Sylvia's Journal

Yesterday our local agricultural fair, the Topsfield Fair, closed, and, as tradition goes, it rained all day. Axel had predicted this, as he does each year. It was hard to imagine that the glorious summer days would end one day and signal a shift to that less glorious part of our fall. We did not go to the Fair this year. We cannot quite manage walking for hours in a crowd. Sita had gone with her friend Tim who is in a wheelchair. They were let in for free. My wheelchair was picked up a couple of weeks ago. I think I would have let it go even if I had known about the free entrance. I was too anxious to remove all traces of handicap from our house.

That is what Axel did yesterday. He cleaned and moved furniture, moved books and muttered under his breath when he could not find something or when he re-discovered something in the wrong place. We are putting our life back together like a jigsaw puzzle and find some pieces missing or placed where they don’t belong. At the end of the day we sat down in our living room which looks and feels like ours again. No longer the place inhabited and managed by a cast of thousands, even if they are our dearest friends. No more surrendering to people who put the teaspoons in the wrong place. And we are still training Sita and Jim; they are making much progress.

I spent a couple of hours doing MSH work, participated in a Quaker Clearness Committee and had another hour of work done on my neck and shoulders. My neck stiffness comes from the vertebra (C4) above the ones that had fractures (C5 and C6), which got rotated slightly and created some misalignment. This is what the physical therapist has concluded and this is what she is working on. We are strengthening the muscles in that area so that they will pull and push everything back in alignment. My range of movement is increasing slowly. I got a new set of exercises and finally was told to drop some old ones or not do them as often as I did. I was a bit too enthusiastic it appears. My rotator cuff tendonitis is slow in responding to anything. I try to do my shoulder mobility exercises gingerly, avoiding further irritation.

Annette arrived from Holland after an entire day of travelling that led her from Amsterdam to Newark to Boston, to South and then to North station. When she was once again told to lug her suitcase up one stairs and down another she had had it with public transportation and took a taxi to Manchester which got stuck in the sand down our beach, in the dark. We rescued her and sent a tow truck to the taxi driver. As soon as she was in the house she zipped open her suitcase and out spilled herring, dropjes (licorice), stroopwafels and cheese. We started on just about all of this before bedtime. All of them are known to have healing properties.