Healing power of home in Hudson Valley

Iwon’t see my redbud bloom this year, just like I already missed my forsythia, my daffodils, my weeping cherry — planted for my 40th birthday — and various birthday fruit trees that came since. I won’t see my neighbor’s magnificent magnolia, which I covet, or burst of quince, either. I’m missing it all because I have been stuck away from my Hudson Valley home — suspended in purgatory, truly — in New York City since Valentine’s Day when my 8-year-old daughter was diagnosed with kidney cancer.

I was born and raised in the city, but it’s not home anymore. I have suspected this emotional shift for a while, but being asked by a pediatric oncologist to stick as close as possible to the hospital has made this clear. When I moved from the West Village, my childhood neighborhood, to a circa 1930s house outside New Paltz with a breathtaking view of the Shawangunks eight summers ago, close friends seemed confused. I could barely drive, why would I of all people move to the woods?

I wanted to live closer to the farms that sustained my family by growing our food, to take in seasons and nature at this fragile moment of climate crisis, and to see trees, not commerce, each time I ventured outside. The only way to respond to their confusion was to joke: If I get cancer, I can easily come back.

I actually said this. And here we are. There’s no joking about a little girl with cancer, I now know.

Each day since mid-february has been chaos, full of loss and mourning, and made trickier as her diagnosis comes in the middle of a global pandemic. I didn’t realize that I’d arrive in the city with one coat and need a far lighter one before we even made it home. I expected to be depressed right now, but I didn’t expect to yearn for moon shadows on melting snow. I didn’t know the weird pain of missing out on the smell and the promise of mud season. I wasn’t aware that I’d have to skip planting seeds, shopping my favorite seedling sales, and witnessing the annual magic of their growth.

I didn’t imagine trees or tulips growing out of concrete sidewalks could make me cry. I want to scream at them to wait for my daughter, who also marvels at their yearly unfurling. She’s coming!, I shout weakly in the direction of a riotous azalea as I weep-run, unhinged, wearing two masks in Central Park.

So I stop going to the park to avoid its unstoppable beauty, though it’s close to the Upper East Side apartment we’re currently installed in as we endlessly make our way through treatment. Inpatient, outpatient, inpatient, outpatient. Chemotherapy. Surgery. Chemotherapy. Radiation. Chemotherapy.

Weep-running is the opposite of what I do on the well-tended Mohonk Preserve paths that surround our home. There I meander in awe, joyous, my head clearing, and my heart opening — a reformed urban kid getting over her nature deficit disorder. It has been a pleasant midlife crisis, until now.

I missed the peepers! This fills me with rage. But anger morphs into sadness so quickly after it flares these days. I also missed the return of the redwinged blackbirds. I’m missing it all. Sometimes I think my family should just give up and move back to my hometown. It would be easier. Even if all goes as well as possible, we will still be in long-term care in New York City, trekking to Memorial Sloan Kettering for years and years and years.

But, in the dark of hospital rooms, kept awake by the specific whoosh-whoosh sound of her IV drips, and by a heart so broken it physically hurts, I realize I can see the Gunks inside my head. In the airless pediatric ICU, I can feel the breeze that comes off the ridge on summer days and swirls

through our house, all windows always open. No need for air conditioning ever. This wind is home. The view is home. I want to trade the hospital germs for dirt-drunk earthworms in the land we get to live on.

Beloved friends send flowers I love. Their tidy bouquets are too sterile. My mom and my older daughter know this. They cut me my own hyacinth and flowering branches and bring them to me in the city. It’s not the same. I want to pick wildflowers at sunset and weave them into the hair my youngest no longer has.

Our oncologist recently suggested we could finally move home around Mother’s Day and finish the rest of her monthslong treatments in the reverse commute of our future. Maybe. This would mean I’d get to witness the last moments of my lilac tree doing her thing and to have coffee near the lily of the valley patch, inhaling its glory.

In the middle of misery, I’m now envisioning us there at long last: a family of four broken but intact on the dandelion-, clover-, and violet-dotted grass with the brazen chipmunks that rule the lawn flitting about. I picture us sitting very very still. I can feel the sun. And I know exactly which friend will stop by first.

The very idea is uniquely mourning-free, calm, even happy-ish. There’s no room for joy or future planning when your baby has cancer. We just go through each day — hour by hour — doing what has to be done and ignoring the mounting bills until we collapse from exhaustion, then wake up and do it again.

It’s war or hell. Take your pick. Doesn’t matter; the only way through is through.

We’re a little closer to through right now — possibly. I hope to make it home in time to experience the things I never knew about as a New Yorker and have grown to rely on as a country transplant: the ants that feast on the peonies’ nectar before they burst into fluffy blossom pompoms, the black cap raspberries that grow in sprays around the property, the ephemerals we now know to look for because we have the pleasure of hiking the same places over and over.

I’m likely going to miss the asparagus, but maybe I’ll be able to gather wild blueberries from our favorite spots, plus pick the blackberries that grow around a beloved neighbor’s pond in August.

We needed to travel to my hometown’s unparalleled hospitals when it was medically necessary. To heal, we need to come home to the Hudson Valley.