Saturday

There was a pretty moment during last night's walk. That was nice. The rest was cripplingly cold--and stumblingly long--even in knitted headgear; but one moment was pretty and nice. Right about the fourteen hundred block, eastbound Pennsylvania Avenue peels slightly south and the whole wide, crystalline, candy-lit metropolitan roadway, with sequences of orderly traffic, bundles of woolen pedestrians, layers of colored signs, and patterns of stone office building windows, frames perfectly the lucent dome of our nation's capital building. Waiting for the little white walking signal to let us cross at 14th, I was momentarily dazzled by the District and the beautiful winter we are having here. But even this moment hurt me. The evening's walk, and Tuesday's facial-fat freezing mass-transit tour, and all the recent traveling, have combined to make me very sick. I felt the first tickle in my throat early this morning, and woke up this afternoon feeling lousy, feverish, and pathetic. Last night we'd ventured out to eat fast food and come straight home. We'd promised ourselves to use today's sunlight to see a little of the District besides that. Back on Thursday, we'd gone to the grocery store after a nice Italian dinner. That first big supply haul after moving was a chore we couldn't face on a weeknight. So we'd just grabbed a few things (bread, for instance, but no cheese; a couple instant noodle lunches) and promised each other we'd really grocery-shop on Saturday. But I woke today knowing I was going to break those promises. Sunshine was heroic about it, sitting under quilted blankets on the couch with me all day, watching bad movies on cable, and good episodes of the Office on DVD. We ate instant noodle lunches. It was miserable, but it was also pretty nice. [Cavin]