Happy New Year's Day

The sky is almost an unreal azure blue today, deep, rich, never ending, unbroken by cloud or shadow. The snow on my tree glistens, sparkling with the light of a thousand little diamonds, the top crisply frozen, hanging onto the branches in a solid, unshifting shape. The temperature is warming up from an un-Godly cold low of -40C to an almost tropical -12C right now, rising even further to a high of 6C tomorrow. The Chinook wind is moving in, drawing warm air over the Rockies, down the Bow River valley, into Calgary.

Unfortunately the warm weather, such as it is here in Calgary, will melt the Currier and Ives picture outside my window, the wind blowing the branches free of the icy weight, turning the sidewalks into slush piles which will re-freeze in the cold of night, turning roads into a slick rink of melt water over top of an ice base. There will be more accidents.

It doesn't really matter to me. I am a shut in this week, at least until my power wheelchair is repaired. I will stare out my window, watching traffic go by on the street, watching the jostling of cars in the mall parking lot, watching people young and old carefully pick their way from their cars to the mall entrance, on unsteady legs already struggling with cold, wet, weather.

I'm not sure if this is perhaps a predictor for my year, this new year according to the artificial construct of our Julian calendar. I wonder if, as I progress this year, I will spend more time in my apartment, looking out my window. That is what happened last year. I found myself increasingly willing to stay home and watch the world go my rather than struggle to get into my truck, or transfer to my PWC so I could go across to the mall. Last year I made what I thought was that final transfer, no longer to use my truck or manual wheelchair. This week is different with my reversion to the manual chair, my PWC sitting broken and idle in my bedroom.

My progression continues. Just as I wondered last year if it would be my last year, I wonder today if I will make it through this year. I must confess I have been a very poor judge of my own longevity. I still struggle with whether this is a blessing or a curse, this longevity of mine while I live with this horrible disease. Yet here I am, celebrating my sixth New Year with ALS. I have seen so many come and go, so many make the decision to live with machines to do their breathing and tubes for their feeding.

I am breathing on my own. I just finished eating a massive sandwich, the kind Kathy makes for me every Monday morning. It's a pretty good way to start a day, a week, a month, a year. My only challenge is picking it up, something which I can still do but am slowly losing the ability to do. It's like the coffee cup beside me, full of coffee, increasingly heavier as time goes by. How slow will it go? I don't know. I'm just happy that I have today, with the clear, blue sky, with the beauty of the crystalline snow, with good food, with family, with friends.