August 30, 2011

• I’m not grumpy.

  …but I needed to look up the word, to make sure.

  “Adjective: Bad-tempered and sulky; moodily cross.”

  Nope, not me.  I’m irritable, sarcastic, and a wee bit cynical today — ill, but not ill-tempered.

  Yesterday, on my way down the ladder from the roof to go to the outhouse, I was struck by severe localized abdominal pain.  When I’d gone a few steps from the base of the ladder, I started belching and burping an insane, outrageous volume of gas.

  Bent over and holding onto my hurting belly, I gimped to the outhouse, then back around the house to tell my son, Doug, I wasn’t going to get any more roof work done.  (Each time I mention the outhouse, I wonder how many, if any, of my readers are just now learning for the first time that I don’t have indoor plumbing.)

  I had been up top, cutting ropes to size, attaching them to grommets for Doug to tie down below, taping the seam between tarps, and reinforcing (with tape) the mastic seals around the seven holes we’d had to cut for vents, stovepipe, etc.  Roof repairs were almost finished, the sun was shining, and until that pain hit me I was thinking we’d have it all done by end of day.

  Ordinarily, a brief search of one or more of half a dozen good diagnostic websites would have told me that I was passing a gallstone, but all afternoon yesterday, each time our modem tried to dial up the web, it elicited an error message saying the line was busy.  Tech support said someone was out here checking the lines and they’d call us when the co-op was back online.

  Meanwhile, I sat hunched over in a chair, searching through my medical library, feeling, along with the grave discomfort, a lot of gratitude for these books I seldom use any more.

  The pain passed, presumably along with a gallstone, but I felt as if I’d taken a beating.  I could barely walk.  I hurt all over, was burning up with fever, wracked with intermittent chills… Hallelujah!  At last some symptoms I can identify without a reference book:  autoimmune flareup, fibromyalgia, the same old same old. 

  I rustled up a cold meal (plain potato chips and Greek yogurt for the protein, fat and carbs, with a handful of pills for the vitamins and minerals) and stretched out on the couch for some video diversion (old VHS of Voyager episodes I’d never seen [haven't had TV for most of my life] including the one where they picked up Seven of Nine).

  After my evening conversation with Greyfox, my husband (not estranged, but we don’t live together — think “bi-coastal couple” on a smaller scale, at 2 ends of a big subarctic valley) I crawled onto my top bunk and Doug fetched me a late snack (leftover fried chicken) and stood by to help me defend it from marauding cats.

  When I woke today, I lay there a while wondering why I felt so wretched.  Then I remembered that I’d gone to bed feeling that way.

  We must go to the spring for water today.  We are out of “drinking” water and to make coffee this morning I had to dip into one of the buckets usually reserved for the washing-up grade of water.  It’s all the same water from the same source, it’s just the containers that are different, but anyhow…. 

  For those who might not know what a “water run” entails, it means loading empty jugs and buckets into the hatch of the jeep — a process complicated by a broken hatch latch, so that we have to get a ratchet from the glove box to remove the screws that hold on the cover over the latch mechanism, before we can open the hatch.  Then we screw it all together for the 2-mile drive to the spring, unscrew it again down there, carry empty jugs and buckets down a mercifully short but perilously steep path to the spring, fill them, haul them back up, load them into the jeep, drive home, unload (with the help of that little ratchet again — but even a defective jeep is better than no vehicle of my own!) and carry them up a mercifully level but tediously long driveway and into the house.

  Doug’s not out of bed yet, and we’ve got about eight more hours of daylight, so I’m not in a hurry to get into gear here.  Today it is raining, and that’s not my favorite weather for doing a water run, but it is heaps and tons preferable to how it will be in a few months:  life-threateningly cold and hazardously slick.

  I’m not complaining.  I could, if I desired, trade in my relative peace and solitude, the clean air I breathe and the clean water from that spring, for the relative convenience of polluted and chemically treated water from a tap in a place that is much noisier and not nearly so beautiful.  I’d swap city crowds and civilized bullshit any day for what I have.  Not complainin’, just sayin’… not grumpy, just tired and ill.

  

  • 7:29 pm
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