Contagion

"Sickness comes on horseback, but departs on foot”

- Dutch Proverb

One doesn't feel the energy and excitement of an upcoming dream trip around 407 today. P's in there sleeping, even now, on the mend but feeling like hell. I'm sitting here in pajamas, throat swollen and raw for four days straight.

We wore ourselves out getting here, then picked up a crud somewhere along the way. Now we're on our way to Dublin this afternoon. Irresponsible? Hey, we postponed for a day to give all this a chance to run its course, and of course we'll wear masks. Truly I don't think we're catching--no one has a fever, I don't have so much as a sniffle, and we're mostly just really fatigued after braving the Christmas blizzard of 2022 to get back down here.

That we left a day early was an act of mercy on the part of Peg's boss. He and I both saw the same prediction in last Thursday's weather forecast: snow, then thawing so the snow turns to water coating the roads, then temperatures dropping into the teens to turn the asphalt into one great ice rink until after the holidays. If we'd waited until Friday to leave Corning, we'd likely still be up there.

So we drove south, first in snow and ice and then in slushy rain. "You should be out of the bad stuff by Selinsgrove" we were told, which proved exactly correct. The goal for the night had been Rocky Mount, NC, the halfway point between Tara and Wyldswood. My get-home-itis started to set in as we drove into the Washington suburbs, past lots of flashing red and blue lights and wrecks along the side of the beltway, then south past Richmond on I-95 in heavy traffic, even in the dead of night.

As we approached Rocky Mount it was one a.m., traffic was humming along and I was amped with coffee. Should we take advantage of the flowing traffic and just keep going to Florida? Nine more hours would do it. But I thought better of that alternative, figuring that staying up nearly thirty hours to get to the farm would invite trouble. So we stopped in Rocky Mount.

The sign behind the lobby counter stated in bold letters, "NO PETS", but I pretended to suffer from tunnel vision and therefore not to notice the proscription. We slid into the back door of the hotel with the cats, fed them and set up their catbox, and visited for a few minutes to let all those stimulants metabolize before passing out at two.

Friday morning arrived with hope, but we should have known better. The front had blown into the North State, and although skies were clear the wind was howling at 40-50 knots, and wrecks stopped traffic every few miles.

Starting in Fayetteville, we jumped off the interstate, figuring we'd make the same time snaking through small town South Carolina and Georgia on a two lane as we would crawling along on the interstate. We even bought a Rand McNally atlas, which the tall South Asian fellow behind the counter told us was one of the last they had available because no one bought them anymore.

We struggled a little finding a straight line home out in the sticks, and punched the address in Perry into the Mercedes's spiffy nav system. It told us to get back on I-95. So we did. Maybe traffic has lightened up.

Well, it hadn't, so we crawled along, losing another half hour, and then exited for a cow path again. The navigation system lied to us one more time before we told it we didn't trust a word it had to say just outside of Santee, and found an old U.S. highway down through Statesboro, Waycross, Madison, and then Perry.

I thought of Uncle Lehman as we drove through Statesboro, wondering where his old office was located and where he was buried on this frigid evening. It seemed like another age when I was freshly back from the war, sitting on the deck of his Frank Lloyd Wright designed home eating crab legs and drinking scotch as he regaled me with stories about the old-school Georgia politics that was brokered there with his father in their kitchen. All of it so long ago.

We finally bumbled into Perry at 9:30, twelve-and-a-half hours from our departure from Rocky Mount, for a total of twenty-one hours in the car. I was beyond exhausted.

But we were also excited at the "reveal" of the newly decorated farmhouse. The boys had put up Christmas decorations, lit lots of battery powered candles, and created a setting I'll never forget.

Home, finally, to a place we'd never been, a transformed space masterfully done.

But so, so cold. The heat pump wasn't keeping up with the twenty-degree night, so we shivered through the first evening in the master bedroom before moving upstairs to the guest room where all the heat seemed to accumulate. Sleep deprivation, frigid cold--our immune systems were taking a beating.

Then the next morning P couldn't bear the fact that the painters had painted not only the walls, but also her tile floors. After suggesting she should leave it for them to fix, I bought her some Goof Off and Paint Thinner, and she set to work on all fours scrubbing the kitchen floor in a cloud of toxic chemicals.

After we'd knocked our systems down just a little further with that chemical exposure, we set to making tamales, trying to establish a new Christmas tradition for the two of us. Then we dialed up Miracle on 34th Street on the television, but I dozed off just as the trial began. Peg left me on the couch while she went upstairs to sleep, figuring I was probably exhausted from all the driving.

But the next morning, Christmas morning, it seemed we were dealing with something other than garden variety exhaustion. My throat went from scratchy to swollen shut. Peg curled up on the couch after breakfast and fell asleep, not to awaken until the following day. This wasn't just fatigue; we'd picked up a crud.

The next morning Peg still couldn't get out of bed, so George and I rode around together in the Gator as he briefed me on the progress of the work on the two barns and the fences. Our cat-sitter friend never made it over, so we left instructions and pressed on to Panama City via the coast road in the hope that I could do a little paying work ahead of our morning departure for Dublin. Peg missed a beautiful cruise through Carrabelle, Apalach, and that whole stretch of coast, fast asleep and stirring only about the time we hit Port St. Joe. Then I dropped her off at 407 and went to work while she returned to bed. Not good.

Yesterday was clear and beautiful here at 407, with brilliant blue skies and a mostly slick bay. Peg's illness had evolved into a constant cough, along with the relentless exhaustion. We weren't going anywhere, so I spent a half-hour on the phone with my friends at Delta re-booking us for today. Peg went back to bed (actually, she never left), and I spent the day in the office tying up loose ends, which wasn't necessarily a bad thing.

Another beautiful morning here on the world's prettiest bay.

Our flight doesn't leave until a little before three, giving P a little more time to . . . sleep. Never seen her this way for literally as long as I've known her. I'm well enough, ready to pack and try to shift my brain into vacation mode after a grueling few days getting to this point. I'll try to post a little while we're in Ireland, Scotland, and Turkey, with no guarantees as to how that will go. I'm just hoping no one has to avail themselves of the storied public health system over there.