a cold wind

Yesterday, I dashed to my most-local farmers' market about twenty minutes before it closed.  I am sick. Serious health challenges.  Most of time, I am content to stay in bed doing nothing but being sick. It's a little scary to watch myself go day after day preferring to be still. It's not laziness.  Sometimes I drag myself to the pool; once I get there and jump in, my body moves through laps on autopilot and it feels good. Once I am back on land, I feel as sick as ever. The walk home from the pool, which is, seriously, about a block, can seem quite far on my bad days.  On the 'bad days', I have so much fatigue that I can barely move.  I feel lousy most of the time but the deep fatigue is almost worse.  When I become aware that I have thought about the effort of reaching over to pick up my water bottle beside my bed, aware that I am thirsty but dreading the work of taking a drink, I am sick.

Yesterday was such a day. But I needed some food in the house. 

I have been digging pink lady apples. Yesterday was probably the tail end of the pink lady season.  I like these apples for their taste but also they come smallish, at least smallish compared to supermarket apples, which seem to get bigger and bigger.  Has anyone else noticed that grocery stores, even places like Safeway, sell gigantic premium apples?  These big ones are too big.  The pink ladies are perfection. I have been eating one for breakfast with two tablespoons of almond butter. I count my carbs beforehand and then two hours later. Testing glucose two hours after eating is called 'post prandial' testing.  I wonder what post-prandial (PP) means, eh?  Somedays, post pink lady with almond butter, my sugar is still okay. Other days, eating the same thing (with unavoidable variations in apple size, naturing insisting on its independence in sizing fruit), my sugar PP skyrockets.  How come?

So I bought one pink lady per day.  After I had paid for my apples, I noticed a box of irregular, and bruised, apples for a buck a pound. I paid $2.50. A woman was buying enough buck-a-pound apples for a pie. I love to make pies, esp. apple. I really wanted to buy a bunch of those cheap apples and bake a pie. But I need flour and lard and a whole pie is a lot of pie.  Still, I much prefer my own fruit pies cause I use lots more fruit. So my pies are always 'deep dish'. If the recipe says 8 apples, I use 14 for the depth.  Baking apple pies makes me lonely, though, for when I had someone to share pies with, which I don't have now. If I were to bake a pie, I'd eat the whole thing. Plus I would have had to shop for flour. I always have butter in my freezer but I tend to buy flour from organic pins at Whole Food, two or three cups at a time.

I really wanted to go to the Grand Lake market yesterday but I felt too sick for all the effort involved.

I still have a butternut squash from last week.  I intend to bake it and turn it into squash soup. Lots of carbs but good carbs.  Why is a creamy orange-yellow squash soup so satisfying?  I could spice it with a little curry, or keep it soothingly plain. Choices choices. But soup is a lot like pie:  it suggests shared meals to me.  I should cook well for myself, right? But I want to cook for shared eating.

I'm so sick of me.

Anyway. As I waited in line to pay for some tomatoes, the two young adults behind the pay location both felt a gust of cold wind. The gal shivered and said "It got cold all of a sudden." Then the guy acknowledged that he has also shivered. They both tried to pull their hands into their sweatshirt sleeves, tried to pull down the hoods on those hoodies.  I restrained myself from telling them, matron-like, that they should have another layer, at least have one on hand. Of course they were cold with only a sweatshirt. Winter has arrived.

I think winter arrived in Berkeley about 1:45 p.m. yesterday. I swear I felt the first cold winter wind around that time, as I shivered over to the market. On Friday, it was not freezing. On Saturday, freezing. Today, Sunday, freezing to stay. Winter has come.

Tomorrow I get some tests done on my heart.  I am considering telling my doc, when I eventually talk to her about the heart tests, which will not be tomorrow, that I might not treat whatever she decides is wrong. Maybe people are supposed to accept illness and die off. Maybe we aren't supposed to use 'medicine' to defeat the will of the goddesses, of the cosmos or whoever the heck is in charge, if anyone is, which likely no one is. And if no one is in charge, what does it matter if I just let myself die off.  No one would notice.

I hear friends assuring me that they would care. BFD.  Will any of them invite me for Thanksgiving? Or even for lunch during the holiday season?  No one ever does. Since I lost my daughter, I step into the holiday hellhole from Thanksgiving to New Year's and no one socializes with me. I am exaggerating.  I have done some socializing in December but it's pro forma. I have tried, in the years since I lost my daughter, tried to trick myself into believing the human race wants me on the inside of it but it is a trick, a delusion. Trickster work.

A cold wind.  I am reminded of that great Ray Bradbury young adult novel, Something Wicked This Way Comes. I think a cold wind rumbles through the town just before the carnival arrives. And with that carnival, evil also arrives in town. A cold wind.  I feel it.