Sylvia's Journal

It is pouring rain this morning; so very Dutch, this weather. The sound of the rain brings back memories of biking to school (in the dark, but no hills) and arriving at school completely soaked. Draping coat and scarf over whatever spot you could find on the radiator and then sitting in class, quietly, letting the wet clothes dry on your body. Uncomfortable for awhile and then you got used to it. This is like the sole of my right foot now, the one without feeling. Or rather the one that used to have no feeling. Somehow, the acupuncture re-activated nerves down there. Since the Friday session more of the foot got its feeling back; it now includes part of the arch. I keep checking my foot because I cannot believe it.

I now wake up with tingling hands again. This was normal before the crash. This is why I was going to have an operation on my right hand, to free the nerve from its carpal tunnel. The crash cancelled the surgery of course but also freed the nerve somehow (in both hands). This had nothing to do with stopping to work on the computer. I remember that the tingling, which had been constant, was gone on July 15th when I woke up. I remember this so well because it had become normal.

The word normal is on my lips a lot these days. I used to think normal was boring. I grew up in a household where what was the norm, especially for women, was not respected. As a result I learned that women had to push the boundaries a bit, in order to avoid being normal (boring). That probably accounts a bit for my wish to learn to fly at the ripe age of 54.

But now normal is appealing and we try our hardest to be normal, to look normal (that darn eye patch) and to walk normal (stairs and distances give me away). Last night we were busy making our house look normal again. We moved furniture back where it was before, making the house once again not-wheelchair accessible or navigationable. We are going to put rugs back and make this house look like a normal house, not some post-calamity rehab ward.

Of course we have much extra stuff now, some of which is Sita and Jim’s, some is discarded home health devices and some significant part is the collection of new books that poured in over the last few months; many of which at least one of us read.

What is also normal again is Axel staying up into the early morning hours, designing note cards in his temporary office across from the bedroom and forgetting all about the time (it is called ‘being in the flow’). He showed me this morning his latest card. It has a picture of Lobster Cove, made from an old print that was published in Harper’s Weekly in 1897. If you haven’t gotten a thank you card yet, you may be luckily and get this one. His technique for working on the computer is anything but normal and worth watching: he picks up his left hand and drops it on the keys that need pressing. He’s getting better at it all the time, although it remains a slow process; hence the late bedtime.

I went to Quaker meeting in the morning, then back home for a quick lunch (leftover Nancy spaghetti). In the afternoon I went to a memorial service for Ken Glover’s mom who died in a freak accident while vacationing in Maine, only days after our crash. Sitting in the church and listening to the rather unusual music picked out by her son and husband (Pete Seeger’s Turn, turn, turn and Joplin’s the Entertainer) it suddenly, and for the first time, hit me like a ton of bricks, right in the belly, that there could have been a service like this for us, or for Axel. Intellectually I had known this all along (and was always quickly corrected – quite forcefully I remember, in those early post crash days – by others with the words ‘but it did not happen’). But this was a different experience, solitary, with no one to correct me, and just the music. I did not cry but it took my breath away, for a brief moment.

PS. Caringbridge will remain open a bit longer. We might get to the 20.000 hits.