A Bump in the Road

March 18. I complained to my primary care physician at a recent annual checkup that, despite dieting and increased exercise, I was actually gaining weight. I thought I was either retaining water or housing a tumor. She sent me for tests.

Yesterday I had a thorough ultrasound look at my pancreas, liver, spleen, bile duct, gall bladder, uterus and ovaries. It took about an hour with technician Becky and a lot of slimy goo and probing and “deep breath and hold.” We shared our respective histories with breast cancer—me thirty years out, she five years out.

A call from my doctor’s office came not two hours later. I have a slightly enlarged right ovary. It could be an ovarian cyst. I’ve been referred to a gynecologist.

We’ll see where this leads.

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March 25. I saw gynecologist Dr. Kasper yesterday, the luck of the draw from my doctor’s referral throught the network. Her first name is Kelly and she looks like a Princeton grad—slim and fit, long blond hair. She seems nice.

She said with my history of breast cancer, she recommends removing both my ovaries. They look grainy and calcified. I wondered if that was because chemo fried them when I was 40, but she said no.

The procedure is simple, she says—three small cuts in my abdomen and the insertion of a laproscope to excise the questionable body parts. I was concerned about disruption to my landscaping business. She said I could lift 40 pound bags of manure the next day if I wanted to, but that I might be a little sore.

The surgery sounds like a good idea, and minimally invasive, but if I can postpone it until after garderning season I'd like to. We agreed to order CA125 blood test to see if that provides a clue on how urgent the surgery might be.

The results are supposed to be available today. I’m waiting for the call.

David and I just remembered we have a reason to celebrate. It’s our 48th wedding anniversary.

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March 27. The blood test results are in, and they’re good. 13 in the normal range of 0 to 35. Yay! Dr. Kasper says with such a low reading we could just monitor with an occasional ultrasound. But by now I’m eager to get rid of the offending grainy almond-sized apparatuses. They served me well in their time, but I don’t want them ever again to cause me worry. Sign me up for the surgery. Bye bye ovaries!

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May 28. Pre-op testing and a hundred and one questions about my health history. Weight, vital signs, a baseline EKG. And some instructions.

My surgery is a week hence, at 2:30 in the afternoon. I’m not to eat or drink anything after midnight the night before, except I can take my routine pills with a sip of water. Also, I’m to shower with four ounces of chlorhexidine antibacterial solution before bed. I’m to wear clean pajamas and make up the bed with clean bedclothes, then shower again in the morning with the same solution. They want me squeaky clean for my procedure.

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June 3. David and I share a bottle of champagne with our steak dinner and watch a soothing episode of Rosemary & Thyme on Netflix. We change the sheets. I lather up in the shower with the red liquid antiseptic and slip into my clean pajamas for a good night’s sleep. I read the final chapter of Maisy Dobbs. All is ready.

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June 4. It’s surgery day! I try to sleep as late as possible (to keep my stomach from grumbling) and spend the morning in my jammies at my computer, tying up loose ends. At 11:30 a.m. I take the second shower with the delightful red liquid, and try not to think about the possibility of a staph infection, which is no doubt the reason for such precautions, and we’re out the door at noon.

We arrive at the Outpatient Sugery reception desk precisely at 12:30 and hunker down to wait for the nurse to call us back. Yikes, I forgot to order mulch for a landscaping project next Monday. I dial up SoilMakers and ask for 20 yards to be delivered at a specified address in West Lafayette. Their truck holds nine yards max, so we settle on 18 yards. Now what kind of mulch did I want? Oops here comes the nurse to fetch me. Okay AA hardwood mulch. What time do I want the delivery? This as the nurse directs me to step on the scale. I explain to the SoilMaker lady that I’m just going into surgery and promise to call her back. Yikes, I also forgot to tell the wholesale nursery when to deliver the 2-inch caliper trees for a project next Thursday. No time now. Gotta clear my mind for the job at hand.

David and I are ushered into our pre-op waiting chamber and are joined presently by my friend Margaret who just wanted to be there with me today. Nurse Heather gives me a plastic bag to put my clothes in and no fewer than three packets of antiseptic wipes that she wants me to scrub my body with before donning the charming cotton gown they’ve provided for me. I’m counting on all this cleanliness to ward off the dreaded staph germs.

I give up my rings, my earrings, and my eyeglasses. A smiling technician installs an IV line in my left wrist. She’s from the Beijing area and has lived in the States for nine years.

Then commences a veritable parade of doctors, nurses, and technicians politely introducing themselves and each asking me questions. First question is always what procedure I’m here for, and they’re satisfied when I say “having my ovaries out” because that agrees with the oophorectomy specified on their paperwork. The remaining questions are largely the same: When did you last eat or drink? 11:30 last night. Do you have any stents or implants (no), skin issues (just a little poison ivy on my wrist), allergies (penicillin, it makes my face break out in a rash), diabetes (no), heart problems (no), can I walk up two lights of stairs without shortness of breath (well, sort of).

Dr. Kasper comes in to review the procedure with me and explain the risks (death, among others). I barely recognize her in her surgical garb, her blond ponytail covered by a blue mesh cap. I ask her if while she’s in my abdomen she could do a little liposuction. No can do, she says (well, she could, but that would cost extra). I tell her I’d like to look at my ovaries, especially the one with the cyst. No can do either, but she does agree to take photos for me. Good, I say, so I can share them on Facebook.

This prompts a story from Dr. Kasper about her son being badly injured while playing lacrosse. She carries a suture kit in her car, so she proceeded to stitch up the gash in his leg right there on the field with the team clustered about. How cool was that!! Her son of course shared pictures of the repairs on Instagram. We had a good laugh over what an impressive mom she was.

Between visits from hospital staff, I’m hugely entertained by my friend Margaret who tells of her recent travels to visit family in North Carolina and the circuitous route she used to avoid the scary mountain roads in West Virginia on her return trip. Margaret was my jazz and tap dance teacher for years, and we’ve become fast friends. She offers a foot massage, which I willingly accept. Her own feet have taken a beating from all the years of dance, and she knows how to make feet feel good. We talk on, and the subject of food keeps coming up, one of our standard topics of conversation—my stomach is grumbling hugely by now, and Margaret keeps apologizing for bringing up the subject. David, meanwhile, is silent, absorbed in learning how to use his new iPhone. Good that we had entertainment, because our wait ends up being three hours long.

At long last, they come to take me into surgery. Someone pulls up the rails of my hospital bed and wheels me down the long hall into the operating theater. There I meet another cast of characters who have been preparing the room for me. The room looks squeaky clean, and I marvel at the huge lamps hanging from the ceiling to illuminate the sugical action. There’s no time to linger over details, however. I crawl over onto the narrow sugical bed and a seat belt snaps over my hips to keep me from rolling off. A nice man bends over me so I’m seeing him upside down and introduces himself, “Hi, I’m Dr. Reddy.” How appropriate, I think, because I’m READY too, to get this over with!

Dr. Reddy injects a little something into my IV line to make me relax. I’m not nervous, really. This is an adventure. And next comes the little something that will put me out. I can feel it beginning to work, like a magical glow in my brain….

…and I realize I’ve come awake. Must be in the recovery room. Behind curtained partitions I can hear the person to my left groaning, and the guy on my right asking over and over to see his wife and son. I don’t feel any pain or discomfort, wrapped in warm blankets and nodding in and out of consciousness.

It’s over. My ovaries are out. They served me well, helping to produce two beautiful sons more than forty years ago. These once fecund egg-bearers are on their way to Pathology. Dr. Kasper will call in a couple of day with the results.

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June 9. These few days since my procedure have been a trip! My abdomen is achy as you’d expect, and I have glorious bruises to the right and left, but other aches and pains have come out of nowhere—my shoulders, the deltoids, are killing me! The nurse says it may be because they had to inject air into my abdomen to be able to see what they were doing, and that trapped air migrated to the top of my body, causing the shoulder pain. Whatever the cause, that pain was worse than the pain in my surgical site.

I amused myself the other day by watching the procedure done on YouTube (not mine, somebody else’s). First they fried the tissue with a heat clamp—you could see it bubbling! Then they severed the tissue with clippers. Fascinating! Today I’m feeling more like myself again, with little pain and finally a regular bowel movement. I just have to be careful not to lift anything over 10 pounds. Life is returning to normal.

And oh yeah, the pathology report came back negative for cancer cells. Which means this was not a life-changer, but just a bump in the road. I can’t complain about that!

Requiem for a Cell Phone

I realize it’s missing one evening when I prepare to go downtown to help Master Gardeners plant pots and beds at the City Market--my little clamshell phone with its tether bearing my talisman purchased in Hong Kong signifying my birth in the Year of the Rooster.

A quick search of likely places yields no phone, and I have no choice but to leave without it, which makes me nervous in this busy season for my garden design company. I’m potentially missing calls from clients and installers, not to mention friends, family, and doctors’ offices.

Next morning the need to locate my connection-to-the-world takes top priority. I call my cell from our landline. In the past I had been able to track it down by listening for its distinctive ring, but no deal this time. Instead of hearing a ringtone on the other end of the line, I’m immediately switched to voicemail, so there’s no opportunity to track a location.

Then commences a thorough search of my car—I find a dish and a dessicated chicken bone under the passenger seat, but no phone. I search my garden tool collection in the trunk, then my purse, my office, the bedroom, the pockets of my gardening clothes, my bathrobe, the back patio—all places where the frequently disappearing device has been found before—no luck.

I retrace my steps from the day before, calling the nursery where I purchased milkweed plants and the client where I laid out the bed for their new Monarch Waystation. No, they haven’t seen my phone. I resume searching in all the likely places around the house and car to no avail. I finally have to tell myself to stop obsessing and get on with the day. My cell will turn up sometime.

Now truth be told, my little retro flip-open device has been giving me trouble lately. For one thing, it has a habit of jumping out of my pocket. I remember how two weeks ago my friend Marcia called to say she found what she thought was my cellphone out in her backyard where we had been consulting about what to plant in the two new raised beds by her deck. She wouldn’t have noticed it except that it kept ringing with incoming calls. In the ensuing weeks it failed to hold a charge more than a day so I was constantly having to juice it up. Then it started beeping at odd times, and not responding properly to functions I requested. It’s clearly time to replace the device; I just haven’t had the time to figure out what to replace it with. But losing it like this, in the midst of spring landscaping projects, is the last thing I need.

That evening I distract myself with a meeting of the local Horticultural Society, hearing about their good works, travels to noteworthy gardens, and plans for the future. While driving home in the relaxed state induced by two hours of slide presentations, greeting old friends, and consuming tasty refreshments, my mind begins to put the pieces of the cellphone puzzle together. In a flash of insight I know what has happened! My phone is lying on highway I-465 somewhere between the exits to Keystone Avenue and Meridian Street.

How did my cell phone meet this untimely end? Why, the little punk had jumped out of my pocket again while I was marking out the Monarch Waystation at my client’s. I spied its puny gray and black body on the grass and placed it on the right edge of my car windshield for safekeeping. While driving home on I-465 I noticed an intermittent sound like gravel hitting the windshield. That struck me as odd, but I figured it was just stones kicked up from recent construction on the highway, and after a while the noise stopped.

My gestalt now explains what that noise was. It was the sound of my rooster charm on the cell’s tether, snapping in the wind and tapping the windshield, trying to warn me of impending doom. I was hearing it, but I wasn’t listening.

Rest in peace--and probably several pieces after tangling with the semi traffic on that busy highway--my old clamshell friend and business partner. I’m off to the phone store to choose your replacement. And maybe I’ll delve into a new generation of devices that, if this ever happens again, which it surely must, will practically be able to call me for help.

Organizing My Life

What do I do today?

This is not an idle question. Working out of my home for two not-for-profits that I care about, plus running a small garden design business, I’ve created a time-management monster. I’m way too busy, and competing agendas pull at me constantly. There’s always something I should be attending to, always something I may have forgotten to take care of. The free-floating anxiety makes me crazy.

I’m working out a system to cope with this, and it’s been working: I designate each day of the week for a different focus. Here’s how it works.

·         Monday is INPAWS Day. That’s my state’s native plant society, of which I’m the volunteer membership chair and communications officer. On Mondays I write press releases, deal with a 560+ member family database, update the website, share news with our Facebook page and group, and answer INPAWS emails. I have to focus, otherwise INPAWS Day can stretch into INPAWS Week, there’s so much to do.

·         Tuesday is Landscape Fancies Day. That’s my garden design business. In season, I start the day with a team of Master Gardener friends, maintaining gardens at the public school where I volunteer (see Thursday). In the afternoon I work on designs for my clients, prepare presentations, develop quotes, source plants, assemble teams to install gardens, make up invoices, and do all the necessary paperwork to file my retail taxes and Schedule C. I’m trying to retire so I can focus on several dear-to-my-heart pro bono projects that I manage. But designing gardens is what I really love to do, so I’m torn every time a potential project comes up. Requests from friends, past clients, and people interested in native plants are hard to turn down.

·         Wednesday is my Personal Day. I schedule doctor’s appointments, do laundry, take care of the house and personal business, get my hair cut, etc. Truth be told, Wednesday is sometimes a continuation of INPAWS Day or Landscape Fancies Day, but I try not to let that happen.

·         Thursday is Friends of Cold Spring School Day. I’m a founding member and officer of the Friends, supporting our city’s only environmental studies magnet school, K-6, which draws from all around the inner city. My job is to facilitate partnerships with community organizations whose members have a passion for nature. I maintain the Friends website and Facebook page, plan and maintain demonstration gardens, engage with the principal and teachers and PTO leader and social worker, involve students in planting and weeding projects, organize meetings of our board and advisory council, and lend my knowledge of native plants as needed. Sometimes I just enjoy standing in the halls watching the children move between classes. They’re adorable, and I get an occasional hug.

·         Friday is Family & Friends Day. When Mom was alive, this was the day I took care of business as her point person with the nursing home staff. Now I’m using the day to get our family finances in order, which is sorely needed, and to pay the bills, which always seem to be in arrears. I also try to stay in touch with and plan things for the family and with friends.

·         Weekends are up for grabs. In gardening season, I work in my yard for hours on end. In winter, I try to declutter the house or process the boxes of family photos into a usable form. Once a month, my Sunday evenings end with a frenzied attempt to tidy for the cleaning ladies who come first thing Monday.

Is this day-based system working for me? Yes, pretty well, and here’s why: (1) If I don’t finish the list of things I had in my Day Planner for a particular day, I know I’ll be coming back around to those tasks in a week. I don’t need to feel guilty about not finishing everything. (2) I give the things I value a full day of focus. There’s time to think about what needs to be done in each area of responsibility, which eases the anxiety of possibly forgetting to do something or of neglecting things (especially people!) that are important.

Sometimes my system gets blown up, like when I’m doing the taxes at the last minute per usual. Other times it feels like a straightjacket because I’d rather spend a sunny weekday just puttering in the garden. But the system has served me well for the past couple of years, considering that I’ve taken on way too much and can’t easily extricate myself.

I contemplate a time when I’ll wake up in the morning and just let the day unfold as it will. To get there, I’ll have to jettison a lot of the above-mentioned responsibilities. But maybe not having an agenda to keep me focused will just make me anxious.

I’ll let you know how it works out.

Another Day Down

Lately I find myself wondering when I’m going to die. 

The thought never occurred to me when I was younger—plenty of time to think about that later. But now I’m beginning to face the reality that my time is approaching. There will soon be an end to my life, and I likely won't have much control over when.

If by some miracle I live as long as my mother did (96+ years), I have a mere 25 years left—and not all may be productive years if mind and/or body refuse to cooperate. Those are sobering thoughts. They make me feel like I need to figure out right away all the things I want to accomplish before I die: make a checklist, set deadlines, lay out a detailed implementation schedule.

But really, what’s the hurry? Other than putting my domestic affairs in order I have no big plans in mind—life seems to provide plenty of interesting projects to engage in, and they can unfold naturally as days go by. More to the point than what to do in my 20+ years may be the how. How do I want to live the time that’s left?

My friend Margaret was intrigued by a thought expressed in a book she read recently, to the effect that you should live each day realizing that your actions today will become a part of your past tomorrow. The idea was you shouldn’t do bad things that you’ll regret, but I like the corollary, that you can fill your days with actions that you’ll happily remember. What would those actions look like for me? This turns out to be an interesting exercise.

Here’s a first pass at a daily mantra for my remaining years. I want to…

·         Be a good friend to my friends.

·         Create beautiful experiences for my family members.

·         Take good care of my body.

·         Use my brain to its fullest.

·         Forgive myself for my mistakes.

·         Send thank you notes.

·         Approach each day with joy.

·         Rest when I need to.

If I can do these things for however many years I have left, I’m pretty sure I’ll die with no regrets.

We Were Had

My sister and I expected our trip to Washington DC for our mom’s memorial service to be bittersweet. We didn’t expect it to be an adventure.

Rosemary and I, our cousin Margaret, and her husband Bill were representing the family at this gathering of friends with whom our mother had lived and worked during her 35-year sojourn in northern Virginia. We wanted them not to have to travel all the way to Cleveland, her home for the last seven years, to pay their respects.

Mom’s dear friend and lay pastor Carol made arrangements for a room and refreshments at the Festival Center, the Church of the Saviour’s center for servant leadership and social justice in Adams Morgan, a once seedy but now trendy part of town where Mom had a long history. Debi furnished the room with lush bouquets of blue and white flowers. Carol et al. had selected thoughtful readings and hymns, Carol’s musician husband Kent provided the music, and Kurt offered up prayers. These were Mom’s people from her spiritual home, and they delivered a lovely service.

Through her Church of the Saviour mission groups, Mom had worked dilligently to house the homeless and families of recovering drug addicts in DC and neighboring Anacostia. So it was no surprise that, along with the expected church friends, two such people whose lives she had touched were present to honor her memory and offer testimony.

During the reception afterward, one of them, the lady with long stringy hair, wizened face, and badly fitting clothes, pulled me aside. She needed busfare to get home, she whispered, and could I spare a few dollars? In the spirit of Mom’s life of good deeds, I said sure and reached into my purse. I had just a twenty-dollar bill left, but I knew Rosemary had some cash on her, so I handed it over with my best wishes.

My sister and I said our goodbyes to Mom’s people and hitched a ride with our cousin as far as Georgetown, where we planned to visit the gardens at Dumbarton Oaks before heading back to Baltimore Washington International Airport for our respective flights home. Before hopping out, we wanted to reimburse Bill for the fee he had paid at the parking garage in Adams Morgan.

Unfortunately, Rosemary no longer had any cash either—she had given her last $20 to the lady with the long hair and mismatched clothing! Pretty slick operator, we agreed, and had a good laugh. Now it was our turn to require busfare, and Margaret kindly bailed us out with a $20 from her pocket.

No Dumbarton Oaks for us—the gardens were closed, as they seem to be every time I try to visit. It was a beautiful May Saturday, so we chose instead to wander the tree-lined streets of Georgetown, pulling our suitcases behind us, in the direction of a metro stop where we would begin our trip to BWI. And presently we encountered the first installment of our adventure.

One of the grand homes on R Street was mobbed with classy looking people and limousines. We had to find out what was going on! A familiar face greeted us along the way there, offering our first clue. That’s somebody, we agreed, and finally came up with a name—David Gregory of Meet the Press. Arriving at the scene, we loitered outside the fence watching people come and go and asking questions. Turns out this was the customary Editorial Briefing Breakfast the morning before the annual Whitehouse Correspondents dinner, and we were standing before the home of former Washington Post editor Katherine Graham. In the backyard, the correspondents were sipping mimosas, being briefed on LGBT issues in the media, and using portable toilets because the house had stood empty for some time and the plumbing wasn’t working. Porta-Potties—that struck me as funny, bringing all these fancy people to a common level.

Someone said all the stars of Scandal were there, so we craned our necks to catch any glimpse of our favorite characters. Hey, that guy was murdered, I said, spotting the journalist husband of Fitz’s chief of staff Cyrus, very much alive, taking over the wheel of his car from a parking valet. We missed seeing the lovely Lupita Nyong'o from Twelve Years a Slave, but we saw another young starlet whom we couldn’t place, though we knew she was somebody.

We finally dragged ourselves away as the party broke up and continued our meander through Georgetown’s shady streets. We traversed Rock Creek Park on the Q-Street Bridge, flanked on both sides by enormous bronze buffalo, and entered the City, which was mobbed with tourists strolling, consulting guidebooks, and taking pictures. We found our metro stop at DuPont Circle and hopped on the Red Line which, with one transfer to the Green Line, took us to the Greenbelt, where we would take the B30 bus to BWI—we had committed to using public transportation all through this trip, for principled reasons. 

  

Arriving at Greenbelt, we pulled our suitcases through the station and out into the sun to join a group of similarly minded travelers at the bus shelter. We waited and waited, but the B30 didn’t come. Presently someone spotted a bus parked way down the road and walked down there to find out what was up. It was indeed our bus; it had broken down, and another was coming in 40 minutes. Hmmmm. Too late for most of us to catch our flights.

So we all hustled over to the nearby taxi stand and made up quick groupings to fill the waiting vehicles. Rosemary and I paired up with a lady on crutches who worked at the airport. The cab ride would cost us fifty dollars. Then we heard the bad news, spoken in heavily accented English—cash only, no credit cards. Between us we had only thirty dollars, crutch lady contributing ten. What to do?! A man who seemed to be in charge went down the line of cabs and beckoned us to one near the back—credit card okay, he said. Whew!

We piled in with our bags and urged the cabbie to drive with all deliberate speed to the airport. Turns out that “credit card okay” meant that he was taking us to the nearby Marriott to use their ATM machine to get cash. Frantic with this delay, I grabbed my card as we pulled up at the hotel, sped into the lobby, located the machine, slipped the card in the slot, wracked my brain to remember my PIN, and…the machine didn’t like my card! No way, uh-uh, no matter how many times I tried. Sweat beaded on my forehead as a sense of doom descended.

But wait! I had my checkbook.

As I climbed back into the taxi, I explained to the cabbie that we had only thirty dollars among the three of us and begged him to take a check for the remaining twenty. The cabbie appeared confused and apprehensive. He didn’t know about checks. I explained that he could take my check to his bank, sign the back of it, and it was as good as cash. He must have heard the desperation in my voice for he stoicly agreed to the plan. Whew! I wrote out a check to Yohannes Merkuria—Slovak? Russian? Ethiopian?—with some extra for his trouble.

Yohannes, our new best friend, sped competently to BWI and dropped us off with just minutes to spare. Rosemary and I used those minutes to grab a beer at a bar near our gate. (They took credit cards!)  The pale, foamy liquid soothed our frazzled nerves, and, as we guzzled, we had a good laugh over how we’d been had by one of Mom’s homeless, and what an excellent adventure had ensued.   

Better Living Through Chemistry

I remember the phrase from our hippie days: “Better living through chemistry.” Dupont meant their slogan to make people feel good about the huge chemical company’s role in society, but our generation adopted it to celebrate our experiments with mind-altering marijuana, peyote, hash, LSD, banana peels.

To us aging hippies it means something quite different now.

Every Wednesday morning, in my robe and slippers, I sit at my dressing table for the weekly filling of my pill organizer. Mine is small and blue and has snap-down lids labelled S-M-T-W-T-F-S. In each compartment I place a pill to keep my thyroid level up (I’m tired and befuddled without it), a small dose of anxiety reducer (to tell my demons to shut up), an extremely expensive generic that keeps my bones strong and is said to keep breast cancer at bay (a somewhat mystical effect like warding off elephants when you live in Indiana), and a luminous orb substituting for the sunshine that I need to manufacture a vitamin that lets my body absorb calcium.

My pill organizer needs are modest compared to David’s. His is enormous and has compartments for mornings and afternoons each day of the week, and there’s a supplemental organizer upstairs for medicaments taken at night. In these go pills to keep his cholesterol down, his heart beating normally, his potassium level stable, his thyroid level up, his blood thin, his bones strong, his blood pressure low, provide essential vitamins, and counteract the depression arising from having to take all these pills every day. For him, it must feel more like “living through chemistry.”

We used to wonder from whom we could score some Mary Jane to get high. Now the Marsh Supermarket pharmacist is our pusher, offering to autofill our every medication need.

“The times, they are a-changin’,” crooned Bob Dylan, the poet of our generation. That’s never been more true than now.

Keeping Up with the Mail

Next to doing dishes, keeping up with the mail is the world’s most thankless task.

I try to fish out the bills and the occasional personal letter on a daily basis, but the rest piles up until it’s a foot high before I actually look at it. That’s about once a week, if I can force myself to get around to it.

Processing all this paper requires the dining room table to spread out on and make piles of stuff to keep—seed and plant catalogs to inform my landscaping business; endless reports on the status of Medicare claims and where we stand each month with our pharmaceutical coverage; paperwork from our retirement accounts; newsletters from my favorite causes to read when I have a moment; things I need to look into, like scheduling the next furnace servicing.

Into the recycling bag go the no-brainers: the questionnaire full of loaded questions from my lackluster state senator; the glossy presentations on high-end home furnishings we can’t afford; yet another brochure on warning signs that the underground gas pipeline in our neighborhood may have sprung a leak; the cheery booklet touting local purveyors whose wares and services we don’t need; and the endless money-off coupons for greasy, salt-laden fast food we had better not eat.

This whole process fills me with anxiety. I think of all the trees that have been cut down, the fuel expended, the carbon spewed into the atmosphere to create and transport all this stuff to my door, just to be recycled using up even more energy. Thing is, I've tried my darndest to stem the tide. I’ve opted out of most catalogs. I’ve asked Lands End and Travelsmith to send me just one catalog per season. I've pared down the magazines I subscribe to. I've gone to e-bills and e-statements whenever possible. 

Yet a week later, there’s another foot-high stack of mail to sort through. And last week’s piles are still on the dining table! 

It never ends.