My neighbor and I kvetch about what the spring thaw reveals: dogshit and stove ashes running into pools of black ink. The mud is a housekeeper’s bane and a gardener’s promise. In the rain, we swap stories of illness and books and parenting. These days, I keep T. S. Eliot’s words in my pocket.

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

Inexorably (and grateful, so grateful to be here, writing), my days unfold towards that first-year mark of emerging from chemo, from the brutality of drugs that both scorched and healed my body. In rickety last summer, I started yoga classes, at first hardly able to climb the stairs to the third floor with its windows that overlook Main Street and the Village Diner and the blinking yellow light intersection. In this mindful class, those ER visits appear again, drift through my thinking, vanish. In my fifties, now, like anyone, I’ve lived through the gamut. The most fearful times of my life, I was often quiet, utterly focused, like the terrifying afternoon when my youngest baby had an allergic reaction and a stranger rushed us to the ER.

Enduring the chemo was like that, too, so many months of cowering beneath a rushing train, nearly always on some variation of the pain scale, intent on the single goal of survival. I longed for the everyday world. In this were small bright gifts. My daughter’s friend would sometimes raid my post office box and bring me books and letters and medical bills, news of the outside world, literary fodder.

Disease is a strict teacher, with lessons of endurance and patience, of non-negotiable acceptance. My world constricted so often, breathing through pain to survive a little more, a little longer. One afternoon in April, my daughters walked me outside the hospital. We sat on a bench beneath a profusely blossoming apple tree. Through the white-petaled flowers with their ruby hearts, the blue sky. We sat and talked. For ten minutes? Half an hour? What does it matter? The limitless spring sky, the infinite mystery.

April this year, not otherwise
   Than April of a year ago,
Is full of whispers, full of sighs,
   Of dazzling mud and dingy snow;
   Hepaticas that pleased you so
Are here again, and butterflies. ~ Edna St. Vincent Millay