After very scary breast cancer surgery Nancy is now back home and Dr. Barth at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock cancer center in Lebanon, N.H. assured us that he and his team feel that after removing four tumors in the breasts and eradicating five infected lymph nodes, they have got everything out that was immediately threatening. At the end of June Nancy will have to begin radiation treatment in St. Jonesbury and after that, a regimen of chemo-therapy.
Meanwhile, we would like to thank all of our friends for the kindness and support you have shown us during this scary time. I shall keep you updated regularly of her progress. Meanwhile, I am honored to be "nurse" for my beloved lady.
Actually, today. June 10, only eight days after her operation Nancy wanted to get out of the house so I drove her to Agway so we can get some plants for the rock garden I built for her last year. It is so nice to see her smile again.
Nancy and I have been together, pretty much every day since I first met her in October of 1991. We were married on our big old power boat "Sunbeam" on April 26, 1992 at her berth in Groton, Ct.. Sunbeam had formerly been a mission vessel for the Maine Seacoast Missionary Society and had served as mission vessel, church, dental office, library and food delivery boat at many small islands along the Main coast. So - we had to make our honeymoon to Bar Harbor to meet the mission people and learn more about the history of our boat which was to be our home for some time. Actually, when we moved to Canada where we lived for 18 years, we did it on Sunbeam and the old wooden thing made the trip to Nova Scotia in great form.
The above picture is Nancy and I on our 22nd anniversary which we spent at our friends Douglas and Agnes Hersant's home in Mystic, Ct.at the end of April. Douglas has just sold his Fort Rachel Marina and retired. He was my best man at our wedding and we have maintained a great friendship throughout the years and they even have a guest room for us in their home on Water street in Mystic for every time we wish to visit them which we try to do every six months.
Back to the great Canadian adventure: Nancy and I rented a lovely home in Montreal and operated a bicycle shop for 12 years together. I was the mechanic and Nancy was the "brain" of the outfit. We even had a resident cat, aptly named "Spokes", two of her off springs are still with us some 18 years later...
After we sold the bicycle shop to our employees because I had been ill for some time, we moved to Sutton, Quebec, just across the border from our Newport, Vt. home and Nancy started a house cleaning business while I began a whole new career as a baker, first for Abercorn Bakery and then for the last five years of our Canadian adventure as master baker with Pascal Picarda at his French bakery in Sutton. And of course Nancy had the cleaning contract there as well which meant that she dragged me back to the bakery every afternoon to help with cleaning mixers and the mopping of floors.
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| Here is my former boss and our good friend Pascal at his bakery. |
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This picture shows my lovely wife at the Stanstead border control station when we moved back to her beloved Vermont. Her smile says it all - she was not always happy in Canada because she is a flag waving US girl and wanted back home. How can I argue with that and we have been very happy in Newport until the cancer problem started but with good humor and love we shall overcome this like we did so many other things in our more than two decades of marriage.
Now that the sun is finally out we actually got to go to Gardener Park yesterday, June 12. Today, June 13 we had our visiting nurse come and she is quite happy with Nancy's progress but there is some new concerns, one being high blood pressure and a really bad cholesterol level which now mandates her to use a Statin drug.
One of our four cats, "Marble" is trying to aid in Nancy's recovery by being extra nice to her. I am trying my best to do the same and I am becoming quite good at changing bandages, doing the laundry, washing dishes and cooking for my sweetheart which is no big deal because I did most of the cooking since 1992.
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| This is me on our porch with a guitar I just made recently. I can do the wood inlay etc. but I can't play... |
Other than making nice things out of wood I have had the great joy of being a columnist for the Sherbrooke Record since 2005 and recently have been tasked to do our cross-border "Passport" magazine which is inserted in the Newport Daily Express and the Record. I have published more than 600 articles in those papers and am still a member of the Professional Journalist Association of Quebec and the Canadian Press Club.Right now I have to get the next issue out which is due next Wednesday and I hope to get a good interview this weekend with the HALO foundation which helps cancer survivors in Vermont. Nancy also has given me permission to write about her fight with cancer and the loving and superb treatment she has received through Medicaid and of course all those incredible people at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, New Hampshire.
In the last issue I did two pretty cool stories and they can be seen here:
http://mapleleafpress.blogspot.com/2014/05/how-one-person-can-make-difference.html
http://mapleleafpress.blogspot.com/2014/05/the-art-of-making-small-picnic-table.html
Today, June 14, I got Nancy out of the house and we drove our 30 year old Chrysler to the Chinese restaurant on Derby road. The following picture says it all:
Now that we are back home, we changed bandages and drains etc. and she is sleeping with three of our lovely cats keeping her company. I so love this woman!
In case nobody in town has ever seen our "boat", here is a picture:
Since I am in this reminiscing mode, I miss my boat and the Maine Seacoast Missionary Society sent me a film clip about her launching in 1939. Now, you good friends of mine who actually read this have to understand that this thing was a bit of a wreck when we got her but Nancy and I completely restored the boat and we had the very best years of our early marriage taking the old girl out into Long Island Sound or over to Greenport or to Block Island on a whim or to just drift off the Fisher's Island approaches with a good book.
Anyhow: Here is the film clip about our beloved Sunbeam:
http://oldfilm.org/collection/index.php/Detail/Collection/Show/collection_id/432
I know, I ramble on but this morning I had the good fortune to speak to Marina Neumann because I needed some help with a motor vehicle issue and she told me that her parents named her Marina after that beautiful Italian classic song "Marina Marina" which I first heard on my dad's car radio in the early 60's when we drove to our summer home at Garda Lake.This is the only song I remember all the lyrics of and unfortunately, after listening to it this morning, I realized that I misspelled half of it. If you want to listen to it in its very best Italian version, I encourage you to go to this lovely site: (It only takes four minutes but if you don't fall in love with this incredible expression of Italiana I don't know what is wrong with you)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZY5529dJ0bU
While I am yapping on here - this is my last 200+ published stories:
http://mapleleafpress.blogspot.com/
Two years ago we were in Knowlton for our wedding anniversary and I wrote this:
By Manfried H. Rieder
A month ago we made a reservation at Knowlton's storied Lakeview Inn for our wedding anniversary dinner. Not knowing that the day after Easter Monday, the inn would be closed, we were surprised by a courteous telephone call asking "if it would bother us to be the only guests in the dining room ?"
Of course not", I answered, feeling bad that this was obviously a slow night for this fabled restaurant. Well, when we got there, we discovered that owner Van Voutsinas had rounded up Tomo and Tomi to give us the best possible anniversary dinner they could provide. For the first time in a long time (believe me when I say that this is rare !), I was speechless.
"Tomo" is Tomo Kovacec the brillant chef, "Tomi" is Drazen Tomic, maitre d' extraordinaire. Both gentlemen as well as Mr. Voutsinas who has owned the inn since 2002 exemplified for us the highest degree of the lost art of hospitality. Over the 22 years of married life, we have had many opportunities to dine in much celebrated restaurants, meet many "starred" celebrity chefs and pedigreed owners. This evening made all of our prior dining experiences fade into memory.
After chatting with Van who is a displaced Floridian with a passion for Knowlton and his 1874 Loyalist mansion, Tomo disappeared into the kitchen and Tomi escorted us into the lovely dining room where a table had been prepared for us, flickering candle included.
The Honorable Arthur Meighen, Sir Wilfrid Laurier and the Right Honorable Robert Borden, former Prime Ministers of Canada, have all dined there, possibly at about the same spot where we were seated, but I doubt they had the same lovely background music or ate as well as we did.
"Forget the menu" grinned the two conspirators Tomo and Tomi. "We are ready for you and you just have to eat what you get".
What we got to start with was a velvety smooth seafood bisque and we both decided that if there was nothing else to eat, we would both drive home happy. But not so. A sublime hot Foi Gras, beautifully arranged with croutons and a sauce which was delicate but not intrusive graced the table and was gobbled up rapidly. Next arrived a plate of lamb shank slow cooked over some 18 hours and so tender that Tomi suggested that I should not need a knife. He was right. The morsels separated by the merest touch of my fork, yet had not been overcooked. A fine sauce accompanied this dish. Nancy received a superb fillet of salmon and we kept swapping dishes so that be both could enjoy the delicacies.
And then dessert. I stop right here, because as I am writing this, I wish I had some more of Tomo's wife's luscious cheese cake, the velvety slice of pie and other lovely things we were allowed to sample. Tomo and Tomi were both born and raised in the former Yugoslavia and Tomo had four years of schooling in traditional Mediterranean cuisine but has had no trouble waving his magic wand over a whole array of variations on the theme "Brome Lake Duck", which is a standard fare on the menu.
For you regular people out there who do not get the whole house for yourselves for an evening, you may be consoled: The inn offers a Pub Platter for two for only $ 50.- which includes a good bottle of wine. The Pub is a lovely friendly place full of ambiance..On Fridays it is roast beef special night ,which starts at 6 pm, and every day you may avail yourselves of a delicately seasoned 11 oz pork chop served with grilled roasted potatoes, vegetables and apple strudel for a mere $ 11.95.
