...“Summer Cold” So, I got a cold.If you catch a cold in the winter, everyone is sympathetic. They tell you to drink hot tea and put on another sweater. A cold in the winter just seems like part of the season, and I can turn the thermostat up and wait it out.A summer cold is totally different. A summer cold seems like an act of idiocy. A summer cold feels like I’m being difficult on purpose. I feel I must have done something really stupid—because who gets sick in the middle of the summer? And yet, here we are.My husband, Peter, takes good care of me when I have a cold. He shows up with all sorts of pills and supplements he says I should ingest. And so I do, but I’m not sure they help. They make Peter happy, and that’s the point. But when I don’t get better after two days, Peter starts to frown at me. He wants me to say that I am at least better than yesterday. But today I am not better than yesterday. Today I am considerably worse than yesterday, and yesterday I was worse than the day before.Peter does not approve of this trajectory. He feels I am headed in the wrong direction and need to do something to rectify my course. But I don’t know what I can do—besides drinking orange juice and trying to sleep a bit more. Colds take time.And Peter probably has a point about pushing myself. I felt bad yesterday but attended a Zoom meeting with some ladies I’m very fond of. I had almost no voice when I started, and much less when I was done. Peter gave me a disapproving look.In order to get ready for the meeting, I had to work a little harder to get everything done a little earlier. Then I had dinner and got a stomachache. The stomachache had nothing to do with being sick, so you would think it would have the courtesy to hold off until I wasn’t coughing quite so much—or at least until I had a voice, so I could complain about it.But this one was terrible. So I went to bed early with a stomachache and a cough and a sore throat and the feeling that I must have behaved very badly to get all these things at once.And, while perhaps I didn’t ...
