Patricia’s Weblog

New Year’s Eve, 2007

My dear family and most excellent writer-ly friends,

It’s been a long time since I wrote to you, and I apologize. But several of you have written lately, asking what’s happening now with my health and personal life, so I will use that as a “prompt” and just begin:

What’s happening now is: I am sitting in the county library in Jackson, Wyoming in a blizzard. Through the automatic door, along with snow, blows a small child with light hair and round, metal glasses. She is my granddaughter, Grace, age 3 ½. Her mother, my daughter Ponteir, and her sister, Zoe, age 8, walk through the lobby waving at me, and head off for the children’s section. It is quiet here, more than the usual library-quiet, due I suppose to the holidays, to the snow, to good fortune. Grace pauses at a card table spread with a puzzle, half completed, and fingers the pieces. It is a complicated puzzle, and in seconds she has destroyed all the work of some larger person, in favor of turning the pieces upside down and shuffling them like dominoes. Who is to say this is not exactly what was wanted?

2007 has for me been something like that, a complicated year of a life turned on its head. If you followed this blog last spring, you’ll know that a year that began somewhat normally with my leading writing & yoga retreats in Guatemala, Mexico and Texas, turned, in April, to a time of intense lung illness, surgery and a summer of recovery. Robin Glenn, Diana Gordon and other dear friends kept many of you informed of my condition through email and telephone, but I neglected to keep the information coming. I apologize for that. It was as though the lung surgery on June 1, not only excised an infection of the hilum, and a sizable node inside the lung for biopsy purposes, but also the part of myself that loves language–to write, to read. Even what I had been learning of the Spanish language seemed to have been expunged.

But there is much good news to share about my health: the lung disease was caused by the histoplasmosis fungus, probably contracted in Mexico, and apparently, due to overwork and far too many bouts of bronchitis, my general health and lung condition was too poor to ward it off,. (Note: unless your immune system is badly compromised already, please do not hesitate to travel to Mexico and other points south. This is a fungus most people are exposed to in warm climates, and never even know it!) And while there is considerable damage to my lung tissue throughout, I have tolerated well the anti-fungal drug, Itraconazole, and am virtually recovered. As a plus, sometime in the beginning of the disease, in Austin, during the retreats when I ran a high fever for 10 days, my chronic asthma disappeared. And, wonder of wonders, it is still gone! I do not recommend getting histoplasmosis as a cure for asthma, but am simply grateful for whatever has rid me of a quite debilitating condition.

I want to stop a moment here to say thank you to some very special people for the help, love and support through the year: to my sister, Lyn Whitcomb, her husband, Gaines, and my sister-friend, Nancy Banister, for taking care of me in Austin at the onset of my illness; to Charles MacInerney and Carol Booth for picking up more than their share of running our retreat and training in Texas when I more or less collapsed; to Robin Glenn for keeping our business on track; to Beth Goren for cooking for two Patchwork retreats and intensives in May, so we didn’t have to cancel; to Jacqueline Sheehan, Diana Gordon, Celia Jeffries and Pat Schneider for leading the May retreat so brilliantly, the last we’ll hold at Patchwork for a while; to Jacqueline, Celia and David Clemson for taking over the Wales retreat, to great acclaim; to my son, John, his wife Traci, and their children, Oliver, Georgia and Benjamin, and my sister, Susan Lewis, for many weeks of loving, in-home care; to my daughter, Ponteir, her husband, Jim, and their children, Zoe and Grace, for their never-failing support, and for understanding that Granny couldn’t fly to Wyoming for the important summer visit; to Diana Gordon and Robin Glenn, for keeping information flowing about my condition until I was on my feet; to Ann Jones, Cie Simurro, Jacqueline Sheehan, Celia Jeffries, Lisa Baskin, Marcia Burick, Becky Jones, Beth Goren, Debin Bruce and Bob Marstall for staying with me overnight when I couldn’t be alone. To the many friends and family members who provided food, flowers, funny gifts, and sent cards, I thank you. And most especially, I am grateful to my now husband, Don, (himself a cardiac/thoracic surgeon) for finding in an emergency the best thoracic surgeon in Massachusetts, for being there as a constant presence in all three hospitals, and for loving me back to health.

Meanwhile, as I recuperated from the surgery and had, sadly, to drop out of my retreats and trainings through the summer, I began planning my wedding and an addition to Patchwork cottage, to make room for my love and life-companion, Don Charles Wukasch. Rather, we began planning these things together, mostly by phone, as Don is still engaged in his business pursuits in Texas. (On Valentine’s Day, I had surprised even myself by accepting Don’s proposal of marriage. Some of you will remember that Don and I first met in the 4th grade in Austin, and learned to dance together in 5th grade. On Valentine’s Day, 1948 when we were 10, as we sat in the great live oak tree in my side yard, he gave me a little red satin heart filled with chocolates. Though we “lost” each other for many years, I guess neither of us ever got over that.) We married at Patchwork Farm on September 1, under a birch bower made by my son, John, and his family, and entwined with flowers by generous friends. Our families, close friends and towering red oak trees witnessed and blessed a perfect day.

This New Year’s Eve morning, wind pushing its way under our scarves as we walked through new snow, Don and I made a small journey to the top of a road, overlooking Jackson. We looked to the west, where a few mornings ago the full moon descended over Glory Bowl on its way to Idaho, and said our thanks.

Last year on this day, I stood just there, alone, coughing with each breath, looking to the future. I thought I knew what the year would bring: workshops and manuscript intensives, trainings and retreats in several countries, practice of Spanish, work with my poems and little stories, and time with family and friends here in Jackson Hole, in Texas and at Patchwork Farm. A year of what I love. Perhaps it was too full, but it was somehow like the puzzle at the library, completed around the edges, but with effort, there would be complicated, interesting connections to be made in the middle.

Then, like my granddaughter, Grace had done in the library, something turned the pieces upside down. I say now, after all the changes, the surprises, the pain and the gifts, this was grace, and exactly what was wanted to help me get my life in balance.

I miss terribly my close connection with so many of you, through our writing together. But it is good for now to have reduced my work in 2008 to a few national and international retreats and trainings, and I look forward to them with energy and joy.

Today, I send to you my love and blessings, and most fervent hopes for peace. I believe our artistic expression, our writing, our open voices help to heal us by bringing forth in a kind of embrace, what we most fear. And I believe that when we weave stories of our darkest sorrows and our secret joys, when we share those with other people, what we create in love will heal the world.

I hope to hear from you in 2008. Some of you will be with me in Guatemala, others in Texas, Massachusetts and Scotland (details, as always, on our website, www.writingretreats.org); some I’ll not see again. But your courage, your stories, your poems will continue to resonate in my heart. My thanks to you, always.

Patricia

P. S. Finally, I’ve begun working on my poems again. Here is one I wrote in an AWA training this fall. It’s still a bit rough, but it’s my gift to you in the new year.

Where Has All The Writing Gone?

I wonder who used to do all that writing,
images hollering. It wasn’t me. A parachute
that didn’t open, the ground rushing
persimmon orange, bloody seeds
of words. It wasn’t me. The cow manure
made me do it, a window to my child’s life,
the ranch, the Angus heifers. Where words
hook together, in clouds or live oak trees.

At the corner of the ranch house, the juniper
is turquoise. Berries feed goldfinch in small herds.
It is cellular, this stuff of words. It is jasmine,
Jerusalem, joyous as winter finch, luscious
as genitalia displayed. Bling and blither, beyond.

It wasn’t me who wrote these words.
They wandered, wooed, wove together
in the manner of the wise. I am not wise.
Sometimes, with luck, I am written.

Patricia Lee Lewis
2007