A Note from Down Under

A cloudy, uncharacteristically warm January Sunday, already in the 40’s, or so I imagine because the bird bath isn’t frozen, as I look from the kitchen window, and there is no discernible frost on the ground.  It is much later than I am usually here, 8:45, but this cold has me on its own schedule, as it bears down with its burden of mucus and lethargy. 
This affliction and I are on our fourth day, the third of confinement.  It has been awhile since I’ve been felled by an upper respiratory revolt, and I’m trying to succumb gracefully.  But even though I have had a witness (John is home this weekend) I have found myself only belatedly realizing, “oh, it’s 3 p.m. and I haven’t showered”, or “this is the same sweatshirt I had on yesterday and its none too clean.”  There’s something about being ill that cancels the good grooming part of my brain.
In fact, it cancels the time-keeping part of my brain as well.  Yesterday, as I lay on the couch under a blanket drifting in and out of cooking shows  (I slept almost entirely through Todd English’s trip to the Andes), I had the growing sense that this was now my life, that I had never been/done anything else, and would never be/do anything else, and once a sharp panic dissipated, a sneezing fit took over, and I just fell back into that stream.  It was fine.  Nothing else was possible. Such is the power of snot.
Such is the power of the body, the dense weightiness of it, with its waves of urgencies, advancing and receding.  We are its servants, in many ways, as it must be fed, emptied, bandaged, washed, soothed with caresses. Sometimes it must be medicated, and for me, that is always confusing, as I was raised by a mother now on 17 prescriptions who, in my formative years, drank raw egg and wheat germ milkshakes, a la’ Adelle Davis. 
Plus, as an eldest child with Leo rising, I would rather do “it” myself.  I have this innate sense that the body, not just my body, but the body can and wants to heal itself, if furnished with the proper pile of ingredients, that the body is in fact already hard wired with all manner of self-correcting mechanisms.  That the job of my thinking/mental self is to listen to all these symptoms and discern what needs to be added:  orange juice?  warm humidity?  sleep?
But it turns out that sometimes what needs to be added is the voice of somebody who has access to a prescription pad.  I’m not there yet, not this time, but I’m just saying. . .if these ears don’t clear up. . .well maybe. . .