Participating in spring

After hearing that I had a ten percent chance of living three to five years and forcing my wedding ring back on my finger, I decided to enjoy as much as I could if I ever got out of the hospital. They discharged me on Tuesday, March 29. At first all I could enjoy was sleeping in my own bed and watching television on the couch with Suzanne.

I came home feeling like a very old man. It was a long way to sit down and a struggle to stand up. When I sat down in the bathroom, I imagined ordering one of those raised toiled seats with handles. When I stood up again, I was so short of breath I became dizzy and had to hold onto the edge of the sink. At first, I didn’t have the strength to stand at the stove. When I did, my arms were so weak that I couldn’t hold a pan with one hand and scrape it out with the other. Because of how the tumor sat on my heart, simply bending over made me short of breath and unloading the dishwasher felt like a workout.

Our dishwasher, our stove, and our toilet are all on the second floor of a two family. Walking in from the car means one flight of stairs. Doing the laundry means two. I had to stop halfway up and then sit on a stool in our kitchen gasping for breath. I am used to building back my strength after leaving the hospital. I have done this so often since I first got sick. But this time my weakness felt different. It felt like death and dying.

“I’ll be back soon,” I said to my nurses when I left the inpatient unit. I assumed I had a week, maybe two, at a home. About half my days at home were consumed by commuting back to the hospital for out-patient appointments. Each time I paid my co-pay and they snapped a bracelet on my wrist, I expected them to admit me again. Stiff and seething, I sat in different chairs in different rooms, sticking out my arm for transfusions and answering questions without looking at the people asking them. What seemed like aggression to the staff felt like anxiety to me. It was a kind of tunnel vision, as if all I could see were the push plate with the wheelchair icon next to the exit (“Press to open”). This tunnel vision lasted until I found the car and put the key in the ignition again. But each day, at the end of my commute home, I tried to do something that felt like exercise—walk the dog farther, go up and down the stairs more often, clean the kitchen.

My birthday had passed uncelebrated in March because I refused to acknowledge it in the hospital. Suzanne and the kids had bought gifts, but at first I didn’t want to celebrate it at home either. I felt too weak and too close to being admitted again. What was the point? But as April advanced, I began to feel stronger. The Saturday before Easter I cooked my own birthday dinner. Isabelle baked a cake, and I unwrapped their presents, which all seemed so unreasonably hopeful. Suzanne gave me a new suitcase that matched hers, for the trips we would take together. Caleb gave me ear protection for using a chainsaw and tools for other work I would do at the farm. Rosalind gave me glasses for beer, when I could start drinking again. Isabelle gave me a portable fire pit, called a Solo Stove, so we could sit outside with guests in the cold. I didn’t expect to ever use any of these gifts, though we used the Solo Stove a week later.

We’ve had a cool spring in Boston this year. Forsythia and daffodils stayed bright yellow for weeks. Magnolia and dogwood still blossomed, green leaves pushing in behind their blooms, when the lilacs started in May. As one kind of bloom faded in Boston, I saw it again in Western Massachusetts. The mountains there are like a time machine. They take you back two weeks. Driving to the farm, I experienced spring twice.

I didn’t do much our first trip in mid-April. I installed three smoke alarms, stepping up on a chair and stepping down three times, and that felt like a full day’s work. I drove out by myself a week later. In the morning, someone came to look at the septic tank. I sat on the edge of the porch while I spoke to him, too tired to stand. In the afternoon, someone came to consult about stream bank erosion. We stood by her car in the driveway and I described what was happening to the bank while gesturing toward a curve in the stream across the field.

“Well,” she said, a little impatiently. “Let’s go see it.”

I paused. From here to there stretched a hundred and fifty yards of uneven ground. “Okay,” I said.

In the field, she kept stopping so I could catch up. Then I would have to stop because I was breathing so heavily. Finally standing at the bank, she asked a few questions about how the stream flowed in a flood.

“Right,” she said when I finished answering her. “Here’s what you need to do. Cut a fir tree. A big tree. Maybe seventy, eighty feet tall and about this far around.” She held her arms out in a circle, just the tips of her fingers touching. “Cut it over there.” She gave a backhand wave. “I can see any number of trees that size over there.” She was waving at our hill full of fir trees on the edge of the field, each tree at least as far away as the driveway. “Then move the whole tree in one piece—with as many branches as possible—to where we’re standing.”

“Are you kidding?”

“No. I’m not kidding. That’s what you want to do. And then tuck it in here.” She pointed at the base of a willow tree on the stream bank. “And here and here,” she continued, as if telling me where to put a two-by-four. “The trunk will help protect the bank and the branches will collect sediment and rebuild it.”

The woman left. I took a nap. It was still a warm, blue day when I woke up. I drove home with the windows open and the radio off, thinking about how beautiful the world was and how good it felt to participate in spring, though I wouldn’t be moving whole fir trees any time soon. We could hire someone to move one—I already heard Suzanne suggesting that. We should hire someone, but in our family this was exactly the kind of project we did by ourselves.

But what a preposterous project, I thought as I followed the double yellow line on a road above a river. What a dream from the past! As I sat at a traffic light in Westfield, I couldn’t help listing the equipment we would need. We had a chainsaw. We had a tractor with a bucket. We had plenty of logging chain. If I can stay out of the hospital, I thought staring at the white lines on the Mass Pike, maybe in the fall. Late fall. Just before the ground freezes. Or maybe a year from now, if I am still around.

“It’s fun to think about doing it,” I told Suzanne, after climbing our stairs. “You know. Some day.” We were standing in our kitchen. Out the window I could see a forsythia bush and a dogwood tree still blooming on the next block.

Last summer, we paid a lot of money to install a cedar fence around our small backyard. It had weathered since then, and I kept imagining it starting to rot. If I got one thing done before they locked me back in the hospital, I wanted to paint it. A few days after returning from the farm, I went to a paint store I’ve used for almost thirty years. I leaned on the counter and asked advice about paint versus stain on a cedar fence. He recommended stain. I stood at the display of paint chips and sent photos to Suzanne until she chose a color. But by the time I took out my wallet, this seemed like another fantasy. Why was I spending money on stain when I knew—just knew—I would never use it? The pristine wooden stirring stick tucked under the handle of each gallon taunted me. I would never dip these sticks in those cans. The cans would sit on the floor of my cellar, unopened, while I returned to the hospital and the fence continued to age and rot.

But the man who had given me all that advice was waiting for my card, and I went home with two gallons of stain and two stirring sticks in a cardboard box. That Sunday Isabelle helped me stain half the fence. I couldn’t bend over so I sat on a five-gallon bucket, grabbing some unpainted part of the fence to stand up and doing the same to sit down. The next weekend, Suzanne joined us and we stained the rest. I moved slowly both days and slept soundly both nights.

The same weekend we finished staining the fence Isabelle and I went to a spring seedling sale. “I don’t know why I’m buying vegetable seedlings,” I said. “I have no idea whether I can even bend over to plant them. Let alone take care of them all summer.” I bought eighty dollars’ worth.

A family of groundhogs lives under the porch of the house next to us. Another lives under the house behind us. If I put the plants in, they would eat them immediately. Later that week, I stood at Home Depot and thought about buying a fence to put around the bed, but it seemed like throwing good money after bad. I’d spend another forty dollars for what? To protect plants I wouldn’t be home to take care of? The two trays of vegetable seedlings sat on the little raised bed along our driveway, which was already covered in weeds. I felt foolish. Another fantasy. But I watered them every morning. And I bought four yellow bags of manure.

In mid-May, while the manure and the flats of seedlings waited next to my driveway, I had a PET scan. A CT scan measures only size, but a PET scan can measure whether a tumors is still alive. I had the scan on a Wednesday and by Thursday I learned that three of my four tumors were dead and the fourth tumor, the one sitting on my heart, was much smaller.

“I feel more confident that you will get me into remission,” I said to my oncologist. “Don’t you?”

“Yes, I do.” She is a woman of a few words. “Very much.”

“But there are really two questions here, aren’t there? There is the question of whether you can get me into remission. And there is the question of what to do when the leukemia comes back.”

“That’s right.”

Each time my leukemia comes back, it has been resistant to whatever put me into remission before. What I am getting are the last treatments in their toolbox. If it comes back again, they will have nothing left to throw at it. “The ten-percent calculation hasn’t changed. Has it?”

“No, it hasn’t.”

For all these weeks, Suzanne and I had been focused on keeping me out of the hospital so I could go to Rosalind’s graduation. Two days after the PET scan, Rosalind came home for the weekend. We had her graduation party in our backyard, and I cooked for twenty people. On Monday, Suzanne and I packed our matching suitcases and we drove with all our kids down to Brooklyn. We went to the ceremony at Radio City Music Hall. We spent a couple of days helping Rosalind move out of her dorm into an apartment. We had some lovely meals on restaurant patios and roofs. When we came back, I bought the fence and planted the vegetables.

A few days after New York, Caleb and Suzanne and I went out to the farm. This was the first weekend when the temperature got into the nineties. “What do you want to do, Dad?” Caleb asked Saturday morning.

I wanted to swim in the river, but I wanted to appreciate the cold water. “Let’s get really hot.”

“Okay. What should we do to get hot?”

“Do you want to cut down a fir tree?” I asked. “Shall we cut down that one?” We were standing on the porch. I pointed at a seventy or eighty foot spruce tree on the other side of the stream and across the field.

I sharpened the chain saw. We walked over the bridge and across the field. Caleb cut it down. I coached from the side, wearing the ear protection he had given me for my birthday.

After it landed, bouncing, in the field, we contemplated it for a few minutes. Then I asked, “Shall we try moving it to the stream bank? All in one piece? With as many branches on it as possible?”

We got out the tractor. We got out the logging chains and this tool called a peavey for rolling logs. We tried about six ways of pulling the entire tree across the field with the tractor, me leaning on the steering wheel and Caleb diving under the tree to fasten and refasten the chains in different places.

“Don’t do it that way, Dad,” he’d say. “You’ll tip the tractor over.”

Then I’d almost tip the tractor over.

Eventually we hauled it down the field and dropped it near the stream bank, not in one but in two pieces. The tree wasn’t where we wanted it yet, tucked in against the bank and above the stream, but that was enough work for one day.

“I’m glad there wasn’t a crowd of people sitting on the porch watching us do that,” I said to Caleb as we walked back to the house. The porch is kind of like the bleachers for anything that happens in the front field. What we accomplished hadn’t been particularly elegant, or safe.

Then we drove down to the river and went swimming with the dog.

The next weekend, Memorial Day weekend, we did have a crowd up there. My sisters and I came up with our families. It was the first weekend we had spent all together since Christmas 2019, before the pandemic. We brought our mother, who has Alzheimer’s and now lives in a memory care facility. A cousin of ours came with his daughter. Add some boyfriends and girlfriends and we had more people than the house could hold. Our cousin and his daughter brought a camper van. Isabelle slept in a tent. We ate on folding tables set up end to end on the lawn.

A mob of us spent two mornings moving the tree into the stream. The tractor pulled a wire rope attached to a pulley. We had people pushing the tree with levers and people standing in the stream shouting directions. Every few minutes, we would stop to debate the weight and angle of the tree and the strength of the spots we used to anchor the pulley. We never really tucked the tree in anywhere, but it moved eventually and where it fell seemed close enough to what that woman had described.

I cooked dinner one night. One afternoon, I hooked the mower on the tractor so we could start mowing the field. We planted two peach trees and two blueberry bushes. “Your dad is like your dog,” my sister Mandy observed to Isabelle. “He runs around up here until he completely collapses.”

I collapsed almost immediately after dinner. But in the middle of one night I woke up because I could hear my mother trying to get out of her bedroom. Her bedroom has an old-fashioned latch—the kind of latch you work with your thumb, raising and lowering a lever that clicks into a hook on the doorframe. It has a small piece of metal that swings down and holds the lever in place, serving as a lock. She had accidentally locked herself in. Now she needed to use the toilet.

I tried explaining how to unlock the latch from the other side of the door. Suzanne was awake and standing behind me now. She ran down to the kitchen to get a butter knife, but that didn’t work. I tried explaining what to do again, but my mother couldn’t make sense of my directions.

I had always solved problems like this myself and I wanted to live—at least in bursts—as if nothing had changed. So I got dressed, went out to the tractor shed at 2:30 in the morning, and took down a ladder. Then I climbed in her window. It was harder than I expected, climbing through a window at my age, after all I’ve been through. As I tried to get my legs and shoulders through, I kept expecting to fall to the floor like mail shoved through a slot. But I made it feet first. When I opened the door, Suzanne was standing ramrod straight with anxiety, her nose almost touching the door, her face as white as her white pajamas. My mother still had enough of her old personality to think it was funny.

It was a joyful weekend. We were all so glad to be together, same as always. There was a frenetic quality to it sometimes, I guess, because questions still intruded. Now that I am stronger, my doctors have started intensifying my treatments again and I don’t know what will happen next. Side effects may put me back in the hospital, and no one knows how well the treatments will work and for how long. A kind of doubleness, a sense of dislocation, kept disrupting my sense of well-being. As I ran around and moved trees and cooked dinner and climbed in windows, it felt like looking at normalcy through binoculars when the lenses don’t align. It is hard to believe in the end. It is hard to forget it as well.