26 Jan 2010
Cabin Fever Fling
The first time I contracted cabin fever I came very close to committing homicide—pre-meditated but justifiable, of course. My husband of thirty something years came within a whisker of having his skull bashed in with a baseball bat, by my hand. When I say whisker, I mean whisker. It was a very near thing.
My husband got me to move to a state with North in the title by telling me, that while it got brisk in the wintertime, it never snowed, or by last report there had not been snow of any significance since the Civil War.
I bought it. We moved. Our first winter in North Carolina there was a freak snowstorm that dumped two feet of snow across a sheet of glacier ice, which floated over a river of liquid sleet, piled on top of hell—which had, in fact, frozen over. North Carolina was, to put it nicely, not ready. Our little band of strangers in a strange land was snowed in for two weeks. I was not ready.
I contracted cabin fever on day two of our entrapment. Cabin fever is a malady that causes the sufferer to experience irrational irritations over seemingly minor annoyances magnified by a factor of about twelve cabillion, multiplied by 666. You get stinky mean.
Until being “snowed in” or as I like to describe it “buried alive,” I had not really noticed that my darling husband had said exactly the same thing upon waking, every single day, for the entire course of our thirty years of marriage—THE EXACT SAME THING, EVERY SINGLE DAY, FOR THIRTY SOMETHING YEARS,
. . . EVERY . . . SINGLE . . . DAY!!!!!!!!
Every morning he sits straight up in bed and says, “Well, I guess I’ll go and get cleaned up now.”
And it’s not that he says the EXACT SAME THING. It’s what he says. He guesses he’s going to get cleaned up! What would the alternatives be exactly? To get up but not get “cleaned up” and walk around with a Wooly Mammoth on his face all day, or to not get up at all, remain in bed in his own filth, and eventually have his skin grow into the mattress (and yes Phillip, that can happen, I saw it on TV!)
By day five or six of being snowed in and with a cabin fever of about 212 degrees, I had not only picked up on this unfortunate verbal pattern, but I had started waiting for the inevitable, predictable, rhythmic cadence of his morning declaration like a cobra tracking the movements of a wounded mongoose.
On day seven, I rolled towards him and with eyes narrowed to slits, and a reptilian hiss, said, “Sherwood, Do you know that you say the exact same thing, every single day, and that if you say it tomorrow I can’t be held accountable. There is a baseball bat under this bed, for crushing the brains of robbers, and I will use it—on you. I swear it.”
He backed carefully away from his side of the bed, his eyes focused like laser beams on my face.
“I mean it. I’ll do it.” I had quit brushing stuff (hair, teeth) three days previously. I was close to terminal.
The day passed as snow drifted, settled, melted, and re-froze. I floated in our garden tub like a giant lily pad in water hot enough to blanche carrots. Then another endless night came and with it the sound of tree trunks exploding as the water inside them froze, expanded, and shattered sending splinters of wood catapulting away into the night and house siding. Trees toppled. Expensive landscaping expired, and then the morning came.
Wrapped in knee socks, flannel pajamas, a bathrobe, and an overcoat, I lovingly stroked the baseball bat that I clutched to my chest. Tension pulsated through my hands and fingers and hair, as I lay in wait, er . . . waiting for Sherwood to wake up.
Sitting straight up in bed, he said, “I guess I’ll go and . . .” my hands tightened around the bat when he paused a fraction of a second and grew very still, before adding, “get a shower.”
Adrenalin oozed from between my fingers. I relaxed. He showered. The thaw came.
Here in Florida, we’ve had a few of those murky winter days that make going out an ugly business, so we stay inside. I haven’t had cabin fever as much as cabin canker sores. As I write this, Sherwood is in bed calling me on his cell phone. He is literally ten feet away from my desk sending a signal into outer space, so that it can bounce off a satellite and ricochet back to earth, all so that he can ask me to do something risqué when I should be writing. Sometimes he calls me on his cell phone from the bathroom to ask me for toilet paper. Spring cannot come soon enough.
Linda (Spring Fling) Zern
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