Coffee or cholera?

Saturday, February 5, 2011


There's been a bit of a lull here at Sycorax Pine.  Largely because everything has gone to hell in that proverbial handbasket I keep around for times just like this.

How to explain what has happened over the last ten days?

Well, let me put it in this context: my parents went off on a delightful, spontaneous trip to Costa Rica to celebrate my mother's birthday.  Normally we talk every few days on the phone (since we live in different countries), and when they ask how I'm doing I say something terribly prosaic about Mt. Grademore, or teaching prep, or my feeble gym-going.  When they arrived back from Costa Rica, this is the conversation we had instead:


SP:
How was the trip???

Mère/Père Sycorax: 
[I had roughly the same conversation with both parents at separate times that day]
Glorious.  When we woke up every morning, 
they'd left a thermos of coffee outside our door, 
and we'd wander outside, coffee in hand, 
to watch the monkeys fight with the tropical birds in the trees....

SP:
That sounds amazing.

Mère/Père Sycorax:
How was your week?

SP: 
Well.... I crashed my car in a snow storm, fell hard not once but twice in public, 
screwed up my neck in a way that makes it hard to drive or sleep, 
became embroiled unwittingly in a major workplace conflict, 
and I think I've agreed to buy a house that has a dug well and a cesspool.  
Do you think I'm going to die of cholera?

Mère/Père Sycorax:
Um....

It never rains but it pours, eh?

5 Responses so far.

  1. Ann says:

    Ow! Perhaps hibernating until the Spring finally arrives might be a good idea? Take care.

  2. It sounds to me like that handbasket was the kind that you can attach to the front of a bicycle; that's why everything went downhill so fast.

    Apart from that, all I can say is "Um...." and "I hope things get better..."

  3. Wendy says:

    Wow, you DID have a rough time of it! Hope things start getting better SOON for you (maybe you need to take a trip to Costa Rica??!?!)

  4. That must have been it, Laura. I've got to stop keeping my whole life in that basket.

    Thanks, both, for your support - it hasn't been wholly disastrous, since my colleagues have been very supportive throughout the work cataclysm, the cesspool-having house is still marvelous in every other way (and apparently cesspools are perfectly legitimate systems, despite the sinister name), and my insurance dealt with the accident very efficiently.

    Still: I wish I could hibernate till Spring. (In Nova Scotia, Spring comes in July.)

  5. I think I DO, Wendy! I could do with a week in which the greatest conflict I witnessed was between a tropical bird and a monkey.

    Good news, though: Our "Winter Break" (i.e. Spring Break, except Nova Scotia spring starts in July - see above) starts in two weeks, and I'm off to see D in Hawai'i!

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