Covert Mom: I’m a believer

Flu season. There is the thing with the high fever and the one with the low fever and the ugly cough. No one is getting out unscathed, it seems. Everywhere in the house, a child is coughing under the watchful eye of a feline. I joked with my oldest daughter after her second consecutive day on the sofa with a fever that the cat was watching her so closely because he was waiting for her to die so he could eat her entrails. It got less funny as one watchful cat increased to two, and downright Hitchcockian when three of them convened around my other daughter as she gave herself a nebulizer treatment. There are five of us, and seven of them. They could be waiting until we are too weak to fight them off.

My cough started yesterday, just a tickle in my throat on my way home from the feed store, trunk filled with a half dozen bags of animal food. It got worse after I discovered that the horses had escaped in my absence, and I spent the last hours of daylight tracking them through snowy fields pink with the light of the setting sun. My voice was hoarse as I spoke on the phone with the Sheriff, detailing the sections of the highway where they might surface.

Sean, my husband, arrived home late after teaching and saw me curled in a ball of stress and illness on the sofa, burbling about hoof prints and state troopers. He walked right back out into the fields, in the dark, still in his office clothes and returned with the horses. He is a good man.

This morning, the cough was broken glass in my lungs. I couldn’t get the shower hot enough; food didn’t taste right. Sean had circles under his eyes. We needed to unload the feed bags. I simply could not imagine carrying them all across the icy driveway. I asked him to help me.

“I just can’t,” I told him. “It’s like a skating rink.” He was still in his striped Hanna Andersson long underwear, I had flannel pajamas flapping under my jacket.
We ventured out. The fresh layer of snow on the ice hiding its smoothness. Though it was cold, far below freezing, the sun was a warm weight on my shoulders. I baby stepped out to the car, almost slipping when I popped the trunk. Then, headed towards the barn, a bag of senior horse grain in my arms, I heard the birds singing. I stopped. The birds were singing. It has been so long.

“Do you hear that?” I asked Sean, my feet slipping. I skittered, clutching the feed bag for balance. Sean, similarly burdened, cracked up, kidded me about my ‘catlike reflexes’. He did not slip. Slowly, we walked back and forth from the car until all the bags were unloaded, my Uggs and his Sorels crisscrossing the slick ground.
In the barn, I upended the bags into the galvanized cans, then whacked at the frozen chunks of grain with the cat’s paw, or as I like to think of it, my lady crowbar. With each impact, I tried to remind myself that I was living the dream. Rural living. Horse ownership. Kids. Today that meant beating the lumps out of the horse food barehanded while flirting with a fever.

The sun, a little warm even through the windows, streamed into the barn, illuminating the cat carrier, the container of horse grooming supplies, the crate of my father’s personal things. It was slanted at a higher angle, brighter than in the past months. I heard the birds again.

Spring is just around the corner. They know it. I know it. If we had chickens, they would be laying eggs like gangbusters right now. This is the time of year where spring builds up in the corners of winter, waiting for it to weaken. No matter how much more it snows, or how many viruses run rampant through the school district, those singing birds don’t lie. That warm sun is real.

I baby-stepped back out to the driveway to help Sean push the wood cart over the ice. We will recover, but winter will not.