RECUPERATION #1 – The Kale Smoothie

It has been a very long time – at least for this blog – since I have posted anything at all on the site.  That is not because I ran out of things to say about Çiralı or Türkiye or the heartbreak of Suriye or that there was nothing else to write about; in fact, there’s been so much else that it’s been hard to find a place to start.

At any rate I have found a place to try to begin.  Here it is: I have been ill since early June, which required us to change our Cypress Hills/Eastend, Saskatchewan working vacation plans immediately after landing in Calgary because I ended up in Foothills Medical Centre for treatment of a serious condition.  So instead of writing about what we did in Alberta and Saskatchewan (because we didn’t get to do them), I am going to write about recuperation from illness in general (my ideas about that) and some of the particularities of my own recuperation.

For this post I am focusing on particularities because I don’t want to tell others what they should do in their own recuperations.  That is, I am not trying to instruct others; I am just writing here about what I did, a descriptive rather than a prescriptive account of my recuperation.  

When I landed in Foothills Medical Centre in Calgary via Emergency on June 10 and word reached our children, they all made their several ways to Calgary to be near Lorraine and me and to help (more on this later).  And our daughter, the lovely and incomparable E., landed with some specific dietary ideas for my recuperation, a central feature of which is the kale smoothie.

That’s right, the kale smoothie!

I know lots of people who happily drink, or eat, their smoothies every morning, though I was never one of them, and I resisted E's overtures at first.  I wasn’t alone.  In fact, one good friend in Calgary who’s in his seventies jumped out of his chair in my hospital room at the mere mention of kale smoothies, and when I showed him the drink (thick and the approximate colour of an army tank) I thought he was going to jump right out the door.  An acquaintance who actually tasted one said it was like licking the lawn mower!  So you can see that I was not the only one in the room to resist.

However, E. gently persisted and insisted, and I drank my kale smoothies at the beginning of each meal.  As time passed my smoothies became a little less fibrous and rough and much easier to swallow, and I have grown to like them.  She supplied them for the five weeks I was recuperating in Foothills and has continued to supply them for the three weeks we have been home in Ferguson’s Cove.

So now there are bouquets of kale on our kitchen counter, the blender buzzes each morning, and I am continuing to recuperate, which is what all of us here have wanted to happen.  So my conclusion is that a critical component of that recuperation (my recuperation) has been the kale smoothie.  

Maybe you should try one.  You don’t actually have to be ill to do it, and they are good for you.

 

If you don’t believe me, just ask E. or go check wikipedia.