I was sick all last week; didn’t go to the doctor’s until Wednesday, but I wasn’t sure what I had.

So of course, I felt the symptoms Sunday night and increasingly through Tuesday. My youngest, Thing 3, was home with me on Wednesday when I went to the doctor because his first course of antibiotics were overwhelmed by his infection and his fever returned. So at 1:15 on Wednesday, when my doctor asked me to say “ahhh” and then she looked down my throat, she didn’t need to swab me, I had strep throat. Thanks, T3.

The irony of all this was that for three days straight, my throat became increasingly worse: the tightening, the pain and the swelling were almost unbearable, yet I didn’t believe I was sick. I felt like my entire body was resting in one of those mechanical blood pressure machines. But my b/p was fine: 115/75, so I’m not sure what the sensation was, but I do know what I was doing emotionally, it was what I had done for most of my life whenever I’d get sick: keep it together and just keep going.

As a child, I didn’t have much opportunity to be sick; too much was going on already. I was sick a lot, in fact I had sore throats all the time. The yoga practitioner and chakra-aware part of me tells me that it’s my 6th chakra and that I was having issues with expressing myself. I felt I couldn’t express myself. I felt, intuitively, unsafe in expressing myself. More on that later, in my “fictional” novel to come one day this decade.

The amazing part of all this, was that when I went in to the doctor, and she didn’t need to swab me, that I was instantly relieved. The pain went away: INSTANTLY. I don’t know if I can make this clearer. When she said, “strep.” I felt no pain. No tension, no compression, no illness, no symptoms. All the sensations I’d been confronting, all the discomfort I’d been internalizing, all of it vanished. I don’t know how to explain that. Other than to say that my body / my illness had been affirmed. My body had been “heard.”

She explained to me how she knew (other than the obvious: she was a trained professional): a throat with an allergic reaction (pollen, etc.) looks sort of gray and slimy; a throat with a virus looks sort of pink and fleshy; and a throat with a strep infection looks red and beefy. Beefy. Like a sirloin on the hook, I guess. All I know is that my throat felt like it was hanging on a hook and had the shit kicked out of it by the Italian Stallion. My lymph nodes, all of it, were a giant swollen mess. I don’t have a normal 98.6˚ body temp, I’m more of a 97.8˚ girl, so when I hit 99˚+ I have a fever. Just before my appointment, I had 100.8˚, so we were on.

But this post so far, has nothing to do with what I saw this morning on my first walk with The Murph in a week. A walk we’d been unable to take because I’d been so sick. I will share those images and moments with you now, because it’s far more interesting than my boring old throat and amazing discovery about my health being affirmed once I was diagnosed.

I am the sole walker of the dog here, other than my beloved, who takes him out at night for a quick stroll to the neighborhood fire hydrant for Murphy’s nightly sniff and pee. Today, the weather is unseasonably cool (it’s 50˚ in May in D.C.!) and everything with roots is verdant and healthy and happy. But first, I want to show you my breakfast.

I think I will do a whole series on my expressive poached eggs. I believe it’s the Fiesta Ware that makes it more … “American.”

Ok… enough! Here’s what we saw today:

And then those geese thought they were all badasses when we walked away, so Murphy (being massive and toothed and genetically engineered to want geese in his mouth) said, “I don’t think so…”

(I’ll get to Murphy telling them off in a second — one more shot of those cute-for-now baby geese)

So then daddy goose gives Murph some backhiss, and mother goose is saying, “You tell ’em Percival,” and Murphy’s all like, “Percival?” That’s so STUPID. WOOF YOU! STUPID WOOFERS!” His fur didn’t even get puffy; he hates the geese. I think.

The best part of all this is that the geese have no clue I’m holding back this 83# monster because I don’t want him to kill anything. They think he’s afraid of them (or I think they think that, which is really odd because I have better things to think about). So when they start to get all chest-puffy with him, I let him do a two-step tug on me toward them and they comPLETEly freak out, start honking and flapping and generally fall apart emotionally and Murphy does this thing, it’s so funny, it’s like he says, “Yeah. I thought so. Losers.”

I’d decided we’d made enough of an imprint on those babies to leave us alone in the coming months. When I make the fatal error of going for a run without my trusty Golden, those geese will chase me and freakin’ snap at me. Not so much with Mr. Fluffyface, they mind him quite well. Thank you, Darwin.

Next, we saw our favorite old truck.

Then after that, there’s this house across the street from that truck with an AMAZING peony garden. If I were half as impulsive as I thought I was, they’d all be cut down and in a vase in my kitchen enveloping my home with their amazing scent.

I ventured closer and took a whiff of this bunch:

Once I woke up and was released on my own recognizance, we started back home and just when I thought I’d seen enough beauty for the morning, THIS hit me:

So … that was it. It was just boring old boring old when we walked home and I released Murphy to his own backyard:

The good news is that the antibiotics are working and I don’t need to work so hard to keep it together, man. I was astounded by that release though.

Oh, and I’m over here today too at Peevish Penman doing everything I can to offend a reader enough to leave a comment. 🙂 (hint, hint.)

Thank you.