Bone-a-fide: What a ride

I am back from Vermont, and after two days, still finding it difficult to process this last week. But since I did not manage to complete more than two sentences of journaling during the entire trip, I’m forcing myself to write, in hopes it will jostle the collage of emotions into relatable thoughts and words.

Open-hearted.

That is the word that best describes my experience. I loved everyone on Team Sarcoma instantaneously. It is rare to feel comfortable, and indeed have it be the most natural thing, to hug strangers upon meeting them. But with the shared experience of battling sarcoma, with all the lost loved ones, words often couldn't suffice. Instant community.

It was a high paced, emotionally charged week. Moments of joy and bliss for what I was experiencing and for who I was sharing it all with, and long notes of sorrow for those who could not be there, for those we remembered.

The rides were beautiful. With all the hills they were challenging too. I felt vibrantly alive and free, and seemed to get stronger with each ride. At times I would look around me and feel a rush of pure bliss. My energy could have allowed me to do the longer rides, but my left leg is still so much weaker that I couldn’t stop my right leg from compensating on the hills and I didn’t want to push it. (Plus, Mom and I were SLOW compared to all the athletic Europeans and the Shriver boys who consistently did the long rides in the same time it took us to complete the short ones!)

We swam in lakes, splashed in rivers, visited local craftsmen, saw cows, chipmunks, ducks, deer, hens, goats. We ate and ate, laughed and laughed, cried, played, prayed, and went to bed thoroughly exhausted every night.

We were lucky to have sunshine the first four days, and to be shaded from it with rain the last three (though frankly, I was pretty bored of the rain the last day when I simply wanted to spend more time in the lake!). Mom and I biked about 30 miles each day, except Wednesday when it poured and we made the astute decision to hang out at the luxurious Trapp Lodge with our new Chicagoland friends, Maribeth and Caroline. Caroline taught us pilates, I taught yoga, and then we got massages and sat in the hot tub. A perfect mid-week day to restore.

There were people from all over the world in our group—France, Spain, Mexico, Denmark, Netherlands, Japan, Poland, and states across the US. I would like to write how each of them touched my heart this last week, but I lack the poetry, so instead I will share a few pictures:

Sweet Reagan from Utah, recently finished treatment (this is right before we went looking for chipmunks on the Trapp Lodge land).