Milestones and the joy of de-cluttering.

Poor guy. He's assigned to my house today, a house with a driveway that goes uphill, 21 stairs to the front door, another 17 to the upstairs bedrooms. It's 93 degrees with not a cloud in the sky. The dude is seriously buff.

He's here - finally - to pick up Anne's oxygen supplies. Two concentrators, one huge back-up tank, seven small portable tanks and a couple of little machines with oddly old-fashioned looking dials that do I don't know what. Annie has been off the sauce, so to speak, since late March, but the supplies have lingered. They don't like to let you get rid of those too hastily since getting them placed back in your house is much more costly and difficult than just keeping them around for, say.... an extra five months.

Finally he's done, having lugged all of this heavy and ungainly equipment down all those stairs by himself. I give him a cold bottle of water that's been taking up space in the back of the fridge then turn back toward the girls, doing a shamelessly bad running man-style dance in celebration. It's go-on, it's go-on... the oxygen is go-on! In the kitchen I yank out the garbage can and stuff it with endless yards of clear tubing and small plastic humidifier bottles. I jerk the rug off the floor that had been placed to keep the concentrator from vibrating on our wood floors, and tuck a dust-coated, unopened box of unidentified supplies under my arm. Now it's my turn down the 21 stairs, down the hill of a driveway that's white-hot under the blistering sun, down to the garbage can with my eyes closed to slits like a vampire peeking out from his coffin to see what the neighborhood humans could possibly be doing with all this daylight. With a soft thud, it's all gone.

Finally.

Tomorrow it will be one year since I was hospitalized with my cervix inexplicably dilated to 5 centimeters. I was, literally, hours away from giving birth to a baby who would have been too fragile to survive. I wasn't in labor, but in the end my body couldn't keep her in. The seven days of bed rest gave Anne just enough of a boost - in the form of lung-building steroids and simple time - to get her over the hump to viability. This is just a polite way of saying that she would have a chance at survival. Viable. Survival. They sound alike, but the difference between the two is a vast chasm.

This has been a life changing year. A year of decluttering, both literally and metaphorically. Our priorities have come into crystal-clear focus, our needs pared down to those most simple and treasured. Our worries sorted into Things That Really Matter and Things That Kinda Don't. I mean, yeah, I'd still like to have a VW bug convertible for my 40th birthday (as Chad promised to me long ago) and I'd also like a couple of those awesome cashmere sweaters from J. Crew this fall and to go on a cruise for our 15th anniversary in November. That would be cool, but it's also cool if we stay home in our old non-cashmere sweaters.

I'm going upstairs to do something with the wide open space at the front of my closet where the oxygen concentrator used to be. I'm going to try to leave it open, like a breathing space in a sea of clothes and shoes and belts. That's how I feel getting all that equipment out of the house. Like I've come out of a fog and found a breathing space after a year of worry, fear, doctor's appointments, unwanted medical knowledge and breathless waiting as Annie has grown.

On August 20th she'll be 1. What a year.