Peachy Keen

My mom has had her surgery and everything appears to be great, as much as a cancer prognosis can be "great," that is. Lymph nodes look clear, nothing seems to have spread, and she seems to be a candidate for some kind of "quicker" radiation they have now. Doctors and their newfangled technology. Pfft.

She had her surgery on Tuesday, so I spent most of Monday baking a really, truly time-consuming peach pie. I wasn't sure why I'd even decided to randomly bake a peach pie that day, until I stepped back and thought about what the next day was, and about the fact that I was, after all, raised in the Peach State and wishing fervently that I could be there this particular week.

Then I proceeded to be completely unable to consume any of the peach pie I'd spent about four hours making, between the crust and the peaches. (They were, contrary to the way they were advertised, cling-stone peaches, not very ripe, and not very big. Slicing them up took almost an hour and a half, but at least I managed not to take off any fingertips.) I couldn't make myself eat even the littlest slice, so sure was I that I'd sit there and eat the whole thing, or not eat another thing after a tiny slice. Maybe I underestimated myself. Maybe I would have been able to chow down just fine on a perfectly normal-sized piece of pie (which was, after all, not even made with real sugar). Maybe I'd have been able to reconcile a perfectly fine piece of pie as "dessert," instead of the fake ice cream I've been eating lately. But on Monday and Tuesday and this morning, all I could do about that pie was stare at it and wish I weren't wasting food, and unsuccessfully try to convince myself that my natural and normal hunger and satiety signals were more powerful than a stupid, symbolic pie.

I finally had some just now (now that I know my mom's going to be okay, interestingly), so I figured I was finally allowed to publish that Yum Yum post without being a total hypocrite. And the pie was, in fact, very yum yum.