Back From the Brink

    Ah, tis a weary road I've travelled in these last six months. To start, my home of 20 years at New Hope Farms in New York came to an end. The owners sold the property where my husband and I worked as equestrian caretakers since 1994.
     Thus began an era of my life that involved finding a new home, yard sales, selling our horses and the horse trailer, disposing of sundry accumulations of stuff we didn't need, packing things into boxes, more yard sales, surrendering our beloved greyhounds, Dot and Dash (I don't want to talk about it), getting through my youngest child's high school graduation, sorting through mountains of books, selling fish tanks, finding a home for Jasmine, my eight foot boa constrictor (I don't want to talk about the, either!), helping realtors show the farm property ... Let's see, what else?
     Did I mention that I was doing my utmost to ignore my health? It's a crime of omission that caught up to me right around Labor Day, when on a sweltering 90 degree day, I hauled six heaping 55-gallon garbage bags to the dump, vacuumed four second floor non-air conditioned bedrooms (with a Shop Vac), and all without drinking anything but an iced coffee.
     Combine that with a visit to an acupuncturist for my heart, liver, kidneys, and a recurrent back problem, on the following Wednesday, I lay in bed giving my husband my last rites confession before I closed my eyes for the final time.
     Yes indeed. I felt that bad.
     After a visit to the emergency room, a very irate doctor chastised me for being overwrought, clinically exhausted, and acutely dehydrated. Yep, when your pee-pee is the same color as your hardwood flooring, you've got a big problem.
     Suffice it to say that I put the brakes on everything and slapped myself into the bed with a pitcher of liquids, my Kindle App, and my TV remote.
     Things occasionally came up:
     "Lesa, could you handle a class?"
     Nope.
     "Lesa, could you help at church?"
     Nuh-Uh.
     "Lesa, I need ..."
     Sorry. Not gonna happen.
     That was the first week of September, and here we are about to enter February. I'm finally feeling better, although every time something physically challenging arises, my body sends out the war party, telling me, "You better nor, or else!"
     And since I tend to take the lemons handed to me and make them into applesauce, I've spent these last months in cocoon mode, writing, editing, and sending out queries to agents and publishers.
     And you know what? I rather enjoy sitting here in our new Pennsylvania home, looking out over the 12,000 acres of state land butting up against my backyard. Like in the days when Mary Shelly and friends wrote their best works in the foul weather of 1816 (lucky her-it was summer then), I look out on a two-foot plus white mantle of snow, icicles draping off my eaves, and the barren trees surrounding my house.
     And I write.