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healthful help from the childhood neighbors
Friday, February 7 2025
location: the couch in the Shaque, Stingy Hollow Road, rural Augusta County, VA
After another night of unpleasant fever dreams, I awoke with a terrible sore throat, the kind where swallowing is so painful that one is tempted to instead spit in a cup. I didn't actually end up doing that, but I messaged all the people I'd been communicating with to tell them that I was well and truly sick. This caused Gretchen to do some scheming, and eventually she reached out to the Vesseys (the neighbors) and Don Vessey arrived while I was sleeping to drop off a loaf of bread, a gallon jug of water (it had a pinhole leak I eventually discovered), a mix of apples and oranges, and a pair of covid tests. I don't really eat apples, but the oranges were just what the doctor ordered, and I was happy to endure the pain of swallowing if what I was swallowing was a piece of orange. I also took a covid test and was somewhat surprised when it turned out negative. Other than that, though, I tried my best to sleep as much as possible, since that seemed to be the best way to deal with the unpleasantness of my sore throat.
At some point, though, I realized I had painkillers available, a bottle of Tylenol I'd found in the crusty medicine cabinet in the nasty (and long unused) bathroom in the ruins of my childhood home). Not too long after I'd eaten 1000 mg of that, my sore throat seemed to diminish to a minor nuissance. Usually when I get a sore throat, it lasts for at least a day, so my recovery seemed to be accelerating. Maybe I'd turned a corner!
Don Vessey came by a couple more times to drop off things like nuts and a large bottle of grapefruit juice. I caught him on his last delivery and he and I chatted across about 30 feet of outside air. He talked a little about how retiring from the traveling art show life (his wife is a somewhat famous artist) was making him crave precisely the life he'd just given up. And then he said that growing old is no joke and that he was dismayed that nobody had prepared him for what it is like (he's in his early 70s and looks good for his age).
My health seemed to improve further throughout the day, and at some point I resumed salvaging what I could from my childhood home. Using a wrench and a pair of needle-nosed pliers, I managed to remove two different vises (another thing one cannot have too many of) and then I went into the Honey House and took seven or eight of my classic paintings from the walls and packed them carefully in the Subaru. I'd been content to let them go for years, but now that they were actively facing a death sentence, I realized I should at least try to save them. There isn't room to hang them in Hurley, but when I revamp the basement at the cabin, I figure I can hang them there. While I was doing these things, Don asked if there was any of our mother's art I wanted. I've never liked my mother's art, but there was a small painting of mice that wasn't terrible, so I said I'd take that, and that seemed to satisfy Don, who otherwise would've thought I was disrespecting her memory.
I went to sleep fairly early, hoping that a surplus of sleep would my battle against whatever non-covid respiratory condition I was facing.
A selfie while sick on the couch in the Shaque. Click to enlarge.
If you look carefully in that cut in the white pines of "Horizon Field" where the powerline passes through, you can see a deer against the sky. I planted those trees in the evenings after school back in 1985, so they're nearly 40 years old. That's my Subaru Forester in the foreground, and I'm parked in front of Don's Creekside trailer. Click to enlarge.
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