I then did something I don't do much anymore: I unpacked and repacked.
Monday afternoon, June 1, I drove down to Washington DC ( Bethesda, really) and joined up with some of my college friends. They joined me for dinner at a great Chinese restaurant,
and then accompanied me to the Friendship Heights Village Center, where I gave a poetry reading for Café Muse, sponsored by Word Works, a literary association in Washington.
I thoroughly enjoyed myself at my reading, and my friends did, too. So interesting: six of my woman friends were there to cheer me on.
Two were my actual college classmates from forty-five years ago; a third was a year ahead of me in college and went on to be an Army nurse in Vietnam; a fourth was one of my religious sisters who was a missionary for many years in Taiwan ; a fifth was my student from back in 1977, who is now a superior court judge in DC; a sixth is a poet friend I met last summer at the Glen West Workshop in Santa Fe.
I stayed overnight in DC on Monday and Tuesday, and Tuesday one of these friends and I had lunch and an afternoon at the National Museum of Women in the Arts. I love this museum, but hadn't been to it in about 20 years.
Then, I drove back up to Emmitsburg on Wednesday with what turned out to be a miserable head cold.
Spent Thursday through most of Sunday down and out with this cold. But the bedrest and the cold pills worked, and by Monday, June 8, I was feeling better.
Not entirely better, it turned out.
Did school work, poetry book work, and retreat planning work on the 8th and 9th, and then, on the 10th, I drove up to Lancaster PA early in the morning, picked up another college classmate C, and the two of us drove several more hours ( including getting lost) up to Doylestown PA for the funeral of another woman E , the older sister of another classmate MA, who had died after about a ten year struggle with metastatic breast cancer. I had become close to MA over the years, and felt it was very important that I go to that funeral. And it was.
So then C and I drove back the same day., stopping outside of New Holland PA at an Amish roadside stand to buy the most delicious strawberries I have ever tasted.
I dropped C off in Lancaster and continued on to Emmitsburg. Had a fairly ordinary day Thursday, but began to have stomach cramps Thursday night and ended up with Gastroenteritis... Again.
Twenty-four hours of vomiting. Had to call in sick and miss the Friday Freshman Orientation I was scheduled to take part in, not to mention lunch on Saturday with S and K ( two other college friends!) and a poetry retreat with my local poet friends on Sunday.
In fact , I spent four hours on Sunday afternoon at Gettysburg Hospital Emergency Room, getting IV fluids for dehydration.
So now I am again on the mend, and have decided to stay home and stay put. I have a Guided Retreat to give next week, and I cannot be sick for that.
This blog entry is probably very boring for those who don't know me. Sorry. But I am concerned that this is the fifth round of "stomach virus" I've had since this time last year. My immune system must be in bad shape.
I have more to say about another death - a sudden one - of a woman I both went to college with and taught with - but enough is enough. I'll return to that another day.
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