SPRINGTIME FOR MORGAN

This piece was written Feb 12, 2001. My wife was in the Intensive Care Unit of the hospital. Within ten days she would receive a pacemaker. She came home Feb 23, 2001, too weak to really enjoy the first warm day when it came, but a false Spring did arrive and she walked outside with me and the aides.


         Lately my time has been occupied waiting for that first Sunday in late February that happens every year in the Northeast. The sun comes out in the morning, and while the forecasters tell us to expect temperatures around fifty, something magical happens and by mid-afternoon it is nearly sixty degrees.


         In my old urban neighborhood, everyone would be outside. Their excuse was to be pretend to clean their yards of the detritus of winter, but the real reason was to get the chance to talk to people they had barely seen all winter. Heavy coats came off, families with baby strollers rolled by, and while all knew this early Spring would not last and that in two days most would have colds, it became a rite of passage.

         Congress has never legislated this mid-winter holiday, just as it has never sanctioned that day in late August when, after a night of rain, the wind blows briskly from the northwest and the temperature does not top seventy. This is weather that that says Summer is coming to an end. It is ignored by everyone, unlike my February day, but it happens nonetheless.

         My assistant, who lives three hundred miles south of here and a mile from the ocean in southern New Jersey, tells me it will be in the fifties there tomorrow. I have to visit her and her husband to give her work and set her computer in motion. Tomorrow might be perfect, but to spend the day sitting in a car on the Garden State Parkway with dog barking at every tollbooth seems a sacrilege.

         I've been hoping to save that first warm day until Morgan returns from the hospital. Her battle with congestive heart failure is being lost; we are no match for the enemy's flanking movements. In the hospital Thursday night a bout of irregular heartbeats nearly carried her off, but she has rallied again and wants to come home.

         She knows life will only get more difficult. She is very weak now, a mere slip of the woman who built a small brick patio at our old house. Her art materials sit unused. She was home for ten days after the 25th of last month and could scarcely get out of bed, but she wants to be home with her animals and this quasi-butler who we call "Soames" who brings her food, medicines, drinks and helps her shower and dress.

         She cannot get to the cellar anymore to smoke her cigarettes. She really should not smoke. We all know that; she has taken breaks from the weed several times these past six months, but now it seems so inconsequential. On-line friend Lynda, a nurse, tells me that if we turn off the machine which makes oxygen she can even smoke in her room. This has emboldened her and her resolve to get home.

         Another on-line friend has given me a crash course in the principles of CPR. The Social Worker at the hospital will arrange other matters and with luck, she will be home before this week is out. They tell me she will be back in the ICU in a matter of weeks, but let her enjoy that warm February day which is bound to come.

         Perhaps that day will not arrive until early March this year. In 1993 that happened, and seventeen inches of snow fell the next week. Whatever, we will wait for the Day and rapture watching the dog roll in the grass while the wasps and bees make their first appearance and a few buds appear on the forsythias. The cardinal that lives in our rhododendron will begin beating her head against our cellar window. We have no idea why she does this, but it happens every March.

         Our daughter, taken from us by accident at age thirteen, wrote or borrowed a piece of doggerel in second or third grade that best expresses the season:

"March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb,
Well this year it has a different plan.