I am tired of coughing and equally tired of cough medicine. Nyquil is a horrible concoction, in all ways: taste, texture, and temperament. It did, however, allow me to drown in an enchanted sleep for about four hours, which is better than no sleep at all, even though the dreams that accompany Nyquil-enchanted sleep are less than ideal. Mine involved (1) sitting in a car with my mother while she drove up an amazingly steep and narrow hill beside an eroding cliff; and (2) attending a summer-colony gathering of ominous rich people and their wacked-out children, all the while knowing that several of them would soon be bloodily murdered in the kitchen. Ugh. Scenarios like those would make anyone glad to get up in the morning.

Fortunately, real life, here in Harmony, involves a cool wind and a blue sky and the fun of shuffling through leaf piles while hiking across the overgrown grass in my barn boots. It's not a very exciting life but it's far better than bloody murder in the summer-colony kitchen, even after factoring in the coughing fits and the dead chickadee that the poodle is carrying around like a much-loved teddy bear. Sometimes I think sentimentality is a necessary balance to the mind's simmering evil fears, though there's something alarming in the idea that even a dead chickadee in my dog's mouth can become a sentimental item. Apparently, the lines of demarcation are not very distinct.