WHAT GOES AROUND COMES AROUND
A Widow Bit – Sept. 25, 2011
By Mary Koch

            “My wife has one, too; she’s miserable.”

            “My boss has a really bad one.”

            “Yeah, I hear it’s goin’ around.”

            These sympathetic cluck-clucks we hear whenever we get a head cold are intended as consolation, but there is little consolation. Only endurance as we snort through boxes of tissues, try various drugstore remedies, douse our nasal passages with sprays, and drown our sorrows in chicken soup.

            It can’t be cold season already! Yet all the other seasons are so screwed up, this too must be a result of global warming.

            I became aware of my cold as I arose Tuesday morning, initially dismissing it as a passing allergy attack. I was on my way for a three-day visit to Holden Village, where I’ll move in December to live and work for a year. I figured the two-hour boat ride up Lake Chelan and twelve-mile switchback drive high into the mountains would clear my head.

            Instead, the cold settled in, aggravated by my inability to sleep easily in a bunk bed, neither top or bottom bunk. It’d been fifty years or more since I last confronted a bunk bed. They don’t make ‘em like they used to. Nowadays, if you choose the bottom bunk, you can’t sit up because the top bunk is so low. Still, if you opt for the top, you have to climb a ladder that was engineered for an eight-year-old body, and then there’s the probability of falling out.

            After two nights of minimal sleep, I returned home with the cold fully in charge. I hoped that one night in my own bed would strengthen me for the upcoming weekend – a long-planned reunion of women who live in various places around the Northwest. One of the women was to ride with me for the 200-mile trek across the mountains. I handed her a tube of cold preventative tablets and warned that I was contagious. She laughed it off, putting up with my sneezing and one-handed driving as I engineered nose-blowing with the other.

            Our reunion was something like a slumber party, only I couldn’t slumber. Fearing that my snorting and snuffling would keep the others awake, I dragged my futon onto the deck outside and snuggled into my sleeping bag on a crisp, starlight night. Over the murmurs of my iPod, I heard occasional hoots from a nearby owl and more distant yowls of coyotes.

            Finally, around four a.m., I heard the voice of God, maternal and tender, yet stern: “You should be home in your own bed.” Recognizing the truth of the statement, I knew my course was clear and finally fell asleep.

            A few hours later, as the others planned their round of adventures for the day and my passenger made other arrangements for her return trip, I drove straight home and was in my own blessed bed by three p.m..

            Colds are three days coming, three days staying and three days going. This is Day Six. That and my bed console me.