October 8, 2017

For a couple of years now I have been afflicted with floods of mucous, which kept me from sleeping (or would have, if anything could) at night, and damaged my throat so that it was sometimes impossible to sing, or even to speak. Coughing, cataclysmic sneezing. Couldn’t find a medication or a cause, until I realized that it happens only in the winter, before I turn on the furnace (which I had blamed for drying out the house and my throat), but after I get out my winter sleep covering: an Afghan Dale knitted (or crotcheted, or whatever you do) years ago. Am I allergic to that? Slept without it last night; am mucous free this morning. Part of the sensation is deep relief, part irritation that so many months were lost to so inconsequential a thing. Did Dale know what he was doing? An ex-boyfriend’s revenge, like those blankets soaked in smallpox that the whites gave to the Indians?  

Afternoon: warm, hurricane-driven rain, so like the temperature of human skin that though to the eyes it appears to be raining hard, the body barely feels it.