I've become a watcher. I watch Bob vacuum, water the plants, fold the clothes, empty the dishwasher, and unload the groceries. I watch football, baseball, daytime television, the weather, the big trees across the street dancing in the wind, the ongoing  battle for syrup between the hummingbirds and the wasps, the gradual lightening of the morning sky, the noisy parade of green garbage trucks, the daily walks of familiar dogs, the worker bees mowing, pruning, patting, and tending the solid, square neighborhood houses.

I'm usually a doer—the vacuumer, gardener, cook; but this hippy thing has changed my role. After major surgical body invasion, we seem to hold the offending body part (for me, it's always the legs) literally at a distance—a thing apart. As my hip heals, it's becoming part of me again. Pain has dissolved into discomfort, itchiness, and the occasional twinge as the left hip settles back in to being part of a whole.

My fog has lifted—due in no small part to the absence of pain pills—and I have a hand in own my life again. I take showers, wash my hair, make a coffee, hang up my clothes, wash a dish or two and make decisions, but I miss the doing. I miss making the bed, sweeping the courtyard, cooking, driving, weeding—the ordinary acts of life. Peter Devries, in "The Blood of the Lamb", writes eloquently about a discussion among old WW II veterans reminiscing about their wartime experiences and "the best moment in their lives". Each describes a wrenching, temporary loss and the joy that the return to the commonplace, perhaps previously discounted, brought to their lives.

Luckily for me, there was no wrenching loss but I am still looking forward with glee to a return to my common routine.