It's 44 degrees in the little northern city by the sea, and I am sitting in my couch corner, in my red bathrobe, with my white cup and saucer, just like a regular healthy poet might. So far, so good: I slept well, and late, woke up without a fever and now I'm even feeling sort of lively. Yesterday was an aggravating mix of energy and sudden crashes, and maybe today will be that way too. But it's off to a good start. 

Also, my typing has improved. I didn't know that Covid messed with small-motor skills, but it seems to have messed with mine. I'm still making a million typos but at least my fingers are now going in the generally correct direction.

I'm sitting here with a broad awareness of how many tasks have lapsed, but I'm also glad to say that I'm not too worried about any of this. I hope, at some point, to clean floors. I hope, at some point, to work in the garden. But I really don't know when I'll be able to do any of that, and none of it truly matters. The garden is already drought-shabby and groundhog-ridden. And the house is still pretty tidy, despite the extra layer of cat fur.

I was thinking about the comments some of you left on the post (was it yesterday's?) when I took a stab at describing the bodily indifference I felt during the height of my illness. Both my sister and Tom have talked to me about the strangeness of the experience, the breath of danger that hung over it, even as none of us actually felt imperiled. Childbirth, as Angela reminded me in her comment, did feel like an active battle with death, and my body grappled hard to win. There was no indifference. I've never had cancer, so I can't speak to that comparison, which, in any case, I imagine is different for each person. All I know is that, in the throes of Covid, my body did not care about itself. 

I don't know how else to describe the lethargy, which was not fatigue but something more insidious. If I had been sicker, my body would not have struggled to stay alive. It would not have helped itself.

I keep going back to the phrase "medieval stench"; it's the metaphor I find myself reaching for when I try to think this out. Because this illness is powerful. It reaches back into the dark annals, the before-times, when medicine was a dried toad tied to the belly or a bundle of nettles under the bed. Nothing of what I've said is rational or scientific; none of it has anything to do with what the illness means to doctors or researchers. But the truth is that illness bleeds body into mind, fractures body from mind, mixes and combines and ferments and throws away, and all I can say is that you should read what Virginia Woolf has to say about that in "On Being Ill":

Literature does its best to maintain that its concern is with the mind; that the body is a sheet of plain glass through which the soul looks straight and clear, and, save for one or two passions such as greed or desire, is null, negligible, and non-existent. On the contrary, the very opposite is true. All day, all night, the body intervenes; blunts or sharpens, colours or discolours, turns to wax in the warmth of June, hardens to tallow in the murk of February.