Becki’s friend’s dentist, in an act of unbridled graciousness, let us use his lovely home for our annual getaway. Asheville, North Carolina.

Becki and I spent the weekend doing the usual–laughing, thrifting, and sipping coffee (see cool double-decker bus turned coffee shop below).

We also hit a few new highs (or lows depending on your perspective)–thrifting by the pound and dumpster diving. I even let Becki attempt to color my hair–though the risk of this is lost on anyone who did not see my tri-color hair in 1990. It’s no coincidence it took 18 years for me to trust her near my roots again.

It was, as always, good to be with Becki again. We are, somehow, flip sides of the same coin and being with her offers me a unique sense of completion. The next time we’re together can never come quickly enough.

This weekend Becki had another solo visit. This time for Dad’s retirement Open House. She stayed with us and the love affair between the two was renewed. Zoe giggled for hours straight.

Below is a photo of the crazy pair–and a picture that Zoe did at school today depicting the leg-slide she and Becki came up with during one especially silly time last night.

Now we don’t know who is more fun, Ante Bakey or the whole Veal family!

Mark and I were a little jealous. Our early entrepreneurial ventures (lemonade for me, a croquet course for Mark) were never so lucrative. Mark laments the maps of the croquet course his dad dutifully copied at work were never even given a second glance by potential paying customers. And I recall Becki and Jackie and me spending hours at the end of Jackie’s driveway with lemonade–to no avail.

Here are the two successful shopkeepers–along with a sample of their on-message marketing

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Mark and I saw the oncologist today. The chest x-ray shows slight (3 mm) growth on the measurable nodule in my lung. It shows no new nodules (good news) and no pleural effusion (don’t ask me what this means, it has something to do with fuzzy stuff that might indicate the cancer is on the move)–also good news.

But the growing thing, not good news.

However, the drug I’m on usually takes 6-8 weeks to be effective. My x-ray was taken at more like 5 1/2 weeks. So, we are going to wait another 4 weeks and see what my lungs look like on a CAT scan. If it seems the Faslodex is ineffective, we need to (in our doctor’s words) “pull the ripcord.” Pulling the ripcord means chemo.

And I really don’t want to do chemo again. Really, really, really.

It is not crazy to think that Faslodex still could work, or I’d be off it as of today. When it does work, it often works for years (like 3-5) so we’d really like to give it a fightin’ chance.

So, we’re waiting until May 22, at which time we should know what’s next.

Just like every time we have an appointment with the doctor, Mark and I waited for over an hour to see him. However, this time I was reading a great book and didn’t really care when he showed up. By the time he did, I was even still in a pleasant mood and rather reluctant to put my bookmark back in.

Hmmm, perhaps that pile of books in my living room might be just what I need for the next four weeks. Waiting may not be all that hard after all.

It seems that, when our families get together, we each have our counterpart. Becki and I have each other, Jim and Mark get along famously. And Ike and Zoe are simply cut from the same silly cloth. Ramona and Josie have always known the joy of twin-ship. When we visit, the rest of us get to experience it too.

Becki and I have not always appreciated people thinking we look alike. When we were younger, it drove us nuts. Now, though, when our times together are so few and far between and our sister-friendship so insanely precious, I absolutely love it when we enter a store and someone gives us a double take and says, “y’all twins?” It happened almost everywhere we went in Atlanta. And I relished it every time.

I miss my seester.

“Something goes wrong, I’m the first to admit it. First to admit it and last one to know. Something goes right, well it’s likely to lose me. Apt to confuse me, it’s such an unusual sight, I swear, I can’t get used to something so right.”

Mark and I have become the ones who get used to something going wrong. Cancer diagnoses and lost hopes seem to be the news of the thirtysomethings. Weddings and babies? Those seem to be the gifts of our twenties, gone and forgotten.

So, when Mark’s sister Beth called with the gleeful news that her boyfriend Jamey had proposed, we couldn’t quite wrap our heads around it. And to think, they’ll get married about the same time that my brother Chris and his wife Alison welcome a new baby. We are overjoyed.

We have a hard time getting used to these “somethings so right.” But we’re happy to try.

Congratulations, Beth and Jamey!

Today, I was chit-chatting with the injectionist who was readying my $1,500 shot of Faslodex. Here is our conversation…

She asks me how many kids I have.

“Just one. My initial cancer was when she was 18 months old, so that was the end of kids for us. I found out about my mets on her fourth birthday. She’s turning six on Saturday.”

“Oh”, she says, “you have metastatic breast cancer!?”

“Yep,” I answer, “it’s in my lungs.”

“Wow,” she says, as she depresses the plunger into my gluteus maximus…”are you getting treatment for that?”

Now there may have been other chit-chatty lines in there, but I swear that last line is exactly what she said.

Perhaps her left brain wasn’t aware of what her right hand was doing.

We swapped breast cancer stories as we all waited for our respective appointments. She had been diagnosed only a few weeks before and was anticipating more chemotherapy, surgery, radiation, etc., etc. As she was filling us in on her treatment and trying to explain the smile on her face, she said, “I’ve been through heart disease, and now breast cancer. I just figure that I’ll do what they [the doctors] tell me and try not to get hit by a truck in the meantime.”

A good philosophy, I think. Perhaps she should still be a cheerleader.

I’ll be trying not to get hit by a truck today. And appreciating the sun coming through my dining room windows.

This fall, I dug up the old clothes I had been saving for such an opportunity, and started ripping them into strips. They are the materials of Mark and my life. The shirt he wore the night we met, some pajama pants I wore to shreds, etc., etc.

I ripped them rather than using scissors and estimated their width rather than measuring. What emerged was indeed organic and imprecise. And full of love and stories just like the Gee’s Bend quilts.

Then, however, I said good-bye to the impoverished, artistic, optimistic, inspiring women of Gee’s Bend and embraced my own heritage…

Power tools.

My mother-in-law, an amazing quilter, has started a small business doing quilting in her basement on a machine that would make my father drool. It is huge. And fun to “drive.” The two requirements of any power tool–and guaranteed fun for our favorite Meyer contractor (my dad, that is).

Jane and I loaded the quilt on her machine last Saturday and I quilted like crazy. It was great fun. And the quilt turned out exactly the way I had wanted it to. I haven’t bound it yet. That’s the tedious part, but here it is…

(Oh, I did use scissors on the applique part.)