Kierkegaard wrote that famous line, “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” This is the story of my life, and probably of yours, too. I’m a few weeks shy of a year away from the last chemo session. During those hours of infusion, I dozed, watching cardinals and house wrens through the cancer center window. That night, I slept profoundly, believing done, done, not yet realizing an excruciating surgery would lear up unavoidably a month later, that I would phone my siblings and beg for their arrival, that I needed fresh horses, the calvary’s arrival, that the end to these months of cancer treatment seemed impossible.

A year later, I’m still here, living forward, still waking before dawn to reckon what kind of light might kindle the day. A year ago, I could hardly lift my laptop. Now, I text a friend to borrow a belt sander. I am determined to lean my shoulders and back into revitalizing this old wooden floor that had been hidden for years beneath vinyl.

Cancer reshaped me in multiple ways, diluted my rage, cushioned my prickliness, whetted my fierceness to entertain no truck with catty foolishness. Disease fed my solitude and forced me to reach out and grasp hands. And now a sander.

A friend recorded Vermont’s poet laureate Bianca Stone speaking about Robert Frost. The recording is up for a few weeks on the local radio station, WGDR, on the March 22 Bon Mot show; it will feed your heart.

And one of my favorite Frost poems:

Into My Own

One of my wishes is that those dark trees,
So old and firm they scarcely show the breeze,
Were not, as ’twere, the merest mask of gloom,
But stretched away unto the edge of doom. 

I should not be withheld but that some day
Into their vastness I should steal away,
Fearless of ever finding open land,
Or highway where the slow wheel pours the sand.

I do not see why I should e’er turn back,
Or those should not set forth upon my track
To overtake me, who should miss me here
And long to know if still I held them dear.

They would not find me changed from him they knew—
Only more sure of all I thought was true.