Today is Day Seven. What I mean by that is that it is the seventh day since the onslaught of a vicious flu known affectionately as the Swine Flu. Or, more accurately, the Seventh Day of the relapse of Swine Flu. The first round lasted five days with almost a full week off for good behavior before descending upon me again like wolves.Day Six I would not have been able to write. Day Seven is that day where the world seems possible again. And it happens to be the first day without a fever. Hence a few cooked brain cells are making their weak and feeble way to the forefront.
Today the farmhouse is hunkering down to avoid being swept away to Oz by the gale winds that are lashing through the trees. A strong wind advisory for the island has been issued and there is not a single leaf left on the Grandmother Tree. I think that the wind snatched that fever and took it somewhere else.
I knew I was mending this morning when I woke and thought about planting bulbs.
There is something, a kind of intense clarity, that comes after an acute illness. After everything is burned away. The colors seems a bit more vivid. Decisions that had been wrestling with themselves, just seem to sort it out and a deep feeling of gratitude wraps around you like a blanket.
Granna always said it is healthiest to "burn clean" and I know she meant in terms of moods and grief and anger...but there is something about a high fever that has lasted for days. The murky daze and glaze of sweating and chilling. Of burning up. And so today, charred to my marrow, I am moving slowly through the day rediscovering my own breath, my skin so sensitized that I feel the air move around me. And somehow I feel cleaner. And rather sheer and see-through.
And alive.
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