Disoriented Tea Drinker

It's awful having fevers at the tail-end of Summer warmth, makes you kind of feel like you're missing out on something grand. Even if September is Summer too, it's a gamble. Who knows how the wind will blow.

It's been a week of head-colds, coughs, and fevers with the little one, interspersed with those moments of clarity in which you wonder, absently, why you put all the dish towels in the garbage instead of the laundry. I hate the fuzziness that comes with being sick, when you reread sentences ten times before they make sense, and then you climb under down comforters and wish you didn't have to cancel all the things you were going to do that day.

It was useful on Thursday, though, when we went through boxes and drawers in preparation for moving out of the apartment. There isn't enough energy to really decide if you want to keep this or that, so you just toss it. And then you feel lighter, cleaner. There is a healthy peacefulness about owning less. It's freeing.

It let up on Friday, in time for Isaac to go to school (because Fridays are his favorite, and he only has one week left), and for me to go to Copenhagen, to aimlessly explore, take some photos, kind of say goodbye. I'm going to miss that colorful city. There is just something so perfect about climbing off a train and meeting people from all over the world, for example - a Filipino American exchange student, barely twenty, who told me how difficult it is to pick up Danish girls; an Austrian couple, who wore every color between them; a Zumba and African dance instructor from Jamaica; and a Danish Unicef employee whose passport just expired - and then becoming part of the color yourself. All those photographers, street musicians, painters, craftsmen, and endless number of tourists and locals having ice cream cones and beer, co-mingling, speaking a dozen different languages, dressed for every season (because you never can tell, in Denmark). The lineup of primary colored cafes alongside the canal, with their outdoor seating and complimentary blankets, their french press coffees and open-face sandwiches. All the boats.

It's a beautiful place to be, and if you decide to go, you should stop for a chat with one of my favorites, an Israeli who sells boho jewelry from a kiosk downtown. Whenever I am in Copenhagen I pay him a visit, because he has so many interesting things to say about life and politics and Bob Marley, and despite the fact that he must always begin our conversations with, 'Are you a lesbian? No? Oy, if only I were younger!' Which is (possibly) very sweet of him, and then he gives me lovely deals on leather bracelets and says 'I love America, but I hate that Obama. I am leaving Denmark. It is the most boring country in the world.' But he stays anyway.

And then Saturday came, and with it our fevers returned. All our plans were cancelled and we did practically nothing, aside from taking a walk around the neighborhood under a beautiful Danish sky. Sometimes the sky feels unbelievably low and expansive, the clouds suspended just barely overhead and stretching on for miles above the flat landscape, the weather alternating between Indian summer warmth and sudden wintry spells. It is next to impossible to dress correctly.

And now it's Sunday, and (I think) we are on the road to recovery. It's started out good, at any rate - an early morning 10k, a mid-day breakfast with home-made biscuits, and an entire lego village that has taken over every clear surface. My head feels fuzzy again.

Tea. I should make some tea.