…or How I Fell off the Wagon.
A hermit, of the basement-dwelling sort that I am, rather than the kind fighting daily for survival, faces a question each morning: what shall I do with this long, empty day stretching in front of me?
My view out the basement door. Pristine woods and the septic tank cover.
Because my days of freedom are limited, and because some of Ken’s structure has rubbed off on me, I came up with a loose schedule to keep me from frittering away the time:
- Mornings: reading, writing, and Bible study
- Afternoons: exercise and play (not really sure what I would play by myself…Monopoly? Operation?)
- Evenings: watching movies and more reading (or eating ice cream, as my friend Mary suggested)
My first full day of basement-dwelling began at 7:00, which is when I take my thyroid medication. And since waking up enough to swallow a pill guarantees I’m pretty fully awake for the day, I stayed up, and in the quiet of the morning, pent-up thoughts began to bubble to the surface.
I had to write them down.
I had forgotten that feeling of having something that must pour out onto paper. I wrote through breakfast and through the rest of the morning, some of it email, much of it just…thoughts.
All that writing made me hungry, and I began to wonder when the Lunch Fairy would toss food down the stairs since I’m not supposed to spread my radioactivity around the kitchen. And on top of that, I’ve been on a low-iodine diet for several weeks to prepare for treatment, so I can’t just run to the kitchen and grab whatever I see: it has to be something homemade without dairy or iodized salt, or a whole food that God made.
Ken was in an all-day meeting, and not likely to surface anytime soon, so around 1:00 I began to take stock of my resources. Since I had just showered, I figured my radioactivity was slightly diminished. Time for a kitchen run.
Donning a pair of disposable vinyl gloves, I snuck upstairs. All quiet. I opened a cabinet (contaminated now), grabbed a plate (also contaminated) and opened the refrigerator (you get the picture), and behold, a low-iodine sautéed chicken breast! A salad would pair nicely, but it didn’t seem smart to contaminate all of our fresh vegetables just for one salad. Instead I grabbed some baby spinach, an orange, an avocado, and an entire bottle of balsamic vinegar, because a life without condiments just isn’t worth living.
And then I saw them.
Chocolate-dipped macaroons.
If I were to be honest, I would mention here that although coconut is a low-iodine food, chocolate is not. Nor is the sea salt in the macaroons. In fact, nothing with the word “sea” in the name is low iodine.
I snuck a furtive glance behind me. No witnesses.
With my gloved hands, I quietly lifted the lid of the cookie box and fingered one small macaroon, one with barely any iodine at all. The merest smidgen, really.
I scurried back to the basement and spread my repast out on the table, with the macaroon to one side, where I could contemplate it. The low-iodine finish line was a mere 24 hours away. Was I going to fall from glory now? (Though, admittedly, I had already eaten one Dorito out of spite when I thought my treatment would be delayed by a few weeks.)
See? No macaroon in the picture. It’s hiding off to the side. (And yes, there’s a hole in our basement ceiling. We have boys.)
In the end, I ate the macaroon. With barely a hint of regret. I blame the doctor. She should never have mentioned that patients didn’t always have to go on a low-iodine diet before treatment. It made the whole diet thing seem superfluous.
By the time the rest of the family returned from being with friends-who-are-like-family, I was back on the wagon. And our house went from feeling like an empty box to being a home again, and I learned that I can still fall from grace, even when I’m all by myself. Call me Eve.
What a basement-dwelling hermit reads:
- Rules of Civility (Amor Towles)—finished it yesterday and loved it, considering rereading it
- Possession (A.S. Byatt)—no judgment yet as I’m still in the front matter
- The Geography of You and Me—chosen mostly for the title but the part between the covers is good too (I’m susceptible to intriguing titles, which is why we own Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes, a book I’ve never managed to read but that makes me smile whenever I see it.)
- One Thousand Gifts Devotional (Ann Voskamp)
- Songs of Jesus: A Year of Daily Devotions in the Psalms (Tim Keller)
- The Bible—Genesis and Matthew (daily reading), Revelation