Home Again

Sunday afternoon. I lie on my air mattress in my living room, curled into a ball. I am in my new home. My head swims softly; it is not unpleasant. I have not taken any pain medication for some hours--I am trying to stay lucid. ("Jesus," I told Trudi last night. "I must be sick. I just refused Percocet.") Now I float on the air mattress and feel mostly fine. "Why don't you take this upstairs first, Camille," Trudi says to my mother gently. "Then I can pull out all these rugs and vacuum."
"OK," my mom says. "I'll get the rest of the stuff from the car first."
Rugged are unfurled and vacuumed; boxes are emptied and then thrown away; clothes are folded and organized. I fall asleep to this song, not deeply, but easily.

It is strange enough that this tumor business is happening at all, but its happening in the middle of our city relocation and house renovation is something else indeed.
We were just about finished with our kitchen tiles and were about to move on to painting. After the painting, the carpets would get ripped up, and then, the refinishing of the hardwood floors. Landscaping, furniture--we'd figured we'd do piecemeal. Six to eight more weeks of work, till we were . . .well, not done exactly--we have been told incessantly that houses are never really done--but mostly livable.

Of course, tumors intervene. Rafael, sweetly, offered to help with cleaning up the house as much as possible while we were in the hospital. Separately, Trudi's father wanted to give us a tangible gift, and asked--thoughtfully--if it would be okay if he were to hire Rafael to continue to work on the house, at least to get it where we could have a reasonably clean and bright place to recover.
So during the days I spent at the hospital, Rafael and his crew finished much of the work.
Living in the house had been like camping---albeit with a/c and hot water--in a construction site. We had our one 'green room' as I called it, furnished with a large air mattress gifted by my mother, a mini-fridge I acquired through the graces of internet bulletin boards, and a reconditioned old table. The rest of the house was either in a state of decay or growth: plaster, wood trim, new doors, buckets of joint compound (mixed or not), half-ripped up carpets with fleur-de-lis imprints, tools of all sizes, toolboxes, work lamps, saw dust, concrete dust, buckets, lights, tiles, fixtures old and new, nails and screws and sheets of drywall pasted with layers of wallpaper from various decades. Everywhere you looked something was being ripped out or something was being placed in or else it was a tool to do either with.
At the same time, another friend of Trudi's family, who has dealt with her share of health scares, bought us our refrigerator, which we picked out the Monday before surgery and had delivered while my head was being mini-scoped on Thursday.
So my return today was one of exhaustion and gratitude and relief and promise.

It is something I cannot fully place, this feeling of safety, of love provided so seamlessly by those around us. It feels coordinated. My house itself represents--in its state-of-being, in its process of coming to renewal--this showering of warmth and unity. And while this warmth was evident before any magnetic image surfaced, while perhaps we all knew that we cared for each other enough that we would take remarkable actions to make each other feel even a tiny bit better, it took the emergence of some awful thing to bring that goodness into reality.
But I cannot tell you how incredible it is to live inside it. I have received a far greater gift that I could have ever realized I needed: I get to see, everywhere I turn, the absolute proof of the world's compassion.