Happy Valentine's Day

Valentine’s Day 2014

In further good news we learned yesterday that my breast tumor had clean margins, meaning it did not try to branch out whatsoever. While I generally consider branching out to be an essential element of a life well-lived, with cancer, everyone wants clean margins!

The pathologist also took a more detailed look/see at my soldier sentinel nodes and pronounced they were as clean as whistle. if that metaphor even works. SO, only good news from the pathology report, which will positively impact my further steps of treatment, to be fully delineated next week at a team meeting with all the relevant docs at Mass General.

No more health stuff now, but how ‘bout this poem I wrote for you know who. This Valentine’s Day we’re sending a boatload of love your way; may all our lives be imbued with love of all kinds and all the other good stuff, too!

Love & light,

AMY

Valentine’s Day for Paul

When we happened upon the

black sand beach while circumnavigating Iceland

I could not predict that 20 years later

I would sit by your side

On a cozy afternoon

After an epic snow storm

Me sorting a colossal pile of nails and screws

Which quite possibly would never be used:

Flat topped nails with smooth legs

Skinny tacks with no manners at all

Stunt little crossed-topped screws

that would drive me mad

when the Phillip’s head went missing,

screws sitting bored in plastic sheaths

waiting to spread wide ,

and alive, behind drywall

these nuts & bolts of our life held together

But like the good husband you are,

You did not begrudge me my useless chore

A sorter’s delight,

Well, how could you?

An unfortunate plate

holding your obsidian Islandic sand,

--that shining rarity you somehow coveted

and carried home like a sack of rare gems--

had shattered,

spraying the shiny blackness

in an spectacular arc on the cellar floor ….

where it languished for weeks

mingling mindlessly

with lesser elements

while life whirled around upstairs.

The clean-up presented a challenge

But you took it on, same furrowed brow

The intensively pensive look you sport:

First gathering the spill
with a feather-light broom

Then arriving at the table,

your coddled load diminished,

you skillfully pour out the mixture,

delicately pushing black sand to one side

lowly dirt and dust to the other,

You had some difficult-to-follow

scientific explanation

for how the division

must take place

While I sat satisfied, sorting my fasteners,

--thrilled to find a missing drill bit!

you worked your magic on that sand

until a pure unpolluted blackness was all that was left

And right there

I knew the perfect contentment

as the slant of the winter sun

illuminated the fact that

people in love can do anything at all & be happy.