Cathartic
Cathartic. That is what the daffodils in the vase are to my inner child, cathartic. This morning, while sitting in one of the patient rooms of my dermatologist, when asked by the doctor if there was anything she needed to know, without a whole lot of forethought I expressed our family's gratitude for the care she had exercised in tending to my Dad for the last couple of years. You see, throughout his later years, Dad had been treated quite often for a variety of skin cancers and, in the course of time, had undergone somewhere around twenty-five or six different surgeries, not to mention the numerous skin spots the doctors had frozen on his skin. If that seems like a unusually high number of procedures, just remember that Dad lived to 97 years of age - and had spent most of his life working the land in the sun. Long before the idea of skin cancers and other sun-related skin issues, Dad had worked in the sun, first behind horses and mules, then on tractors which had no cabs an...