Virginia Woolf, in her under-read and excellent essay "On Being Ill" (1925), muses on the aesthetics of illness. She writes of how, as one lies prone and feverish, one becomes aware of the incessant passage of time as clouds grow and morph across the sky, and roses bud and bloom and endlessly unfurl their petals. When one is ill, the little things become fantastical and profound.
"Meanwhile," she says, "with the heroism of the ant or the bee, however indifferent the sky or disdainful the flowers, the army of the upright marches to battle."
I look at the pictures I snapped from my bed a couple of days ago and am glad, I have to say, that I've rejoined the army of the upright. As much as I like staring at knobs, I'm really DONE with being sick and its profound, useless, dreamy musing.
Plus, we've got ants, Virginia, heroic or not, I can't tell.
They're coming in from a tiny hole in the monstrous caulking, applied with a kitchen spatula under the bizarre kitchen window sill. Looks like this weekend I'll be removing said monster caulk and continuing the job I've been fearing: painting the kitchen.
Our kitchen window doesn't open. The wood vent on the bottom of the window (still visible in the exterior picture above), was boarded over. Now we have an ugly window frame around a simple, ugly window and a board. The next step is to figure out how to de-uglify the whole thing with a new window. But first, we have to get rid of the ants and the caulk.
Now I'm ready to go back to bed and ponder clouds.
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