I’m in this wheelchair, my rental wheelchair—meaning its only mine for a while. My right leg extended like a lance. My bones slowly knitting themselves back together. The screws and hardware in my body trying to make them look and work like they used to.  Not that I can really test them out yet.  My left shoulder needs another three weeks before it can bear weight (more than a coffee cup) and my right heel and ankle not far ahead of that.  My back will stay in this brace for another four weeks too.  I can feel where the screw is in my tibia—it is just bone and screw and my skin above it.  Seven layers of skin.  Thin.

It’s been seven weeks since I was hit by that driver in that black car, probably a Kia Sportage, 2017. Two and half weeks spent in the hospital and now another four and half here, rolling around the first floor, sleeping on a bed in the living room, next to the woodburning stove like a Russian grandmother. Making coffee, washing dishes and folding laundry are about the only helpful things I can do.  

And I can dress myself; if you consider a t-shirt (short-sleeved) and overalls, underwear and a sock, dressed. And getting my brace back on, while lying down.  I can’t take it off myself, which is a frustration.  I’m like a turtle turned on its back.

I’ve never given much credence to this holiday.  I realize that things need to be accounted for, and so we made the months, the years.  Gave them beginnings and ends.  Not like stories.  If they were, we’d start the year in spring and let things begin, really begin, again.  Although ending them in darkness, like the darkness of December nights, isn’t the worst thing. 

Doctor Fowler was happy to see me today, sitting in my wheelchair, dressed, looking, I guess, more like me.  The last time he saw me, I was in a hospital gown, as he clipped a couple of the stitches that snaked my arm to my shoulder.  There were 16 of them.  Like there are 16 at my ankle. Just four at my tibia. And I guess this must look like progress to him.  I must look like progress. My shoulder is getting some of its movement back, starting to work like a shoulder should.  My hand and arm are trying to reach in all the directions they used to. 

I called the 2^nd Precinct.  Left on their answering machine my case update.  That I’m still in a wheelchair.  That I will be for another month.  That I’ll be lucky if I’m walking by Valentine’s Day. 

Maybe it will feel like spring.  Or how I remember February feeling when I was a girl.  That despite the cold and ice and snow, the light stayed a little longer each evening, and the scent of something else was in the air.  I think I called it hope then.  I know I thought about love.  Wanted color. 

Settled for the pink the air left on my cheeks and the changing blue-gray hues of the snow and the ice.

jks