I love doughnuts, at least the first bite or two and then they become sort of boring. I’ll labor through the whole box or bag in a perverse form of dedication. Even though I love doughnuts I try to eat a doughnut or two only several times a year. Just because I love doughnuts doesn’t mean they’re good for me.

In 2015 I started to have some health issues. I was putting off doing anything about them because they would either go away or I was going to see the doctor anyway in a week. Things came to a head that weekend when I realized I had an enlarged lymph node – it felt huge. That and the periodic fevers and other stuff caused my partner to put down her foot and say we’re going to the doctor Monday morning.

The doctor’s office squeezed me in for an appointment and I was feeling like an idiot for making a big fuss. The doctor examined me, discovered other enlarged lymph nodes, got this look on his face, and left the examination room. We could see him across the hall talking to people in the lab. I looked to my partner and she looked to me and I thought that’s strange.

He came back, sat in a chair and said, “We’re going to be aggressive about this, I promise you.”

I said, “What’s this?”

“Lymphoma.”

He started me on some antibiotics in case this was an infection and scheduled me for an ultrasound of the largest node.

It was definitely time for some doughnuts. They tasted good, especially after doing some research at the library about lymphoma.

Two weeks later he had the ultrasound results and the antibiotics weren’t having a noticeable effect so he sent me off for a second opinion. That opinion was also lymphoma and I was scheduled for surgery to remove a node for pathology.

I love doing research and I did a ton of research. At this stage of diagnosis about 38% of the time the pathology report will not show cancer but some other issue. That was the number that stuck in my head until the night before surgery when I realized that meant about two thirds of the time pathology will show lymphoma.

The surgeon told my partner while I was in recovery that he thought everything would be okay. Since we were in town anyway we went shopping. I think I got my streak of optimism from my mother.

In the end, it was an infection of unknown source.

The sad thing is that my doctor died last year, unexpectedly, and I miss him. He was one of those people where you can see the child they were. Bright eyed, imaginative and inquisitive, a bundle of energy. He emigrated from the Middle East when he was sixteen, was someone who gave so much to his adopted country. I miss him and doughnuts won’t help.

This is what I posted on FetLife a few weeks ago. When these events were happening in 2015 one of Kelsey’s family members called it “a hard time for family dads.” Her brother’s father was in ICU in Colorado, our daughter’s birth father was in ICU in Miami on life support. The daughter was down there faced with the decision of whether or not to pull the plug. He lived alone, had a massive stroke, and wasn’t found until several days afterward. His doctors didn’t expect him to live and if he did live wouldn’t have much brain function. She decided not to pull the plug.

She was really pissed when we told her after the fact what had been going on with us but accepted our reasoning that she already had more than enough to deal with.

The father in Colorado is okay, I’m okay, and the daughter’s father in Miami survived. He’s able to talk but not able to live on his own — he’s in an assisted care facility where the nurses love him. There have been rumors of a romance.

One of the reasons for the FetLife post was to remind myself that I didn’t need to go off the deep end. After a physical in early January my new doctor brought up the c-word in a new context and sent me off to a specialist. The specialist called me Tuesday with the pathology report from the biopsy and it was good news. Again.

I’ve posted a number of photos here and I thought I’d shift things a bit and post some photos of objects from what I think of as our museum. It’s not a museum really, it’s more like a library with objects that have stories. Unfortunately the photos are from posts I made in 2010 on a commercial site and reposted on our website and if I start talking about things it’s easy to Google. So there will be very little text.

What I can write about is the fact that the items shown occupy points of time within which economies were changing. For some of the objects, those made in a particular region in England, a change had taken place at the end of the seventeenth century from a focus on armour making to one devoted to precision tools and devices. Another change was taking place from localized family production units to factory production. The intermediary stage was the factor who went to a pub on Saturday and met makers of tools, purchased the tools, and provided raw materials for production of more tools.

The hacksaw frame and table vise were produced this way, in an 18th century style but made in the 19th century. The sugar nippers were probably made elsewhere in England, again in an 18th century style but probably dating around 1850.

The pastry wheel (or pie crimper) and plane are American. We purchased the pastry wheel at a midwestern auction in the 1980s. It has a walnut handle, forged and lathe turned wrought iron wheel holder, and a brass wheel, and dates around 1850. The plane was made in Massachusetts around 1800 and has the typical relieved wedge of that era and region.

This is sort of based on a conversation I had with my partner a few nights ago.

What started it was my finding a file on the computer I’d forgotten I’d had. A newspaper article, an obituary, for a woman who I love who died in 2006. I write love because it never was in the past tense and she’s still important to me for many reasons.

That evening my partner and I were talking about her and her house a thousand miles away, a 1940s Spanish colonial style with an interior walkway/hall with floor to ceiling windows looking out onto the garden. We have plants from that garden growing here.

We were talking and I was going on about how there’s a catalog of graphic triggers for me – women’s fashion, like bold patterns or the colors red and black, or simple things like lipstick. Back in the ‘70s she was the only woman I was close to who wore lipstick. This woman’s costume when dressing up included crimson lipstick to go along with a crisp white blouse, long black skirt, boots, and a Spanish-style black hat. She was beautiful. When I come across 1940s photos of Slim Keith, there are some which are spot on with my memories of this woman.

And then my mind took a lurch and I started to talk about another woman. She was the friend of a third woman who had been the victim of a grisly rape and murder in the 1980s. The other woman had been a witness for the prosecution. We were friends then lovers in the ‘70s and are friends now.

Anyway, I was in the library of the small town my partner and I lived in back then, almost 30 years ago. I was browsing through the library’s new books and while I don’t normally read true crime there was a book which caught my attention. It turned out to be about the murder and trial and amongst the photos was one of this other woman I knew. I hadn’t realized how hot she was or how beautiful until I saw that photo and I told my partner this. How I hadn’t realized. My partner knows the woman and smiled. Yes, she’s beautiful and hot.

And then I told my partner how I hadn’t realized how beautiful she was/is until about 1980. And then I’m having to explain myself. How when we first met I felt like I was enfolded in her. I wasn’t an observer. I’d had no time to go through the process of discriminating and objectifying.

What I’m writing isn’t going to say anything important, except there are people who are important to me for various reasons and everything’s fuzy because even back then there were so many interlocking strands and digressions. It’s even more so now. I touch the leaves of the daughters of the plant she gave us, the first woman, and I remember her house and the crimson lipstick.

I remember her saying to me, “You like pretty girls, don’t you?” And giving that special smile.

The second woman, she had her lips tattooed so her lipstick is permanent.

Our garden is the only large opening in the woods on our property. Trees tower along the edges, mostly hickories and remnants of the pine forest that replaced an abandoned field.

This is looking east from the road that passes between the garden and our home. The northern edge of the garden is visible through the trees.