Today on this beautiful autumn day I will venture out beneath the cornflower sky to dismantle our flower beds before they become brown frozen messes shifted to my spring To-Do list. Two months ago, garden work was not my focus. Two months ago, I was just finishing up six weeks of chemotherapy and radiation and was mainly focused on getting to treatment appointments each day, getting meals on the table, and getting well. My last CT scan was clear, and it is wonderful to have time once more for other things. Time to widen my focus and resume regular life again. Time is a precious commodity.

Before my medical adventure began, I was working on a simple chart that would help me stay on track juggling the various balls I try to keep in the air when the warm weather comes. Well, the snow melted, the songbirds returned, and that simple chart turned into a full-blown planner which I finished and published but didn’t get a chance to use much because I didn’t have the energy to juggle anything other than doctor appointments all summer. So here it is. I hope someone finds it useful:

Simple Steps Homeschool Planner

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What I’ve Been Reading

Heaven Rules by Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth

Blood Money by Peter Schweizer

Chequebook of the Bank of Faith by Charles Spurgeon

How to Starve Cancer by Jane McLelland

The Cancer Resolution? by Mark Lintern

Immortality by Loraine Boettner

We Will Not Be Silenced by Erwin W. Lutzer

Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular by L. Rust Hills

The Small Woman by Alan Burgess

Poland James A. Michener

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A Poem for Autumn

October on a Maine River
by Kenneth Slade Alling

The blood of maples on the autumn sky,
And dead leaves drifting, drifting to the sea:
Now, to the year Time makes his old reply,
Nothing on earth shall live immortally.
The burst of glory on a dying face,
Of one who sees beyond, some haven far,
Lit with the spring-light of another place
And silver winds blown from another star.
Now beauty burns in gold on every hill
And changes not her warm imperial way:
There is no sadness here, whate’er men say—
Beauty departing is yet beauty still.

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