Sad notes and annoyances

May is a lovely month in my region, southeastern Pennsylvania. Perfect temperatures for days at a stretch. Blossoms everywhere. Birthdays of loved ones and my own.
This May, however, I have tests coming up that may indicate that having my leg amputated in February didn't nix the cancer and I'll be dead within a year or two.
Other things, most of them minor:

• A life on crutches in barely tolerable. The little things add up after awhile. An example: When you're on crutches both hands are so occupied that if you want to do something like scratch your ear or blow your nose you have to stop walking to do it. If you happen to be with someone else you have to tell them that and make a minor apology. Not that any real friend would care about this, but having to explain such small actions to people is a new burden.

  

  Author Rebecca Chace.

• I finished a novel I liked yesterday, Leaving Rock Harbor, by Rebecca Chace. I'd known the author when I was a teenager; a summer friend in New England. Usually, knowing an author puts a sort of veil over what I'm reading and I'm so busy judging the prose that I can't enjoy the book. In this case, though, it's been forty-five years, so that wasn't an issue. When reading the acknowledgements page I saw two names of mutual friends, both women, both of whom I carried a minor torch for. Not that I'd been on the cusp of romantic involvement with either of them, but after years passed I realized that both were my type and who knows what may have happened if we'd kept in touch? One had acted for awhile and then found that her real calling was teaching and she's now and Alexander Technique instructor. I watched one of her demonstration videos. She was still recognizable four-and-a-half decades later, and her laugh hadn't changed a bit, which was almost eerie but nice. The other had become a lawyer and worked on social justice causes. Then she became a pastor in her early fifties. Then, just two years ago, she died. Her obituary didn't list the cause. She'd married a guy I also knew back then, the early 1970s, and that surprised me. He was a little rough when I knew him. I guess he cleaned up. He died, too, but the obituary didn't say when.
• Mirror therapy is supposed to do wonders for phantom limb pain. I've seen videos in which users have gotten real relief within a week. I'm set up for it, but it hasn't done much for me yet. I have to put in more hours, I guess. A problem in my case is that mirror therapy tricks the brain into believing that your missing limb is still there by showing it to you as a reflected image. In my case, however, the missing limb, my right leg, was seven inches shorter than the left. When my non-existent foot hurts, the location is where the foot was, not where it should have been. 
• Yesterday I was replacing about two hundred gallons of the water in my six-hundred-gallon koi pond. As the new water was going in, the three koi I have got restless, thrashing around a little. This happens every year when I do it but usually that proportion of water replacement is one they tolerate well. Once the replacement is in, I immediately pour in a water treatment that makes the new water compatible. This time, toward the end of the replacement, one of koi jumped out completely! I was sitting outside during it, finishing the above-mentioned novel, and something rustling in the foliage next to the pond caught my eye. I had no idea what it was, having missed the actual jump. I crutched over in a hurry and, knowing that it would be very hard to pick up a vigorously writhing, foot-long, slippery fish, managed to guide him back to the pond. He'd never have gotten there otherwise and would have died an unpleasant death under an

  

  A koi jumping out of water.

  unseasonably hot sun. (Of course I talked to him during the seconds he was out of the water, telling him how foolish he'd been. I doubt he listened.) The water's not clear enough to see the bottom of the pond and therefor the fish, so the rest of the day I crutched out every half hour or so to look at the area around the edge to see if everything was all right. So far, so good, and that includes this morning. I'll have to build up the section where he jumped somehow so it won't happen again. 
• The older I get, the more mistakes I find in my writing. I go over what I write and I'm surprised by them. Dropped or incorrect word endings are the main category. Just moments ago, for example, I found I'd written "I finished a novel I like yesterday." Like instead of liked. I'm sure I'll find several others a few minutes from now when I go over this. If it weren't for the built-in spellcheck I use, you would have very little respect for me.
• I bought a new shoe Monday. The brand is New Balance, which certainly applies to me. My left foot has always been unusually wide. I describe its footprint as almost a square, though that's an exaggeration. The sales clerk was knowledgeable and considerate, but I'm not sure the shoe's a perfect fit or if I have to just wait for it to get fully broken in. I'm going to check at my rehab session this afternoon and if they say it's not, I'm returning it. Life, especially mine, probably, is too short to wear an uncomfortable shoe.