That February the white sofa
was my gurney,
my plinth, my bier. Laid low
by a headache no doctor could
define or ease, sick to death
of the bed upstairs, I stayed
in my favorite reading place
even though I could not read.
The sun’s sharp fingers
shrieked through the high, unshuttered
window, all those days
it was so cold, ten below
and no new snow, not a cloud in the sky.
Alone in the afternoons,
I forced myself upright
to cast a row of magazines against the glass,
then lay back down, arm thrown across
my eyes. From the radio came
news of the world in British accents,
my cat offering his occasional
neutral comment.
At night my daughter
recited a library book about headaches,
and my husband fed me
a few more pages of the novel
I’d abandoned.
When, finally, I had to get up,
my head was hot with pain,
leaving a scorch mark
on the white pillow.
Published in Headache (journal of the American Headache Society) 4/2011
After retiring from a column-writing gig lasting eleven years and yielding over 300 personal essays, I find I still have something to say. My thoughts range far and wide, and occasionally deep, on subjects including being an Iowan who misses Colorado; surviving marital violence; raising an amazing daughter and an equally amazing son; being justifiably angry about the world “these days;” writing poetry and plays; wondering if I’ll get Alzheimer’s like my mom and her two brothers; wanting to write about my twin granddaughters without sounding all Hallmark-y; fixing OCD-ish food; making sense of pants that come in shorts / crops / ankle-grazing / bootcut; being a librarian in public, academic, archival, and medical libraries; waiting 46 years to attend my high school reunion; having a gorgeous garden I can’t take care of; seeing a shaman; loving good men despite all the bad ones; and trying to wrest a little joy from life despite an 11-year-and-counting chronic migraine.