw and kayak season to return. Getting vaccinated for Covid. Overseeing construction of the new garden and new chicken coop. Year six.

One thing I love about winter is that when my husband Steve ends his landscaping season our conversations get more interesting. The winter is the time for the life of the mind and different types of creativity to emerge. Steve makes furniture, remodels rooms in the house, makes paintings, refinishes and reconstructs doors, and in the cold mornings between four a.m. and seven a.m., when he is usually organizing and loading machinery for a day’s work, he reads and writes.

This winter, we’ve been talking a lot about the meaning of the self and the meaning of time, started by the question, “Is there really such a thing as living in the present?”

This past year especially I’ve been being more conscious of my own memories. I’ll indulge in a surprising memory that floats through my head, sometimes telling Steve the story (poor guy), sometimes writing it down in as much detail as I can muster. I haven’t pushed on the memories the way I did when I regularly wrote poetry rooted in memory and association. It is more simple storytelling. It is like photography.

Twice in my life I’ve looked at a photograph and seen my own life. The first time was at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where I saw a photo exhibit that included several by Dan Weiner. There in a frame in NYC was a photo of a “Party in the Tot Lot,” adults doing a sort of Virginia Reel in a small enclosure surrounded by brick townhouses that were unmistakably in my home town of Park Forest, Illinois. I’d lived there from a year old to six years old and it remains a magical place for me, where I experienced safety and a nurturing of my creativity and intelligence. I learned to read there. I explored the forest preserve with others and alone. I took long walks down sidewalks and through neighborhoods of identical houses, “the courts,” meeting people in my neighborhood, most of whom were kind and a few of whom were bullies. The world of the Park Forest Co-Ops was truly my oyster. In the gift shop, I bought as many of the post cards as I could get. Later I got a copy of America Worked, a collection of Weiner’s photos from the 1950s, the catalogue from a show at MOMA I had not seen, that had several photos from Park Forest in it. I framed the post cards, and recently framed a larger image of the Matteson, Illinois, train platform where I often caught the train. It was taken a decade before I was born, but captures the place and the identity of my home town and so, in some ways, of me.

Last week I bought the book The Universe Next Door, images by Abelardo Morell, from an exhibit of his photography at the Art Institute of Chicago. I bought it for the camera obscura images he has taken, including my favorite one, “Houses in Living Room, Quincy, Massachusetts, 1991.” That image wasn’t in that exhibit, but I was introduced to a lot of other gorgeous photographs, many of which make one think about nostalgia and childhood. And then one ordinary page, not my favorite image by far, stopped me short.

I wasn’t sure at first what I was looking at, in black and white, and in a way it resembled views of our prairie or garden at different times when hummocks of grass and dirt appear. So I read the title: “Shadows During Solar Eclipse, 1994.” Wait a minute. I was there. I saw that. And in fact I’ve been looking for it ever since.

I was in Chicago on May 10, 1994, when there was a good-sized solar eclipse across North America that lasted several hours. There was no totality, the sky did not go dark, but it was the kind of eclipse where you could punch a hole in a piece of white paper and see a perfect shadow of the moon crossing the sun on the ground. Punching a hole in a piece of paper to make an image is much like camera obscura, where you turn a room into a pinhole camera and create an image of what is across the street on the canvas of the room.

The thing about this solar eclipse, when I went out of the office where I was working to see the eerie light, to look through my poked piece of paper, was that all sorts of things became pinhole cameras for seeing the eclipsed sun. I heard on the radio that this was true, so not only did I look through my pinhole sheet of paper, which worked so much better than I remember a cardboard version working in grade school, but I also looked at the shadows on the ground cast by the leaves of a tree. It was incredible. The dappled sunlight took on the outline of the eclipse. There was a littering of eclipsed suns, of crescent suns, on the grass. Later a friend would tell me she and others were looking at the shadows cast through their hair, long and lifted up, with interstices for the pattern to sprinkle itself on the sidewalk.

That is what Abelardo Morell had captured in his photograph. I could see my memory of it, in green grass, on the sidewalk, in the dirt around the urban tree.

I don’t believe it is the goal of art to reflect one’s own life back to the viewer. In fact, what I love about Morell’s work is the way it makes me think about more complicated issues like childhood, language, place, and the stories we tell about place. Weiner’s images allow me to think about the complex story of America, particularly the suburbs and capitalism. But then on this day I saw an image from my own life, and for a moment I considered the complexity of all human life, and its constancy as we move forward, from past to future through the most fleeting of things, the present.

Today is the feast of Christ the King. The Gospel reading is telling, Matthew 25:31-46 and it tells us all we need to know about the kingdom of God. The king separates the sheep and the goats, and the sheep are those who cared for the least of those, the ones who fed the hungry, gave drink to the thirsty, clothed the naked, and visited and cared for those who were ill or in prison. Those are the inheritors of the kingdom.

I am so glad to be a Catholic. I don’t know what is preached in other churches, but in my church we regularly hear this message: welcome the alien and stranger, comfort the afflicted, care for those who have needs. Share what you have. Pay attention to the isolated and lonely. What a calling this is for all of us.

People know my opinions about the death penalty. I am against it wholeheartedly. Not only do I believe that people should not be judged harshly for their worst act, their worst day, and not only to I believe that all life is sacred, I don’t believe the State should take the lives of its citizens. We have prisons to protect people from the worst among us, the dangerous among us, and even if that danger is a form of brokenness, I believe the State should isolate those who inflict harm.

Our current president, acting more like a king than an elected leader with the interests of the citizens at heart, is spending his last weeks in office executing people. Realizing that Joe Biden, a Catholic, is likely to place a moratorium on federal executions, Attorney General William Barr has directed the federal prison system to execute three men before the end of the year. With the execution of Orlando Hall on November 19, the federal department of corrections has executed eight people since July 2020, after a hiatus of 17 years. Also scheduled for October was the execution of the only woman on federal death row, Lisa Montgomery, who participated in a kidnapping that resulted in death and suffers from severe mental illness due to her own experience of lifelong abuse by family members. Her lawyers, however, contracted Covid-19 while visiting her in prison, and so her execution has been postponed to December 31. There hasn’t been a federal execution of a woman in 67 years, and there has never been an execution by a lame duck president. Usually presidents leaving office spend their days pardoning and commuting sentences. This one is spending his last weeks killing people.

Covid-19 has opened the opportunity for me to meet virtually with an inmate on North Carolina’s death row with whom I’ve had a correspondence for more than six years. This has been a blessing in that my writing to him had dropped off in the last year, as I struggled with brain fog from chemotherapy and spent most of my writing energy on keyboards and emails. We have had several 15-minute visits, which have been joyful experiences for both of us. I’ve come to know his voice, his Southern accent, his interests. I can tell him funny things and he can react in the moment. He can update me on his and his friend’s health issues. We can talk politics. I can ask him more in-depth questions about his childhood.

Now the video visits have been curtailed to once a month. I mark my calendar to make the request before the schedule gets filled up. The people who manage those requests have been very kind and efficient, even calling me when a visit was running late to say Robby was on his way. Since all my other experiences with this prison has been filled with the language of punishment, threats of “privileges removed” and strict orders to follow various protocols, and since my efforts to send him birthday money and food packages has involved high fees and limited choices and the requirement to hand over my personal information (including a copy of my driver’s license), this has been welcome.

I am constantly impressed by Robby’s care for other inmates. He asks me to research book prices for a poet on the block. When his friend’s father died of Covid-19, knowing no one would send him condolences, Robby sent detailed information on how to send a card, and was delighted that Timmy told him “your people really came through.”

Although Robby has turned his life around, gotten off drugs, pursued Native American spirituality, and poses no threat to society, no one is denying his participation in a crime. All that is being asked is that his sentence be commuted to life in prison without parole, the sentence his codefendant, who committed the murder, received. That would mean transfer to a different population, one where he would likely be able to work and earn money for stamps and other necessities, and earn privileges, and interact with more people. Maybe he could even get an email account. I can say that I love Robby and the fact that he’s found ways to make good in his current situation. He has suffered at the hands of bureaucracy, and currently has debilitating carpal tunnel syndrome. Waiting for surgery, it has attacked the muscles in his arms as well as his hands, and he’s unlikely to get full use or strength back. We’re hoping the surgery can happen soon.

I’ve been able to get signed up to receive phone calls from him. I sent money for the account, and he can call me (cheaper than me calling him) for 15-minute phone visits. I’m glad there is a way for us to keep in touch. He receives support from me about his medical issues, and feels the need to update me about all doctor’s visits and the process. I will undoubtedly get a holiday call this Thanksgiving.

Which is to say, it is so easy to see the lifeline that any contact with the outside provides to prisoners. It takes so little on my part, just basic interest in another human being, and means so much to him.

I am glad that our next president is a Catholic. Joe Biden plans to put an end to federal executions. He believes in the sacredness of life. Today at Mass, which he attends weekly, he heard the same gospel I heard, what it means to be a leader in God’s kingdom. What a relief it will be, from the past four years of a president who used his power persecuting immigrants and refugees, fomenting racial hatred, encouraging white supremacy, and in the last days executing and ignoring the 250,000 deaths from Covid-19 in this country– 1/6 of all deaths worldwide.