What Haunts Me

I
A wide excision for melanoma more than thirty years ago has revisited me in an unexpected way: significant leg and ankle swelling. Brought on my bad sprain the first Saturday in September, this spectacular inflammation has been, literally and figuratively, a pain. 

After an x-ray, I waited for the doctor and counted the holes in a ceiling light.

Such a result, he said, is normal for melanoma patients like me, though most suffer this effect soon after the surgery. The inflammation of deep tissues may last, and last, and last. I left enlightened, and disappointed.

II
Finding the "right" camera has been a years-long pursuit. But I may have made the next important step yesterday. After seeing the doctor and searching Nashville for expensive compression knee-highs (not covered by insurance, naturally), I dropped by Dury's to make a Christmas list of camera accessories. Much to my surprise, four-thirds camera and lens I ordered had arrived. 

But.

Until I recover my energy and return from a quick overnight trip, it shall remain in the bag.

Can You See Me Now?

First day at Lake Cheston in more than a month, following a week of rain and fog, and look what I see as soon as I walk out toward the dam. The fat lady has definitely not sung the end of this odonate season.


I may be hobbling, my muscles may be aching, the rental camera may be challenging, but boy does it feel good to be out and about, even just a little bit. We all agree.

Betcha can tell me where I got dem shoes! (Sewanee version)

On leaf-strewn ground with feet inside!

Look carefully, folks: those are my very own feet, wearing athletic shoes for the very first time in over a month. Look more carefully, and you may note that the left lace has almost totally been used up. Why? To enclose that mightily swollen foot. But -- and this is the great part -- that foot is truly enclosed. And these feet took a slow stroll in Abbo's Alley today, where the sun shone for the first time in over a week. 

I may not look like it, but inside I was dancing just like Jeanie Stephenson's bronze "Playmates."

Anne Bradstreet Meets Frances Hodgson Burnett

My doctor called, on his day off, to ask about my foot, and in the course of the conversation, he mentioned an X-ray and possible bone chip affecting a ligament. When I reminded him of my misshapen feet (think Buster Browns with metal insteps) and told him about the now knobby protuberances lumping up around the toe joints, he added "It might be gout," and we made another appointment.

Gout?

I remembered this from Anne Bradstreet, "The knotty Gout doth sadly torture me." Well, that sounds about right.

And then my brother put a humorously positive spin on the possibility with this, "Oh, my: the possibility of gout. How aristocratic. Grandmother would be so pleased. I learned about gout when you were in your mother's womb. That's the truth. She read aloud to D and me, and she read us Little Lord Fauntleroy. The churlish old duke, Little Lord Fauntleroy's grandfather who didn't approve of the child's mother, named Dearest, had gout, and I still remember the Edwardian book illustrations showing him sitting by the fire with his foot on a gout stool. I hope you do *not* have gout. It's an unfriendly disease and a whole string of Medicis actually died of it in the 15th century. Do tell."

A few minutes later, he sent this photograph of the very book he remembers hearing read aloud.

Died? My quick Google search indicates there are modern treatments now.

We shall see. The mystery deepens, along with the bruising.

Color Them Purple

My toes
like this flower
defy description:
seen in one light
they purple,
then redden, 
turn mauve
or raspberry,
even green
at the bases
where bruise
meets bruise.

Only
my toes
are not so
pretty as
this.

Enclosures

I

While the technician prepared the machine and spread the gel on my leg, I asked, "Aren't you going to look at my foot?"

"No," she said. "He wants me to get the veins, thinking maybe there's a clot."

"Oh! That makes sense since my whole leg is swollen, not just the area around the ankle."

I showed her a little bump on the back of my thigh, discovered this morning in the shower. "That's probably just a blood vessel right near the surface. No biggie," she said.

It's a weird thing, lying in a mostly dark room with a machine clicking and whirring at my shoulder, staring at acoustic tiles in the ceiling and reflected in someone else's photographs hung on the wall, while a pleasant stranger is probing into my deep tissue, looking for something out of the ordinary.

Dressing afterwards, I asked, "Mind if I take a picture of that reflection?"

"No, of course not! I thought maybe you wanted to photograph the screen."

"May I?"

"Sure," she said. "After all it's got your name on it and it's your body!"

II

In the car, I wrapped my ankle, and headed out to grab groceries and wash the car.

I love sitting in my car, inside the dark tunnel, facing a treed corner anchored by the Monteagle Inn's sign, letting the car-encompassing machine track itself down and back, spraying and sudsing, brushing and whooshing, rocking the car slightly, creating designs on windows and mirrors. It's almost like being suspended deep in a womb-like whirlpool, only without getting wet.

III

My first day of new enclosures in many days of being shut in proved oddly relaxing (even knowing what the test showed).

All Because of a Book

Because I can't put out the garbage till early Tuesday morning, about an hour before the truck crew arrives (think raccoons; it's not a pretty picture), I waddled out, grabbed a can, rolled it back to the steps, prepping for tomorrow.

Then I saw the snail.

Elizabeth Tova Bailey's The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating leapt to mind.

I knew I couldn't put my garbage in the can. What would happen to the snail, whose life is spent in a tiny universe (hers lived in a terrarium), so I dragged it back to the trees, grabbed another, rolled it to the steps, and went inside, foot-fore but happy.

When I finish the book I'm reading now, I know what I will re-read next.

Fall's Footprints

These days, I see fall only on my deck or front porch or deliberate walk to the mailbox. Usually, I spend hours outside, walking, camera in hand, to capture autumn's slow arrival. Now I see only fall's footprints, without making any of my own.

Fall has never seemed more like the prelude to a death.

And so, this happened

Much Too Early

Autumn

by Adam Zagajewski

translated by Renata Gorcyzynski

Autumn is always too early.

The peonies are still blooming, bees   

are still working out ideal states,

and the cold bayonets of autumn   

suddenly glint in the fields and the wind

rages.

What is its origin? Why should it destroy   

dreams, arbors, memories?

The alien enters the hushed woods,   

anger advancing, insinuating plague;   

woodsmoke, the raucous howls

of Tatars.

Autumn rips away leaves, names,   

fruit, it covers the borders and paths,   

extinguishes lamps and tapers; young   

autumn, lips purpled, embraces   

mortal creatures, stealing

their existence.

Sap flows, sacrificed blood,

wine, oil, wild rivers,

yellow rivers swollen with corpses,

the curse flowing on: mud, lava, avalanche,   

gush.

Breathless autumn, racing, blue

knives glinting in her glance.

She scythes names like herbs with her keen   

sickle, merciless in her blaze

and her breath. Anonymous letter, terror,

Red Army.

(My severely sprained left ankle might as well be the Red Army.)

In a Fog

I had to look it up: ankle sprain. And what I read provided neither comfort nor ease.

So I surrender to pain and lose focus.

There is nothing else to do.



But wait.



And I grow impatient.