Dear Kids,

The big family news of the week is that Tom’s family has covid–well, at least Tom and the three girls.  I don’t think Kim is positive, or Tom would have put it on the family message thread.  When I talked to Tom a couple of days ago, he said Abi had been the sickest, and the rest of them just have flu-like symptoms.  Tom has lost his sense of smell and taste, but not as completely as with some of the colds he’s had.  We hope and pray they will all recover soon, along with Allen.  How about the rest of you?  Do you think it will pop up somewhere else among us?  Of course Tom’s family is quarantined, but we hope they’ll be out and about by the time of the cousins’ gift exchange next Saturday. (Allen called it the gift and covid exchange.)  

Our quarantine here is going really well.  When we need stuff from Walmart, John or Donna buys it for us and puts it on their porch.  Then Dad swings down to Heber (or Midway) in the truck to pick it up.  Dad and his truck are always eager to be out and about, so it’s working out fine.  I don’t feel like going anywhere, so the quarantine doesn’t matter to me at all.  My pain level is still high, partly because I’ve transitioned off oxycodone onto gabapentin and tramadol, my usual drugs of choice.  I miss the hallucinations, but it’s nice to have my brain sort of working again.  It isn’t nice to have my leg hurting so much, but I’m confident that my pain will east off eventually.  Thanks for all your prayers in my behalf.

Part of my regular every-day diet is the Charlie Thacker biscuits, and Dad made a batch of them for me earlier in the week.  I told him where the recipe was, and I presumed he followed it, but they were quite different.  But good.  Different shapes than I’ve made before, and quite brown on the bottoms.  That’s because he baked them in the bottom of the oven, because the rack was still down there, from cooking the Thanksgiving turkey.  We ate them all, though.  I appreciated his help.

Finally we have some snow on the ground!  Not much, but it keeps Scout and Sonia from rolling in the dirt.  They were coming in dirty up until the last possible day.  They figure I’ll brush them, and Dad will vacuum the carpets, and I think they like the attention.  Now they’ll have to find some new way to aggravate us.

Some of you have asked what I want for Christmas.  Amazon credit, same as always, but I can’t request Midnight Reverie, like I usually do.  Bonnie brought me a fabulous collection of dark chocolate truffles and Lindt truffle balls, and I was looking at them and thinking about them and planning when I was going to eat them, and my mouth started to swell.  Now it’s full of cankers, even my lips, which are big and swollen.  Talk about a conditioned response!  It must just have been the saliva while I thought about the chocolate.  I’m going to eat all the chocolate when my mouth heals, and if I have another cycle of cancers, so be it.  Life is short, and there are so many wonderful kinds of dark chocolate in the world.

Lots of love, Mom