August 28, 2002
Melinda Ruley on her skin cancer and sense of loss:
I remember walking across a pasture once, and coming upon a fox sunning itself in the grass. The animal was young, a pup, really, taking time out from the grim business of survival to daydream in the still heat. A carpenter bee droned nearby, and stalks of Queen Anne's lace held their doily faces to the sky. Standing perfectly still, watching, I knew that in the wide distances between our species--the fox, the bee, the wild carrot--there was a sun soaked intersection, a common pleasure.
This, I think, is the greatest loss in this the age of broad-spectrum titanium-dioxide. Not the demise of the all-American tan, but of the faith that, like the fox in its pelt, we were after all made for this world. That no matter how bleak things get it is possible to lie in the sun, to drowse and to dream.
One day after my surgery, when my stitches were itching and I was feeling especially cranky about it all, a friend told me, rather unhelpfully I thought, that I was just feeling my mortality, and to get used to it. From here on out, he said, it's Death Valley, in Technicolor.
I remember walking across a pasture once, and coming upon a fox sunning itself in the grass. The animal was young, a pup, really, taking time out from the grim business of survival to daydream in the still heat. A carpenter bee droned nearby, and stalks of Queen Anne's lace held their doily faces to the sky. Standing perfectly still, watching, I knew that in the wide distances between our species--the fox, the bee, the wild carrot--there was a sun soaked intersection, a common pleasure.
This, I think, is the greatest loss in this the age of broad-spectrum titanium-dioxide. Not the demise of the all-American tan, but of the faith that, like the fox in its pelt, we were after all made for this world. That no matter how bleak things get it is possible to lie in the sun, to drowse and to dream.
One day after my surgery, when my stitches were itching and I was feeling especially cranky about it all, a friend told me, rather unhelpfully I thought, that I was just feeling my mortality, and to get used to it. From here on out, he said, it's Death Valley, in Technicolor.
