Saturday Task Force

Before I even could open my eyes, I knew. I knew what today meant.

I knew it was a Saturday. A Saturday in the middle of June. I suppose that in most childhoods a summer Saturday meant a day to explore and laugh and play and soak up the sun and chase your friends on your bicycles while your parents sat on the patio and sipped their chilled wine.

Not on the Powell homestead. Dad was home from work for the first time all week and he was certain to make sure we all knew.

Oh, I knew.

Everyone up! He hollered up the stairs, There's a whole lot to do today and only a day to do it!

The task force was split up accordingly. Me, Joe and Sarah were sentenced to weeding duty. Evelyn lucked out and got to help Mom out in the cooled house. Therefore, she got to play with the kittens and relax with Mom. She always got the best jobs. Rob was ordered off to mow the 3 enormous lawns. Bill and Mike ran errands with Dad-- to the dump, to Home Depot, to till the garden and pick and water the vegetables. Mary helped out with the youngsters, playing blocks and reading to Nellie and Nina, the twins.

Typical Saturday in June.

On any other day, the sun was a playmate of ours. It danced as we foraged new lands, explored the vast forestry full of dwarves and evils and Indians, challenged our bare feet against the hot, sharp drive way gravel. But now, it turned against us. We bent over the stones surrounding the house, tugging and yanking at the overgrown weeds with our young warrior hands, the sun's belly shaking with a powerfully overtaking burst.

Ripping roots. Sweating. Kicking away the rock. Pausing to catch a butterfly. Pulling. Digging. Tossing to the side. Piles of discarded plants, dandelions and tall grass and the horrid stinging nettle, grew on the small side lawn where we worked.

Breaking in the late afternoon, we scurried to the hose out back. Mom would never allow our dirty hands and feet and faces back into the house after cleaning with Evelyn. We danced and splashed in the wet grass where we flooded a patch of the lawn as we cleaned off.

Turn off the hose! Mom shouted out. The dishwasher was whirring in the kitchen, the washing machine sputtering in the basement and Dad was catching an early shower.

Dashing away from the hose directly to the oak tree in the middle of our sand pile out back, we raced up the knotted fish net ladder to the tree house, purposefully entangling ourselves on the way up. Our huge tractor tire hung by a sturdy woven rope shook from the excitement, creakily giggling alongside us.

It was just a typical Saturday in June.

Sick Day

It was a hot and unpleasant day. The heat stuck to me like a fuzzed dryer sheet, unashamed by the electric snag it had on me. Or perhaps more so like those rascally prickled bunches that traipsing about in the woods and fields will get you. It was damn hot and I was damn uncomfortable.

To make matters worse, my head was pounding. Angry pops of hurt that refused to leave me alone, scraping up against the inner tunneling of my head, filling the gaps with reckless waves of pain.

                                

This is the worst day of my life.

It was early June. School was almost over and there was little to be accomplished in the classrooms. Teachers brought the kids outside to sit in a circle and weave dandelions in the little girls’ hair and catch grasshoppers for the boys. To quiz the group on their freshly-learned vocabulary and create stories with those new words. To laugh and bond and play in the warm shade that the beating sun created with its marriage to the trees. The four walls of the school were forgotten as children laughed the afternoon away under their melting blue ceiling poking through the harbored peeking holes in the branches.

And I was not there.

I lay there on the couch, my eyes barely able to focus on the blinking and flashing VCR. Don Quixote was there atop a plump, smiling ass, his chin crooning up to the heavens as he proudly rode down what should have been the quiet road. But his anthem followed him along his journey, a trot and a kick and a boom and a tra-la-la of adventure song, attributing the notes to his bravery and valor.

I was too uncomfortable to care.

My head lay against a swampy pillow on the couch, a blanket knotted up in a ball at my feet. A sudden surge of frozen air swept over me, causing my spine to curl against my back, a tremor to overtake my frail body. The aching coupled with a moan as I shuffled my feet, capturing the blanket and slid it up toward my arms. I grabbed at the quilted squares, pinks and roses and purples and greens sewn together in an endearing pattern.

I will always associate that blanket with being sick.

And then, a moment of peace. Of wonder. Of calm and of beauty and of perfect medicine.

The household cat—be it Checkers the dark gray and tuft white feline or Buster with the lightened gray coat or Stubby the three-legged cat— jumped up on my hot and cold stomach and nestled himself against me. It was as though he knew I was at the end of the rope, the deepest depth of the pit, the last straw of my sickly camel. He fell into a thunderous purr, brushing his head against my temperature-rising skin.

I fell into slumber, the adventurous chime of Quixote and the happy rhythm of my cat setting my sickened and uncomfortable body to rest.