As my strength returns, I begin to sense that I had been ailing for some time.  Though the doctors never found the source of the bleeding, one theory credited my interruption of the blood thinner for the swift correction.  Finding the polyps and cutting them away came as a happy bi-product of the mysterious malady.

I picked my way along trails on the bluff above Seal Cove and in the forests above the sea.  I can walk to the garden again without a cane.  My morning stretches again invigorate me.

One of the young folk staying at the hostel greeted me on my birthday by asking how I fared.  “Any day that I awaken counts as a gift,” I told him.  I gave a short version of a twenty-year survival by default.  “On 14 February 1998, a doctor gave me six months to live.  I told him that I had other plans.”

Putting my best foot forward, accepting each day that dawns, never forgetting to breathe; my strategy seems to be working.  This evening I sauteed chard and zucchini which I had a hand in growing.  I cleaned Delta silt from the leaves of butter lettuce from the community garden and nibbled Thai basil flowers culled from a bountiful plant which stands adjacent to the broccoli.  I feel my mother’s DNA fighting for ascendancy.  I’ve been an Irish Corley long enough; my  sturdy Austrian blood mingled with the passion of  Syria can carry me for the next thirty years.

It’s the eighth day of the fifty-seventh month of My Year Without Complaining.  Life continues.