C'est Moi.

This is a card made by the grandkid for a family party on the occasion of our forty-ninth wedding anniversary. Grandpapa has his own. Both daughters and their attendants came out here, loaded down with food and flowers. The feast they prepared included lobster and spareribs, ably handled by the ED and her partner and scallops and other delicacies turned out by the YD with one hand while she prepared and iced a cake with the other. Me, I stayed out of the kitchen. The offspring also did a bunch of heavy chores, in the intervals of cooking and skiing, that I had found difficult or impossible to keep up with. And they cheered up JG no end.

He needed that. For the last three weeks he has been suffering (it is thought) from a pinched or inflamed nerve in his lower back, and has been almost immobilized. Since we heat with a wood furnace and live a good way from doctors, hospitals, physiotherapists and chiropractors, I have been running about doing the chores he normally undertakes (you never know how much your partner does until he can't do it!) and driving him directly to the doors he needed to enter, fetching him a wheelchair and waiting to drive him back. In the intervals, I have had a colonoscopy, cancelled out of a lot of activities, including blogging, and worried a lot.

As of yesterday and today some of the worst effects seem to be easing off. Our doctor also managed to get an appointment for an MRI for this morning at 7:00 am, in our local city, an hour's drive away. Getting the sufferer there involved crawling out of bed at 4:45 am and slithering over the local roads in the pitch black dark until we reached a clean highway. We've also been getting temperatures that allow the ice to melt a little during the day and then set up in lovely slick patches overnight. I go no where without my ice grippers having had a bad scare when I lost my footing while bringing a pizza back to the house from the garage. Saved the pizza, though. It's amazing what you can do when you have to.

(Insert mental picture of big pizza box with feet madly whirling below it and face with mouth gaping above it. Our local pizza place does not deliver out here in the boonies, alas.)

I don't normally suffer from cabin fever - if I do, I strap on snowshoes and plop off with a camera to investigate beaver swales and slopes that are difficult to reach in warm weather. But this last while I have felt the walls closing in. I'll be seventy in April and for some reason that seems like a wall, too. The breakpoint between the four score and ten allotted years during which you can live your life and the onset of being too old to manage. I have already had to give up cross country skiing when my sense of balance went west and arthritis started to bite. Now I watch the family snap on the skis and zoom away, including the granddaughter who has new skis and is handling them very ably. 

Here's a shot of the crew taken on Saturday - it was pretty darn icy, as you can see. That's the GD's father, a highly skilled downhill skier, who has just wiped out. Our trails are narrow and have a lot (!) of ups and downs, this being eastern Ontario shield country.

It's a beautiful day today with an Alice blue ski laced with contrails and little puffs of cloud. Windy up there - the contrails wind and shift and fray and the puffy nubbins are really scooting by. Did you know that Alice blue is called that after Alice Roosevelt - Teddy Roosevelt's daughter? I often wonder why I can retain useless factoids like this and solve a crossword while I eat my toast at breakfast but lose my car keys, important documents and train of thought on a regular basis. But the chickadees are singing 'hey sweetie', their spring call, and the ice is at least off the porch.

Two days have passed while this post was building, a word or a sentence here and there. Now there is wet laundry in the washer, supper to be prepared and a meeting tomorrow to set up. JG is so much better that he has been loading the furnace all day. But I do have to go and get him some wood before he tries to do it himself and has a relapse.

Maybe the next post will be coherent. But maybe not.