My world is very small and self-contained, and has been for many years now. Its bordered mainly by the four walls that make up the house I live in, and a little beyond that the fence that encloses our yard. On good days–or on desperate days with the aid of hydrocodone–my horizon can expand to include anything within a 3 hour drive of home: Central Washington, Northeastern Washington, Northern Idaho. On very rare and special occasions, I push my body and my boundaries beyond their limits and dare as far as Seattle or Portland… or a plane trip to Texas. Because the FSM treatment is helping keep the pain at a lower level, but it isn’t making it go away, and so most days I still find myself spending the majority of my time on the couch with nothing but a book, a movie, my writing to keep me company.
A friend of mine just got back from New Zealand, and last night I was looking at all the photos of her trip, incredible mountain vistas and waterfalls, the ocean, Hobbiton, the wind whipping her long hair into curly kinks that just made my jaw drop… And it hurt to look at those photos. Not jealousy, because I was truly and completely thrilled to see her have such a good time, but sorrow because this is something that is so far beyond my reach. Even with FSM, it’s going to be a struggle to make it to Texas for my brother’s wedding. I will never travel abroad, never see New Zealand or England–I’ll probably never even see the East Coast. My boundaries are tight, my world claustrophobic, and I don’t think I will ever stop mourning for everything I lost six years ago when I injured my leg and became disabled.
And yet, even though my world is so tiny, so isolated, it’s a pretty darn good world to be stuck in. The Inland Northwest is an amazing place, crammed with almost every kind of landscape a person could want–we’ve got swampy marshlands, lush valleys, snowcapped mountains, rolling meadows, and harsh rocky plains, each of them providing an unique beauty that works on your heart so deep you don’t even realize you’re falling in love with it all until you wake up one morning and discover that your heart has changed. And even though most of my friends and family live far away, I’ve got my husband, and he’s the one who creates silly songs and zany characters that can make me laugh when I don’t even want to drag myself out of bed in the morning, the one who brainstorms about my fiction with me (not to mention just letting me babble for hours at a time about it), the one who gets me out of the house on the good days and the desperate days, the one who goes above and beyond the call of duty every day to encourage me and make my claustrophobic, limited life a little better. So my world will never expand to include the far-off horizons of other countries; so my life will never be what I hoped it would. It’s still my world, my life, and it’s good. And this is the song that I feel has become my anthem. It’s a new secret I have found…



















