BANISHMENT 16: Winter

This morning I woke up and felt like I had a Winnebago parked in my nose. My throat is scratchy. My eyes are a bit red. And my head is throbbing. Pulsating like the Krispy Kreme ‘Hot Now’ sign, only with no yummy doughnuts as a result. I have bottles of medicine single file on my kitchen table.  Lineup of “healers” in liquid gel, day/night, or caplet form. My wastebasket is a Kleenex convention, white snotty puffs congregating with other white snotty puffs. This can only mean one thing: I am slowly dying. Keeling over in my apartment-of-one to be found by the FedEx man who creepily peers through my highly ineffective blinds.

I’m not any good at this. I’m good at a number of things - including people watching, boarding airplanes, and drinking java – but I am not good at being sick. It requires such an intense degree of ughness. You’re supposed to lie in bed all day and drink liquids. You’re supposed to overdose on vitamins, watch reruns of Mary Tyler Moore and become a child of four, once again gulping down chicken noodle soup, saltine crackers, and a Lake Eerie of Sprite. This can be fun when you have someone to love on you, bringing you hot washcloths and a movie stockpile from the Red Box. But when you’re alone and sick, it’s the pits. You are the tree in the woods that falls down and no one hears. You have to drive your snotty self to the grocery store, pick up your own cans of chicken noodle soup and pray you don’t spread influenza throughout the greater Kroger area.

This is entirely winter’s fault. It has overstayed its welcome. It’s March. In the south. We’re supposed to be breaking out our allergies to dandelions, not our fire logs. But yesterday it snowed. And today if feels like the innards of an ice cream sundae.

Typically, winter and I are pretty good friends. I love curling up in sweaters and being told to light fires. I like candles and fuzzy blankets and that feeling of stepping into a warm house after being felt up by the cold air’s frigid fingers.  But after about a month and a half, the whole charade gets a little old. Nashville has horrid drivers who become even more severely handicapped when Father Winter sprinkles his dandruff on our streets. I live in an old house that has less insulation than an anorexic girl, and I am so over the gas bill. And now, on top of all of its expensive, dangerous grandeur, the season puts me on my death bed to cough myself into a miserable and lonely demise.

For lent, I give up winter. I adopt spring and sandals and a slightly darker olive twinge to my skin so I no longer look like the ghost of Christmas Pallor. The cold and its flurry friends can consider themselves evicted. Parting gift: my snotty box of Kleenex.