Chrisonomicon

Thursday, June 20, 2002

I roused myself from the retreat I had found on the couch, the dull throbbing behind my right eye relentless. I had so much to do and the night was nearly over but my migraine stood before me, a sadistic sentry. I sat up and covered my eyes with a hand. This headache wasn't about to win.

With a hardened determination, I rose, swallowed down a few Advil, and picked up where I had left off on the housework. Before I knew it, I had rid the torpor clouding my aching head with a comforting routine of chores. The pulsing pain wasn't as easily defeated, however.

I stopped cleaning and surveyed my space. The light was streaming in?a class-five rapid cascading down through the cheap Venetian blinds?and I squinted, half-annoyed, as migraines always make me overly sensitive to light. Two words came to mind: window treatments. I took some measurements, noted the color scheme of the room, and with my coat slung over my shoulder, escaped into the evening-dappled city to do some shopping.

The air was thick with the threat of rain and the mountains?burning from the inside?taunted their ephemeral, spectral counterparts in the sky, daring them to do their worst. I drove with the windows rolled down and wished the rain would fall in torrents to extinguish this fire inside my head.

The city was quiet and inviting, the traffic sparse enough to allow me an unfettered path to the store, and I felt a bit of the weight lifting from my brain. Scented candles beckoned as I entered. I browsed through kitchen wares, glass frames, metal wall-hangings, furniture, curtains, and pillows, and by the time I had made a few complete circuits through the shop, the sun had completely disappeared behind the horizon along with the remaining traces of my headache.

I paid for the armload of items I had amassed. Driving home, I noticed that the clouds over the mountains had dissipated. Had the fires been extinguished on the other side of the mountains? Had they also found their cure? While I'm not an advocate for consumerism as an answer to anything substantial, I found comfort in having made the evening productive and conquering the long-forgotten adversary that had returned, an uninvited in-law.