Sharing Without Caring

Farmer H is the gift that keeps on giving. He has been complaining all week about a cough. Yesterday I had a pounding headache, last night I coughed up phlegm by the bucketload, and this morning I had wheezing and ear pain.

Funny how it's the ear that faces the ceiling while the other is safely ensconced in my bed pillow. The ceiling ear is at the mercy of Farmer H's breather. I know it was spewing in my direction, because when I went to bed, I laid down on a living arm. Quite uncomfortable for Mrs. Hillbilly Mom. And apparently for the arm, because Farmer H commenced to snarling, and jerked it back out of the trap of my two pillows that had so recently held it captive. Seriously. Stay off my side of the bed, and out of my pillows if you value your arm health.

I could picture those tendrils of breather breath, coiling together into one snaky plume, doing a little cobra dance before walking like an Egyptian through the dark bedroom air and threading itself into my ear canal.

Farmer H declares that I must be crazy. HE is not Typhoid Mary. Even though the sickness has been circulating at his place of employment. I probably caught this bug at school. Because, you know, students breathe virusy breaths into my ear all the live-long day, sharing BFF secrets, I and my 100 confidantes.

My throat is now lit up like a west-coast wildfire.