After lying low, zoning out on old movies, and napping all day, I thought I had the worst of the Carmen flu licked.

Until a little while ago.

It’s awfully hard to get a good night’s sleep when you’re coughing your throat raw.  It’s even harder when your fever, just about gone all day, is back to a 101*F per C&D’s nifty ear thermometer.  Its measurements aren’t exactly the same as an oral thermometer, but it doesn’t matter–fever is fever. 

Good thing:

• tomorrow is Memorial Day, and Matt is off for kid duty.  Today he made David a stuffed excavator, and Carmen a butterfly.  Per their instructions, of course, and with the fabric they chose themselves; then C&D stuffed their creations to their specifications.  Take that, Build-A-Bear Workshop.
• the night has been unusually, delightfully quiet.  With the frogs and crickets and mourning dove nesting just outside my window, and the soft ceiling fan on my arms, I can almost pretend I am in the Big Thicket, sleeping in the cabin at Weird Woods.
• some things are just a hop, skip, and a jump away; Matt and the babies walked to Whole Foods to buy me my favorite sore-throat tea.
• I have a Netflix account.  When I’m sick like this, even reading (or typing) can be a strain.  Thankfully a good old movie is a few clicks away.  Tonight I will watch with one eye open, studying the clothes and shadows, and listening to Audrey Hepburn’s lovely purr of a voice.  The night I left the ICU at St. Luke’s after my AVM surgery, I remember staying up late with my mother, both restless from our own kinds of pain, and watching an old movie on the set in the hospital room.  I don’t remember what it was about, and I’m not entirely sure it was even in English.  But I remember the cars, and the silky sound of the actors’ voices.  Tonight when I am up feverish and coughing, and everyone is sleeping, and I don’t want my mind to wander off to uncomfortable places in the quiet, the old movies will hold my silly head in their laps until I am ready to sleep.