25 Days

I have now been sick for 25 days. In a row.

Two Doctors believe I have bronchitis, despite any number of symptoms that can not be explained by that diagnosis, and despite the fact that my illness started right after a diagnosed case of walking pneumonia (which is contagious) in my household.

I have been told to take Mucinex DM, Zyrtec, a prescription cough suppressant that even the pharmacist's assistant had never heard of, an Albuterol inhaler, and now Advair discs, a medication for emphysema. Emphysema. I am out more than $200 in co-pays and over the counter meds, and I feel like crap, and no one will give me the antibiotics that I'm fairly certain would have cleared this all up at least 2 weeks ago.

In these 25 days, I have also given notice at my job, bought a house, made a decision about the girls' education, thrown a double birthday party, and planned a move. (or not planned a move, as it were: we leave two weeks from tomorrow and we have not packed a thing. Sound familiar? Oh, right, we did this last year at this time.) I also bought tickets to the Pavement concert because we know where we will be in September, and started, slowly, to remember all the things in storage that we clearly don't need but will have to do something with, nonetheless. Good thing the new house has a basement. And a garage.

I am tired. I am behind on blogging. I am starting to be a little sad to leave Colorado (though I am excited about where we are going; excited about getting there already), especially when I stand in the parking lot at King Soopers and stare at the mountains, remembering my first time in that parking lot, the first time I had that sense of the mountains being so present. I stare at them on my drive home, try to soak them in.

In the past 11 months, I have had a very different experience of Colorado than Dave has. This struck us recently when we were driving to Denver together to meet our friends Amanda and Jon, and we realized that Dave has been to Denver just a handful of times, while I know the road from here to there like the back of my hand. I sometimes feel I have worn grooves in that pavement with all the back and forth. Dave has been in Boulder, has gone mountain biking on weekends, including a weekend in Moab, has been to Steamboat Springs on a motorcycle. I have spent weekends at work events or watching the girls. I almost started a book club. I missed every single mom's night with moms from Clio's school. I joined the library committee only to be unable to shelve the books on Tuesday mornings as promised. I felt like we were finally really in Colorado in December, when we closed on our house in Brooklyn, only to begin the process of leaving again in February, when Lizzie was diagnosed with breast cancer and I wondered if it was finally time to go home.

It's funny to be sick through all of this, as I point my compass North to Minnesota. I have long had a tradition of wearing myself to the bone and then returning home to my mom, starting in summer camp, through college, and continuing long past an age where such a thing should be acceptable. It feels like that to the nth degree to make my way home, weary, for good, for now.