Anatomy of a Headache

I am, unfortunately, headache-prone. I've learned to live with the dull aches and the sharp pains, with the early awakenings and the late nights. I don't glorify these as migraines, but they can hang around for days. Sometimes they respond to ibuprofen and sometimes they don't.

It's a point of pride that I don't give in to these headaches — but today I was wondering what it would be like if I did. Would I be one of those neurasthenic Victorian ladies, perfumed handkerchief and rose water, dabbing at my temples and wrists? Would I lie in a darkened room while someone (a Downton-Abbey-style ladies maid) brought me a cup of tea?

Not my style. But that doesn't stop me from analyzing the headache, especially the one I have right now. Unlike the more typical vague throbbing, this one announced itself with a stab of pain between the eyes. I can pinpoint its arrival almost to the minute. It began sometime between 6:50 and 6:55 a.m., while turning right from Vale to Hunter Mill Road on my way to Metro and the office. One moment I didn't have a headache, and the next moment I did.

Now I'm imagining another scenario: that the headache skedaddle as quickly as it came. I can almost feel it now: the pressure will vanish, the tightness will disappear. Ah, yes, I'm feeling better already.

Burrowing

I'd like to say the thunder woke me up, but I was already awake and reading when I heard the first clap. But it did jolt me, and, more to the point, it upset Copper so that he scratched on the door to be comforted.

I escorted him to the basement, his place of safety — though if he only knew how many precariously stacked books and boxes are down there he might seek higher ground.

But burrowing and sheltering have their appeal. I thought about this over the weekend when I draped a comforter over some chairs on the deck to air it out and was immediately reminded of the blanket forts my brother and I made when we were young.

How cozy they were, how beguiling, as if no one would ever find us, as if (it seems to me now), we would never grow up.

Bird Cloud

It was not the best idea to pick up Annie Proulx's Bird Cloud last night when I couldn't sleep. I thought it would lull me back to dreams, much as it had the evening before.

But not this time. Last night I was farther along in Proulx's Wyoming house-building saga. I wanted to know what would happen to the concrete floor that was poorly poured — and the color of liver. I wanted to understand how she could have spent most of her (considerable) income on a place that turned out to be uninhabitable from October till May due to wind and snow-packed roads.

I still haven't gotten a satisfying answer to the last question (though it made me feel good that someone so accomplished could also be so gulled.) As to the first — well, I know she found a floor fixer who gave up his Thanksgiving (for a mere $40,000!) to sand, polish and stain her floor to a dull, serviceable brown.

Along the way, I read lines like this:  "Bird Cloud was to be a type of poem if a house can be that. After Bird Cloud was finished I knew it was a poem of landscape, architecture and fine craftsmanship..."

There is a Morning

"Will there really be a morning? Is there such a thing as day?
Could I see it from the mountains, if I were as tall as they?"

These lines rolled through my head last night as I tossed and turned, unable to sleep. What got me going? Unsettled dreams, our upcoming travels (what they call "good stress"), or just the normal wear and tear of daily life that frays the spirit enough to set the ends flapping in the wee hours, waking us with their clamor. As usual, I shifted position scores of times, made mental lists, fretted over words said and unsaid. I didn't get up and read; I was tired enough that I hoped to be drowsy again momentarily. But the moments became hours. I did, however, drop off again eventually, so that I can at least pretend to have been asleep all night, so that I can answer Emily Dickinson's question, "Will there really be a morning?" with "Oh, yes. There is a morning, all right. And it comes much too soon."