Can't shake this

...cold. Got sick in FL and improved but never
stopped coughing. Now, I am coughing again,
only much worse. Spent all of yesterday and much
of the day before in bed, reading and trying to sleep,
but it's hard to sleep when you have chills and then
you have fever (or you're burning up sans fever but
burning just the same). My body can't seem to decide
if it's hot or cold. I'm sweating as I type this, but I'm cold.

Gonna give it a few more days and if there is no improvement,
well, guess it will be a trip to the doc (yuck!). I still think
Isaac and I are just passing germs to one another. He got
over pneumonia, but within 2 days of ending his antibiotics,
his nose start running and he started coughing again.

I had 14 people over for dinner last Tuesday night, and
he was coughing then. After he got home that night,
he started vomiting and diarrhea. Lo
and behold, that hit me in the middle of the night
Friday, and then my throat got sore on Friday
and then this awful cough started. To my knowledge,
no one else here that night has gotten sick except
he and I.

I had company in from Orlando (hubby's side of the family),
so I invited all of the close family members over for dinner.
Stuffed shells, salad, crusty bread with some dipping oil.
My sister-in-law brought Italian wedding cake and fresh
blueberries and strawberries to top it. We all ate too much
but had a good time.

***************************************

I am enjoying reading Levis. I only had Elegy
prior to ordering The Selected Levis. I'm not crazy
about the poems in Elegy but think I'll enjoy them more
after I've read some of the earlier work.

And Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (another Annie Dillard)
is an excellent read as well.

She tells the story of a Polyphemus moth cocoon
that one of her friends brought to school one cold
January day.

The kids were passing it around to one another
and warming it up in their hands. She says," The pupa
began to jerk, violently, in heart-stopping knocks."

The teacher put the cocoon in a Mason jar, and the moth,
warmed by the children's hands, began to emerge
from the cocoon. She says, "He couldn't spread his
wings. There was no room. The chemical that coated
his wings like varnish, stiffening them permanently,
dried, and hardened his wings as they were. He was
a monster in a Mason jar. Those huge wings stuck
on his back in a torture of random pleats and folds,
wrinkled as a dirty tissue, rigid as leather. They made
a single nightmare clump still wracked with useless,
frantic convulsions."

She concludes the story by saying that someone
let the moth go free and she saw him dragging
himself down the school's driveway.

I can't get the image of that moth out of my head.

The thought of this poor thing emerging before its time,
incapable of using its lovely wings, freed from the Mason
jar to walk away and die.