April already. Young J observed how quickly the days seem to be flying by. And he’s only twelve. He has no idea.

After a couple of months of work, we are finally getting used to the house not being overrun with workers. Our renovation is finished and the painters did their good work and the house finally feels like it is ours. Well, ours, with boxes. Baby steps.

I sat at my desk this week for the first time in ages to get some long-postponed work done. I was translating an interview with the head of design for a major car company. Unlike the interviews I usually translate for this client, which tend to be with workers or managers on the factory floor speaking about their specific jobs, this guy is giving a big picture overview of how a concept becomes a car. It’s fascinating. I feel fortunate to get to do this work, and can’t believe I get paid too. Also, he said he sketches every day. Puts pencil to paper. Every day. This was a good reminder to me that I should probably do the same if I’m ever going to actually write a book.

April is always a bit triggering for me, since two of my three cancer diagnoses came down this month. I find I can no longer easily access my feelings in the immediate aftermath of my initial diagnosis in 2013, because it seems like a different era of geologic time. My kids were small, I was still young, and I was not yet succumbing to the physical and mental lumpiness of solid middle (emphasis on middle) age. I was pretty freaked out, of course. I do remember taking the call from my dermatologist, Dr. A, around midday, before the kids were back from school. I called J and stood by the front window of our old apartment, probably blinking back tears while looking at the ginkgo tree with its leaves just emerging. It would have been sunny.

Of all the things I resent about melanoma, I’d put fear of the sun near the top of the list. I love the spring and summer. I love a hot, humid day. I love the feeling of sunlight on my skin. No one told me that feeling would prove as dangerous as heroin or smoking, until it was. All the UV protective clothing in the world can’t make me feel better about having to live in fear of the sun for as long as I’ve got. (Although if your new paradigm of swimsuit shopping means picking out new full length swim tights and long sleeved rash guards, you may find you don’t miss the often-humiliating exercise of buying more revealing swimwear.)

My initial diagnosis memory of April was surpassed forever by the 24-hour period in mid-April 2015, where I went from being NED in my lungs to having a brain full of tumors. The blog post I somehow wrote while language-impaired is a source of fascination now — and how lucky I am to be able to write that. In the middle of a translation work marathon yesterday, I paused to remember how worried I was back then. I thought that melanoma was going to permanently steal one of my superpowers, language. I remember lying in bed wide awake at 4 a.m. when the steroids kept me from sleep, chatting in Italian with friends in Europe who were already awake. I was desperate to make my injured brain prove itself still capable of coherent expression in any language. I’m surprised I didn’t blow a gasket. And there I was yesterday spending five hours at my computer translating from Italian, then unwinding for an hour by reading a novel in French. (I should maybe seek out some slightly more brainless pursuits.)

I didn’t mean for this post to get morose. Yes it’s April, but it has now been four years since my last big crisis, and I’m still learning new things every day. I’ll keep this song in rotation this month, of course, because of the mordant humor of the line, “What good was cancer in April? / No good at all.” Thanks for that, Lou, if you’re listening. You couldn’t have known, nor could I when I first heard it, how prescient that lyric would be.