I LOVE LIVING

Fall trees at Dillon Nature Center, Hutchinson, Ks. 

We met that fall morning in the parking lot outside the hospital. She reached in her trunk to pull out a basket of scrape booking materials. "Would you like some help with the basket?" I asked.  

"No, I'm fine today. Thank you." With a heavy breathe she continued, "I may not feel this good after the treatment today. The days get really long for me."  

My heart took a double beat with her heavy sigh. Here she was smiling and looking at the sunlight. With a joyous expression on her face and a glisten in her eyes, she looked around at the hospital complex, of concrete, bricks, and asphalt, and then the sky. "I love living, Letty. I don't want to die." 

I LOVE LIVING

"So do I, Sue. I love living." But the words stayed on my tongue. I wasn't strong enough to repeat her words. I knew her cancer was more serious than we wanted to acknowledge, and I cried inside for her. For her zest for life. For her abundance of joy that she spread to all around her. For her family and selfishly, for me.

Prairie Dunes Country Club, Hutchinson, Kansas

It was a cold January and we were celebrating our sixtieth birthdays at Prairie Dunes. Sue was a friend who laughed like I did when it came to telling stories about plucking hair from our cheeks our round table of women took turns topping each others stories about aging, and asking over and over 'what next.' We laughed especially hard over the long black hairs that hung from our chins. Gads! you could see the look of agony as personal stories flashed through our minds of chin hairs. The next time it was the pitiful stories of shaving our mustaches for the first time.

Here we were at sixty trying to laugh out loud at our new 'old' bodies. Month by month we poked fun at our fragilities from puffy eye bags to sparse eyebrows; from wrinkles to 'wisdom spots' on our faces and arms.  

The friends all joined in the laughter with stories. "Ladies," one woman who confessed to being older than sixty placed her arm on the table, rolled up her blousy sleeve and continued, "This is why we wear long sleeve blouses all year long." Then she curiously rolled her skin back and forth using her index finger. She even went on to show us how she could pinch and pull up loose skin. We snorted we laughed so hard. I think it was after that story that the club gave us space to gather away from the lunch crowd. 

Perhaps we had shared a bottle of wine or beer at the luncheon that day. We seemed louder and funnier than ever, when Sue dropped her voice, gathered our attention and then pointed at her chin. "Look. Look at me." In silence we looked. "See."  She pointed to a camel colored mole, then she began to wisp two white hairs back and forth. Her cackle erupted, "I have become a HAG and I'll pull your little hairs out one by one."  Our table roared with laughter. We loved to be in her audience.

WE LOVE LIFE.

Months passed. Things happened.

I often arrived to sit with Sue on Wednesday afternoons for a couple of hours.  Sometimes I helped her paste things into her scrape book for her children. Other times we shared our joys, sorrows, funny moments we experienced from golfing with other women, all told with a desire to share our lives and love for living. We still played golf on warm summer days. We saw hope on the horizon.   

Prairie Dunes Country Club, Hutchinson, Ks. 

On a late spring day, I walked her to the car to say our evening good-byes. Tears I'd never seen before began to flow. Catching her breathe between sobs she said, "Here. I have to show you something." I watched closely as she put her basket in the car and pulled out a plastic sack. Shaking and crying she reached inside and pulled out an object that looked like a prop from a HALLOWEEN movie. It was a brownish toned mask with tiny holes along the forehead and down one side to the ear. 

It was my turn to gasp and catch my breathe. Holding the mask away from her like a dead animal she sobbed, "The cancer has metastasized in my brain. They told me that I now have to come back for radiation."  I reached for a hug. As she rested her head on my shoulder, she sobbed, "I don't want to wear that mask. It's dark. It's ugly. I don't want sting rays shooting through my head." We cried. 

At last she sobbed, "I just want to live. Doesn't God know that I LOVE LIVING?"

I don't remember being able to come up with words of encouragement. I do remember we continued to share what we loved best about living, to the point that we compared our crooked toes right there in the room full of patients all receiving chemo. 

Sue Wagler

January 23, 1948 - September 03, 2010

Surprise Lilies by night 

Dear Sue, 

I hear your words "I love to Live. I love living," ringing in my head these days. I noticed out my window that a few bulbs are reaching up through the cold mantle of earth. Our perennials. Sue, you are my shining example of a Perennial. I pray that I may never forget how much joy living brings us. Did I ever tell you that I LOVE LIVING, too?

A View of Life as a Perennial

Click on this link to read another story about living and loving life as a Perennial. 

A Winter Window

Winter sparrows on feeder. Thank you Carol T. for photo. 

The bitter cold snowy weather does not hinder the spirit of the tiny birds at the feeders outside my ‘art gecko’ studio window. In fact, they become my escape when my fingers get confused on the keyboard, and I need to s l o w  d o w n my typing.  Today the arrival of four Goldfinches grabbed my attention, and stayed long enough for me to add them to the annual Great Audubon Backyard Bird count.

Our home with large windows on the east and the west gives us the perfect opportunity to become curious bird watchers. In the past I might have said, look that’s a UBB, an unidentified brown bird and gone on with my daily routine.

Curiosity and time have changed our UBB habits to names and collective nouns like a trembling of finches. The easiest to learn were the wrens and juncos. The sparrows still defy my learning. My ear tells me it is a song sparrow, but which one is the song sparrow?

The most fun to watch in the spring are the doves. When they are mating they gurgle back and forth and then the male begins to chase the female by ducking his head and bobbing back and forth. They gurgle bobble and fly off together. But that is in the spring and now they are surviving by sitting in my feeder cuddling.

*The Ring-necked Dove is noticeable because of the half-ring on his neck. He is one of the largest of the doves, and when he puffs out in the winter he becomes twice as big. But I have decided that doves aren't that easy to truly identify.

Last Saturday Jack and I were mesmerized by a hawk sitting on our back corner patio. He was perched on top of a flower pot, about two feet off the ground with his back feathers facing us. To one side was a Holy bush and a Privet bush probably filled with chirping birds, and an open area where mice and other small varmints might run between bushes.  Most importantly to him, his backed faced the sun. During the two hours that I watched he preened himself and ignored the squirrels that raced by on the fence top. The most stunning moment came with the silly squirrel on the fence top that decided to puff up and swirl his tale, so that he looked twice his normal size. He must have been chattering but we couldn't hear it.  The bird ignored him. Two hours gave me time to study pictures online and in books that proved to me he was a Sharp-shinned Hawk. He never feasted on one of our birds during that time.

We call the birds "our" birds because they become frequent flyers in our yard, and give us a winter task to keep their feeders full, especially during Siberian Arctic cold fronts and snow. Two weeks ago a large bird

I think this is a Red-shouldered Hawk.

landed outside on our bare-armed Chaste tree. He puffed his chest and fluffed his feathers long enough for me to take a picture and eventually identify him as a Red-Shouldered Hawk. It is hard to keep still and watch these birds, as I'd rather squeal with delight.

Since the time I was a child and could identify the Killdeer, Red-winged Blackbird, Robin, Scissor-tail Flycatcher, and Northern Cardinal I wanted to know all of the birds, but didn't want to be a birder or study them. I just wanted to know their names. That didn't happen. What did happen is that they gave me stories to tell.  

The summer between seventh and eighth grade Alfred Hitchcock produced a movie that terrified me, The Birds, a Scary trailer . That summer Billy Fullerton and I were playing afternoon golf, and we laughed about seeing the movie and boasting that it didn't scare us. On hole number 8, a long par three that went north about 200 yards away from the safety of homes that lined the golf course behind us, we teed off, picked up our leather golf bags and walked down the slope, jumped across the stream of water, apparently startling  the birds nesting in the bushes. A cloud of Red-winged blackbirds swarmed us like in the movie. 

 

We screamed, dropped our golf bags and ran the long way to the clubhouse for safely. Our screams were heard before we arrived and a gathering of people came out to see the commotion. When we explained that the birds had attacked us the men laughed, the few mothers took pity on us. My dad walked us calmly into the golf shop and gave us each a bottle of pop to settle us down. Later, he took the golf cart out to get our clubs, and a cluster of Red-winged blackbirds flew after him. Ha!

In the days to come several of the golfing moms and dad, who had heard the story, saw fit to explain to Billy and me that when birds are nesting and they fear danger for the eggs or babies they become very aggressive. Lesson learned, but I still never crossed that tiny creek without checking out the birds in the bushes first. 

A group of Red-winged Blackbirds is called either a cloud, or a cluster of blackbirds.

Ironically, they are not called a "murder" of blackbirds.  That's just in the movies.