On sickness and health

blast ye, Covid

It’s Friday at 4pm and we’re lying side-by-side on the bed in the darkening bedroom talking about what to make for dinner. Outside the sky is graying and I heard thunder rumbling. “At least we’ll be getting rain this weekend,” I say.

My spouse Janyce has stopped working for the day, still feeling bone tired from her onset of Covid over a week ago, and she is taking one for the team by agreeing to pick up more supplies at CVS in a mask. I shouldn’t be out anywhere. I’m in the thick of it right now, with a fever that only abates with Tylenol and then comes roaring back six hours later.

Sometime this winter, I stopped fearing Covid so much after hearing many people talk of sailing through it fairly easily and then I got weary of mask wearing and I haven’t worn one in months. But Covid is still out there. And it can be a doozy. Or not. You just never know.

This morning we shuffled along the rail trail with our dog and a large coffee in our hands, feeling almost human as the caffeine hit. The air at 7am is still cool, and it felt as if we’d dipped down into a woodland pool, with glints of sun peeking through the leaf cover. The first half mile of the trail is like a green tunnel before it opens up onto a bright expanse — a local farm with a freshly tilled field and a few flowering plants set out on wooden tables.

We’re lucky to have a fairly chill dog who is happy to crash with us on the bed all day. At one point, I willed myself to get up and grab the pile of laundry on the floor to start doing something useful but then I had to lie down again. Today I’ve watched all my favorite reruns on the computer, feeling solidarity with the wan and broken hearted Marianne from Sense and Sensibility struggling to recover from a deadly virus.

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Saturday morning and it’s more of the same. Janyce has just delivered a cup of tea to me here in bed with honey and it’s wonderful. The smell of the spice, the steam tickling my nose. For days I have done nothing and thought of nothing. Reading? Too hard. Writing? Thinking of any kind hurts my head. What could be more appropriate than the hilarious Billy Collins at this moment and his quite perfect poem.

Sick Room

Every time Canaletto painted Venice
he painted her from a different angle,

sometimes from points of view
he must have imagined,

for there is no place in the city
he could have stood to observe such scenes.

How ingenious of him to visualize
a dome or canal from any point in space.

How passionate he was
to delineate Venice from perspectives

that required him to mount the air
and levitate there with his floating brush.

But I have been sick in this bed
for over sixty hours,

and I am not Canaletto,
and this airless little room,

with its broken ceiling fan
and its monstrous wallpaper, is not Venice.