Life is Healthy

No sooner had I emailed my friend Shari on Tuesday, telling her I was going to lay down for awhile because the goldenrod had bloomed and I had an allergy headache, that I developed a sudden craving for salad. And on that salad I wanted a cucumber. Sadly all that was left of the cucumber in the crisper was a little stub.

What to do, what to do. My head needed a lie-down, but I really wanted a cucumber on my salad. So I put off my nap and drove to our local farm market to buy a cucumber.

One hour AND…one cucumber, three nectarines, a melon, five heads of garlic, six sweet onions, two pints of green beans, one pint of blueberries, one large zucchini, two red peppers, and 10…yes 10!...pounds of Roma tomatoes later, I was in the middle of making five batches of roasted tomato sauce.

No nap for Lynn. But at least in between roasting batches of tomatoes, I ate a salad with a bunch of cucumber chunks on top and my headache disappeared.

Lately I’ve had this never-before craving to move. It’s like a food craving, the kind in which you want a sweet/sour/salty/mint ice cream/Little Debbie/Texas toast (or cucumber) fix so badly that you’re salivating and will drive 20 miles in rush-hour traffic and stand in the check-out line for an hour just to get it. Only instead of a food fix, I want a movement fix. Something – anything! – more than what I’ve done the last 8 weeks: “Watch out!”, “Don’t fall!”, sit-down showers, and living out of a laundry basket because of stair avoidance.

It started as a whisper last week – “Come on, do a little more. It’s OK.” This week my body is like a coach screaming at an umpire just before he’s thrown out of the game.

“Get up! Move around! Do something!!”

To clarify, I’ve not been sitting around for 8 weeks. I go to PT three times a week and I do my exercises at home. It’s hard work. The voice I heard this week is my Normal calling me, and it told me it’s tired of being stymied.

And so I moved the way it challenged me to.

Along with the spaghetti sauce, I organized the move that brought my gym and office upstairs and my bedroom downstairs. While Larry (with the help of our next-door neighbor) was the muscle, I did my fair share of lifting, moving, bending, stretching, reaching…everything my body was craving. By the end of the day, my office and gym were set up, the grandkids’ toys were in their new home, and most of my clothes were in my “new” room. My knee felt like it was being strangled with bare hands, but that’s why God made ice and heating pads, right? 

We went from this: