As I drove

to fetch my daughter from school, deep in the English countryside, the hills and woods were all painted by Winter. Winter had brushed her brown sienna fingertips across the hills, her dull green patched the fields and even the grey of the road, in the dull, pale sunshine seemed more intense in its colour. The trees, twisted and bare of their leaves seemed to grasp upwards, reaching to the clear, pale blue clarity of the cold sky above. Their trunks and branches naked of adornment proclaimed their imperfections and their twisted age to a motionless vista of their own. Time, for them, had stopped. They were waiting for the seeping of Spring into their veins, the unfurling of the tiny buds on their boughs, the beginning of their new year has not yet begun.

Like them, I am naked of my adornment, like them I wait, wait for the first signs of hair, of life to come back and hug me. I feel that I too am in a waiting pattern for the runway, that it is only when I land, when this treatment is over that I can get going and get on with what I am meant to be doing. I am in transition, in a hiatus, in flux and in a place where I can do nothing but sit and wait.

You cannot be active with cancer: I long to get out my rifle, to clean it, snap it together and go hunting across the plains for the cancer beast. But I can't, I can't do anything active to get better...if only I could. If only, like being overweight, I could restrict my diet, do more exercise and see, every week, the hard evidence on the scales - to have the certainty that by doing these things, I would be killing that collection of cells, reducing it to a infinitesimal crumb that couldn't be detected with a mini microscope, but I can't. No, there is nothing that I can do that will affect my blood cells, to ensure that I am ready for the next chemo, to make sure that that cancer will get smaller and eventually disappear.. and that, that, my friends, is incredibly frustrating.

Like those same trees grasping towards the sky and sunshine and feeling the cold, earthbound set of winter around their roots, I too feel the paradox in my situation. On the one hand, I feel the longing for love, for companionship, for the warm touch of skin upon mine and on the other, I feel the cold slap of cancer and the long journey of treatment. I, like those trees, hold, hold still between the sky and earth, between Spring and Winter, activity and passivity, life and death.

Where do I go next?

Minerva