In Sickness and In Health

I was not well over the holidays and quite sick this last week. It's some kind of creeping crud the doctors say my husband may have brought back with him from his military-sponsored hiatus to Senegal, Africa. Whatever it is, it can't be readily cured with anything known to "modern" medicine but I'm willing to bet there's a woman in Conakry who knows just what plant to chew on to make it all better.

This illness has cost me its weight in Puffs Plus and other sickness-related sundries. I can't imagine the uncivilized person who still uses Kleenex. So have my three children and husband been sick all this time, but not all at the same time. That would've been, the gods of illness and maternal devotion decided aeons ago, too convenient. Instead, they were sick one at a time with bits of overlap so that I was off from work for the better part of the past three weeks. And I wrote virtually nothing.

This is lucky for anyone who meandered my online way as my perspective of the world over the past few weeks was at best, askew. My fever broke just in time to find out Pat Robertson had served himself up yet another plate of foot. I tried to make an article of it but couldn't seem to get past the idea that everyone on the planet should get together and smote him. Smat him? Smate him? Whatever. It didn't work. I put the article through Microsoft Word's spell and grammar check only to be met with something I'd never seen before: a pop-up of a deranged animated figure of my late Mother (may she rest in peace) asking me what in the world I thought I was doing out of bed and that I'd probably burn in hell for my syntax. So I crawled back under the covers and tried to keep Mom out of my fever-induced nightmares.

Article Author: Diana Hartman

Diana (nee Gulick) Hartman is the Culture and Tastes Editor for Blogcritics.org. She is a freelance writer, mother of three, and a (Ret.) US Marine spouse. She is a Wichita, Kansas native, having also lived in the California desert, Southern California, and eastern North Carolina. …

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