Waiting for Parole

“Stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage.” – Richard Lovelace

It has been a little more than three weeks since my surgery and I'm suffering badly from cabin fever.  Everyone has been really kind, offering to drive me around or do my errands for me.  While I'm very grateful for their attention and kindness, I am climbing the walls.  I don't want to be driven around.  I don't want to be accompanied on every errand.  I just want to get in my car and drive to the craft store or the bead store and spend an hour wandering the aisles and looking at all the things I don't need but that give me joy to look at and that spark my creativity.  I want to pop down to the hardware store and pick up a case of canning jars, come home and can the dark sweet cherries that are freezing on my back deck and mix up a batch of wild blueberry jam and some grapefruit jelly.  I want to paint the table with the carved legs that has been calling to me to be refinished but that I am not allowed to lift for another week.  I'm waiting for my four week post-surgery sentence to end - waiting for parole.  

Another week and I will be able to go back to physio, which I have so much missed, not just for the relief it gives to my aching bones but for the way my therapist Claire, soothes my soul and spirit.  A couple of treatments under her capable hands and I will once again have the feeling back in my left toes as well as two functional shoulders. I can hardly wait.  

I'm trying to be patient.  Trying to understand the lessons of this latest challenge to my mortality.  Looking for the gifts that this problem surely carries in its hands.  I'm finding it a little harder this time but I'll get there.