DOING A UNIT
How a disaster pile-up and a 400-yard vacation are changing my take on shittiness in general
Life at the Polish Riviera begins at 5am. I am here in the convalescent home and Rona Refuge my vacationing European neighbors and excellent friends offered me for the week because the rest of my nuclear family is Covid Positive, and I’m fresh out of the hospital from an unrelated onslaught, toting images of my lungs that look like dried spills of sandy cereal milk. I’m roughly 400 yards away from my sick (yet generally chipper) husband and children, but life here is so different as to be comically luxurious.
The reason we begin early at the Riviera is that the steroids I’m taking to treat a traveling autoimmune circus that unpacked in my lungs last month after probable Influenza A (GET YOUR SHOTS) are of the opinion that 5am is the best time of day. It turns out they’re not wrong.
At dawn, through the Riviera back porch sliding door off the master suite in which I do the work of S(/KN)ITTING A LOT, I hear a Wood Thrush over the back creek in the woods, and all the field birds I could want from a 6-acre meadow of milkweed and other native plants.
The cat, Nurse V., has been on perpetual double shift— she always works from 1pm to 7am. Last night’s shift ended with her crawling under the covers with me and making a cinnamon-bun of herself right where one of my sick children would go.