Woke to the rhythm of drumming on the mountainside, the rituals for Easter dawn of the African Zionist church. Scratchy thraot, bleary eyesight, hot and cold and achey.
And I had been looking forward to lunch up at the farm with Erna’s excellent cooking, a quieter time and a chance to talk with Karin as we walked through the orchards in the afternoon sunshine.
Instead, making chicken soup from a Claudia Roden recipe, chopping celery, carrots, onion and flat-leaf parsley, shivering and thinking of my cool bed, a darkened room.
Wondering if this is in part stress — the relationship and renewed intensity, the conflict here at home, concern about work and money. I am not sure. Right now too headachey to think.
Going out to water pot plants, afraid they will dry up in the heat, and seeing the tatsoi and chives coming up, needing to be pricked out and replanted. Such munificence, so many seedlings.
Heat and fever working in me. The still afternoon light, a glaze like applied gilt over the fields and trees and garden. Gold and green. Thinking about travelling again, writing, working, embracing a new life.
But for now there is only the sickbed, the creased pillows and drawn curtains. Glad to be just sick and tired. No need to self-medicate moods, no impatience, nothing getting in the way of letting the illness run its course and pass over.
Before I’d embraced 12-step recovery there was no better way for me to wind up drunk than to get sick. Even if I weathered the actual illness for its duration my mood would be altered in such a way that only a bender would restore me to what was then right thinking. Weird. And pitiful.