Frickin' February

I am feeling a little weighed down the constant flow of have-to –dos that make a house and life and family run semi- smoothly. I had a break from the grind this past weekend, where my bestest, longest, closest friend came to visit. But as the short, tease of a weekend comes to an end, I just get greedy and grabby and I want more time with her. Because right when the groove gets going, and my girlfriend and I figure out what our theme song is for the weekend, and we have a few dance moves to go with it, we have to get back to work or whatever reality we have that needs attending. Although if I didn’t have just that little taste, right now I’d be drowning in the grind of life. Sophie has been sick this week. Feverish, barfy, moaning, glassy-eyed, oh, we are not leaving the house, sick.

Frickin’ February.

I am perhaps going on about the dreary month of February., but it cannot help it. This month is a long, dark, frozen marathon. It drags on with no mercy and I have nearly developed a phobia about the bad that this month traditionally slams onto me and my family. It usually involves any combination of sickness, objects breaking down, trees falling, and power going out.

For example, one February my husband started to read The Stand, by Stephen King. If you are not familiar with the plot of it, it involves a super flu that kills off most of the world, and then those who survive are drawn out to west, plagued by visions and dreams, culminating in the timeless fight of good versus evil. It runs a dainty 1,000 pages. Three days into reading the book, he came down with a raging fever and flu, the likes of which I had never seen him racked with. Then the girls got sick – and that was it. I was convinced that it was life imitating art and we were all going down. I would yell at Cliff to “ finish that goddamn book because it was jinxed and causing us all this misery!” He would read it with fever hallucinations and I would ride him everyday, making sure he was getting closer to the end.

You see, in addition to my hatred of February I am quite prone and susceptible into believing in the apocalypse and the possibility of any sort of giant meteor crashing into the earth or microbe killing most of humankind, and then those of us who survive having to duke it out with the zombies and cannibals . I will watch or read anything post-apocalyptic. I was paralyzed while I read Cormac McCarthy’s, The Road. I believed in every grim possibility. I would have to stop reading and look up at the outside, just to make sure that reality and life was continuing on. As I remember it, he finished The Stand on February 28th and they all got better the next day. March first.

So right now, for the next eleven days I have to strap in tight, fix my eyes on the prize of the promise of spring and hold on until the month is over. Wish us luck.