Morning, Wild Hair, Snooze Button

In the witching hour between midnight and one a.m., the bleat of a text message flowed into my room as my son expressed his excitement at the outcome of the voting in Idaho and Utah.

I replied with emoticons and exclamation points, smiling, thankful that he knew I would awaken to see his notes.

When the phone sent its alarm into my sleep, I rose and stretched, catching sight of my wild hair in the mirrored door leaning against the wall where the carpenter placed it during the closet rehab.  Laughing, I hit the snooze button and burrowed under the quilt, listening to the wind, letting the day’s duties begin to float to the surface of my mind.  I worried a little about my lost Rotary pin, trying to remember where I might have stowed it when I took it off my jacket after last week’s meeting.  I calculated and recalculated the timing from Brookside to Platte City, and finally crawled out of bed at the very last moment possible to have enough time.

My fatigue lies in my cells, entwines itself around my bones, spreads through my veins and over the surface of my skin.  On last night’s conference call with the guru in Stanford, I listened to his assurances that labwork showed stability and his reminder that my first check-up with him last August seemed promising.  He insisted that I have to manage my life to decrease pressure.  I do not treat stress; you must take care of that.

Sure, of course, thank you, I’ll just wave my magic wand and twitch my nose.  But I did not complain.  I thanked him, feeling really no more informed, wondering if anything through which I’m going at his suggestion has had the least impact on my life, never mind making enough difference to justify the effort.  But best foot forward, my Nana would have said.  So I put my hands into the curls and sort them into a braid, as the radio blares, and the wind whips around the houses of my neighborhood.

It’s the twenty-third day of the twenty-seventh month of My Year Without Complaining.  Life continues.

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