slowly she turned

Doing a coffee pot post today before I blog my trip to Tucson. I’ll drop the personal details here from the past week or so then do a separate post for the pretty pictures.

The days before my trip were consumed with getting the studio cleaned and the yard stuff moved to the shed part and carpet tiles laid down. This part of the project was a lot of fun because my favorite “toy” when I was little were these small plastic grids with color tiles to press into them, much smaller than Legos. I could spend hours making different patterns with these. So putting together different colors and textures of 24 inch carpet tiles was great fun for me and I think Sandy enjoyed it too. I know that both of us are very pleased with the result.

We went to an art opening reception at Center for Visual Arts on Friday night that was fun and featured a couple of friends. One shared the print studio with me and another was my ceramics professor when I was at Greensboro College. This is where I believe we picked up the Covid cooties. One person we both talked to for a while wiped his nose and said, “Excuse me, I’ve a bit of a cold.” Whereupon, I scooted away quickly, but unfortunately not quickly enough. And just as quickly, I forgot about it.

Anyway, I’ve had a LOT of problems with allergies lately, including a two week case of hives, and between that and cleaning a dirty, dusty, spiderwebby, recently repaired moldy spotted space, I assumed that the symptoms that began for me on Sunday were allergies. We still had energy to do errands on Monday. The symptoms were consistent with the many times I have tested negative for Covid. So on Tuesday morning, I took my temperature, had no fever, so off I went on my trip to Tucson. In hindsight, of course, I should have tested. I wore an N95 mask to ward off any cooties I might encounter, not realizing that I was the one carrying the cooties.

As soon as the plane got in the air, my sinuses let go. It was as if a faucet turned on. I kept stuffing toilet paper into my nostrils and breathing through my mouth. When I got off the plane during my connection, the dripping stopped. Back on the plane, it started again. When I hopped into my friend’s car at the Tucson airport and she proposed a drive in the country on the way back to her home, I was feeling fine and all for it.

That night I began feeling freezing cold and foggy-brained, and I realized that I was sick. I contacted the tapestry workshop people and said I’d be missing the first day, but I would assess the situation Wed. night and take a Covid test if I was still sick. I did, and it was positive. My first known case of Covid, and I had brought it to my friend’s house in Tucson. I missed the tapestry workshop entirely, and the people in the guild very graciously refunded my money without me requesting it.

My immediate concern was for my husband, Sandy, who has many health concerns and is immuno-compromised. He was alone at home and yes, he was sick. I texted a group of women friends and asked them to be on the alert if he needed help. One of them volunteered to drop off groceries and meds on the front porch, so that helped him get through it.

I had the generous care of my nurturing friend in Tucson, who was working from home and brought me food and hot tea and blankets and a water pitcher and tissues and of course, got sick herself, but not so bad. She went out and bought a fifth of Jack Daniels the first day and we tried our mothers’ old-fashioned cure for colds: hot tea, lemon, honey, and whiskey. I think it helped.

My main problem the first two nights was coughing and the constant sinus drainage and so I tried to sleep sitting up and didn’t get much sleep for three consecutive nights. Once I went down on Thursday, I slept a LOT. I broke a fever. We had ordered out dinner from her favorite restaurant, Guadalajara, so we had chicken tortilla soup and really good Mexican food. My sense of smell left and so did my appetite.

By Friday afternoon I was feeling better so we went to the San Xavier Del Bac Mission and walked around the outside. We bought Indian tacos from a food truck. The next day she tried to find an outside Indian craft event but it wasn’t there so she drove me around downtown Tucson and then up into the Santa Catalina mountains up to Mount Lemmon.

On Sunday, we went to the outdoor Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, which had beautiful fairly flat trails through gardens and exhibits and a small zoo. But you’ll see that in the next post. We went to El Guaro Canelos for takeout and I had a Sonoran hot dog, which is a regional thing. Basically a beef dog wrapped in bacon with a Jalapeno sauce.

Anyway, United was helpful, as they have always been to us, and once I figured out when I thought I caught the bug, I changed my flight to a shorter flight that was ten days out from first exposure. I explained why and they did not charge me a change fee.

Monday I was at my friend’s house all day. I wandered around in the wash next to her house and I began a little tapestry with inspiration from the beautiful giant Saguaro cacti all around.

The flight home on Tuesday was good and for most of it the plane was not full at all, so I had lots of room around me.

And now I’m home, laundry done, coffee pot empty, and it’s time to catch up weaving on my tapestry diary.