Sunshine and Chocolate...

(Two things that are not necessarily good in excess.)


Sunshine on my shoulders felt good back when I was a teenager who occasionally slathered herself in baby oil and iodine in search of a deeper tan. I was already tan enough. My grandparents on my mother’s side used to tease me about my olive skin making me look like a little brown bug in the summertime.
Recently I have been indulging in a little anti-oxidant therapy, also known to the ordinary layman as chocolate therapy. It may be too little too late, but a little chocolate never hurt anyone, right? (Unless we count the time I ate my entire chocolate Easter bunny on the way to my grandparents’ house Easter morning. I think I was told I could only eat the ears.) They did a biopsy to be sent away to a lab while I went home and tried to think of other things as I waited for the week to pass. Turns out, one of the spots was a pimple-like thing. The other, well, it was a simple basal cell carcinoma, the kind of cancer you’d want to have, if you just had to have a type of cancer.

I made a collage and had a little talk with Jesus (as Anne Lamott might say), well, several talks, actually, and I wrote a little bit about the initial shock of it all. I thought of the incredible privilege in being able to cry out to Jesus. I reminded myself to remember to anchor deep and lean on God.

I believe the collages and the journaling are powerful forms of prayer. I think that while I am occupied with arranging images on the page, or in simply reporting what has been happening, the Spirit enters in and all the other voices of my fears and turmoil are shushed, and I am very grateful.

I go on the 1st of August to have the spot excised (don’t you just love medical euphemisms?) People say they will burn it out. I am not sure how he will do it, but the doctor (who I think just turned fourteen, that is how you know you are getting old, by the way, the doctors all look like children) will remove the offending spot and will somehow stitch everything back together. I have not had stitches since the third grade, when I ran smack-dab into Lou Ellen Lyons on the sidewalk at school.

There are worse things that could have happened.