What does Owen know? How can I possibly know guess? If I ask him he just turns away. Or smiles.

Last week, in the first days after I learned that I am going to be fighting breast cancer this fall, Owen began to Crank It Up.  He dumped and chopped bottles of laundry detergent and fabric softener.  He gathered all the bedroom and bathroom linens into a mountain in the laundry room, and then he did it again the bathroom. I kind of wondered, standing and feeling dwarfed by the piles of mess, what he knew. He knew something. He could tell that something was different. Maybe he could feel it. His Spidey senses were tingling? Whatever it was,  he didnt like it.

Anyway after about five days of mad chopping, dumping and peeing, at bedtime one evening Edward said, “Owen. Mom is going to be okay. She is going to go to the hospital, and then she going to come home again.”

Edward told me that Owen became very still after this. And then he looked right into his dad’s eyes. The words seemed to mean something to him.

When we went away for Labor Day weekend a few days later, to stay with family and friends in a set of rustic cabins beloved to Edward since his boyhood, in the cold, rainy woods of the Poconos without laundry, I wasn’t exactly sure this was a great idea for a way  to de-stress.  But it turned out that Edward knew by some kind of instinct. He was right. All three of us needed just stop thinking about what might be coming next.

And since none of we humans can really know what’s coming next, at any time, that’s a pretty good idea.