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Hill Country Living
By Coulter Fussell
There’s not a lot to report this week in Hill Country Living as I have been more on the Hill Country Dying end of the Hill Country existence spectrum. After four years of presumably remaining Covid-free, I think it finally got me. At least, that’s my best guess. I have never actually taken a Covid test because I can’t see how it will matter what the result may be since literally nothing would change in my life. I would remain a hermit. Except, as an act of self-sacrifice, I would skip getting a hot plate at Pigsaver out of caution for my fellow local lunchers.
I would have normally considered this entire sickness episode just a good old fashioned cold or flu except for one distinguishing factor: there was no story arc. By that I mean, there was no predictable coming-on, rising, waning and falling of symptoms. By the time you’re middle-aged and have raised a few kids, you become an expert on the innate pace of any given traditional illness: the timing of the first mention of a sore throat, then the fever check, the lethargy, the chills, the breaking of the fever, the dry cough followed by the productive cough, the first getting up out of bed and the regained appetite. There’s an order to it all. There are systems at play and they all have their parts and places in the whole production.
Not so with whatever I have. It was like someone’s ADHD toddler reached into a paper bag of random symptoms and threw a handful of them at the wall. And did that a few different times a day, each time with a different outcome. And the toddler somehow managed to never once grab Fever, the anchor symptom around which all other symptoms can be timed and judged!
And this morning, just in time for me to write this column, this toddler hand of sickness has grabbed Suddenly Cured. But, judging from the entirely unpredictable nature of this illness, tomorrow he/she will grab At Death’s Door again.
All this to say, it’s probably Covid. It’s been worse than a cold but not as bad as flu. My main beef is that I can probably no longer claim to have never gotten Covid. I took great pride in presumably being immune to Covid as it clearly means that I am especially beloved to the Gods, unlike most of y’all who have gotten Covid and are clearly not in good favor. On an entirely technical level, though, I can still claim to have never gotten Covid since I’ve never tested for it. There’s no paper trail.
Lastly, congrats to our new mayor, Tommy Reynolds, and to everyone who went out and voted for your preferred candidate. It takes guts and probably a good dose of magical thinking to run for office and I respect it, as I like both of those things. It doesn’t take much of anything to go vote in a town this small, so good on all the people who know that and did so. The next time you see something improved in Water Valley then pat yourself on the back for making it happen.
