Breaking and entering

Today was an adventure. Here's the backstory:

My daughter's Brownie troop leader has cancer. In fact, she's been fighting it for most of the time our daughters have been in Brownies together. This is not news. However, she's not doing well lately. At all. My friend K-Bear and I went to see her in the hospital last week, and damn. Damn.

Here's an aside: All of you hospital workers and hospice workers and home health care workers who deal with this every day with several patients, YOU ARE HEROES. You do something I couldn't ever do.

So damn, Our Fearless Leader (OFL from now on) did not look...well, "well" is the wrong word. Tired is the wrong word too. More like, she was running a quart low on that cosmic life energy thing we all have, that gets us up in the morning.

Times like this, people like me want to "do" something for the family. But it's not easy to ask the family what needs to be done, and damn near impossible for the family to try and think up something on the spot.

Today K-Bear and I "did" something. We weeded OFL's front yard, and swept the back porch. Then we sprayed Round-Up on the beginnings of some poison ivy we spotted. Then K-Bear went and bought groceries, then we went back and put them in OFL's kitchen for her husband and daughter, because that man could be an extra in a holocaust movie and they'd tell him to gain weight.

Then we secretly copied their house key, so we can sneak back in and do it again next week, if necessary.

'Cause after all, the leaders are Brownies, too.