to be thankful

The problem with Canadian Thanksgiving being so early in the year is that the trees have not had a chance to fully turn colour. Although — as Pd pointed out, as we were driving along the Niagara Escarpment — that might be an illusion because a lot of the trees we were looking at turned out, upon closer inspection, to be conifers. Nonetheless, here is a picture of my in-laws' deck, replete with squash; that is the closest to a Thanksgiving image I could come up with today.

And actually, yesterday the temperature was somewhere in the mid-twenties, and today it's in the high teens, so it doesn't feel much like late fall anyway.


This year has been a bit of a medical annus horribulus for our family. Just over a year ago, my mother-in-law went into the hospital with severe abdominal pains and came out with a diagnosis of cancer (thankfully she is in remission now); my father was hit by a drunk driver (not yet fully recovered, but healing) my father in law was in an ATV accident and lost the tip of two fingers (thereby gifting the rest of us a verbal punchline that will never get old). And, of course, there is the Kidlet: by the time she left the hospital in mid-September, she had spent a cumulative seven of her nine months in a hospital. March and April, essentially.

Every family has weeks, months like this. We are not unique. We are, however, incredibly lucky — that we have all survived, more or less; that everyone is still alive, relatively intact (give or take a finger or two ... you see?), reasonably healthy and hale. So I think that this year, as we gave thanks, it was pretty obvious what we were thankful for.



Health, kids, hope. And turkey duck. What more could anyone want?

the things that change your life are always the things that you never see coming.

The roses have been in bloom for most of the summer now. They all survived the brutish winter, more or less, but it's 'The Fairy' ones that enchanted The Spanish Inquisition. She asked for one, and then two: one for herself, and one for her father. They're tiny, these fairies, tiny and perfect. 

I don't often talk of my private life or my family on this blog, and that's deliberate; I'm a fairly private person in general. But something this big and all-consuming is hard to hide, so here it is.

My life is incredibly complicated and incredibly simple right now. With the exception of four days, the Kidlet has been at SickKids for more than two months. No, she's not well. Yes, she's getting better ... except that she's not. Not in the way you mean; not in the way we usually mean. It's complicated. She has a rare metabolic disease. It is progressive, and it is severe. There is a treatment, but there is no cure.

What do you do when you're blindsided like this? You take a breath, and then another. You try to discover the new world that surrounds you: your new spiritual home. And then you move forward, hoping with each step that you are still on solid ground. Sometimes, you are. Too often, you're not.

I have been going to SickKids every day. It's my new job: I go there after the Spanish Inquisition leaves for preschool; I try to get home before she does. In between I meet with doctors, and I spend time with my darling girl. She likes music, and Madeline. Sometimes, when the day is good and the wind is fair, she smiles. And it lights up the world.