The Sickbed Gift

In some world I am always running up that green hill...

Sag Harbor, 2023. Photo by Tonya Morton

For five days, the inner paths of my face ached. I was too cold, then too hot, huddled over the humidifier, breathing in steam until it dripped off my nose and chin. I walked out briefly on Saturday to the grocery and stood fuming in the aisle behind a pile of large boxes. Men were taking fruit from the boxes and stocking the shelves, laughing and sorting the apples into separate crates while I stood behind them, sniffling and tugging at my sore ear until I could push past for another packet of microwaveable rice and more orange juice.

I paid for my basket, then braced myself the seven wintry blocks home, caught behind a family of Italian tourists. They were striding four abreast, chatting like birds about the neighborhood. I knew exactly what they were talking about, because there is no word in Italian for “Sarah Jessica Parker” and there is no word in Italian for “Ross and Rachael.” I so dearly wanted to escape them, back to the dark of my sickbed apartment, where I could put away the orange juice and dangle my head over the humidifier and, oh, if God is kind, sleep.

There may be only one gift in sickness—I can’t think of more than one, not while I’m still recovering. But that gift is sweet. It's the dozing. The idle timelessness of dozing. The hours of the past days when I have slipped just outside reality’s doors, into its courtyard. Hours spent lying in my bed watching the sunlight in the midday window.

I lay watching the golden eye of the crystal hanging against the glass, for hours, thinking to myself how that crystal used to hang in the window of my parents’ kitchen when I was a little kid. And I considered, in and out of dreams, the bare-limbed tree across the street from my apartment, its shadow rippling in the translucent weave of the curtain.

It’s that sensation of near-sleeping, even with my eyes open, and the feeling of having arrived in a state of ascension (held lightly, so willing to be forgotten) in the course of those waking dreams.

It’s how the crystal is both moving and not moving as light dances into the warp of the curtain. As the light deepens, then softens, one moment into the next, as the hour tilts to late day.

Watching the crystal, I sense that it lives here in my New York window and, somehow, it is also still hanging in my parents’ kitchen in the Black Hills. And that, in that window, I can still watch for spring to return to the flower beds in my mother’s garden.

It’s hanging, the crystal, in that sweet somewhere place, where winter is only a long night’s blizzard. Where silent ribbons of snow brush against the dark glass. And where my father walks up the stairs, smelling of the wood stove.

Where it is swiftly summertime again, but summer lasts the length of a late evening, with the long northland sun slanted across the side acre between our house and the forest. And if it is summer, then I am out on my feet. I am running up the grass, barefoot, as that last hour of pink sunlight touches the pine trees. I smell richly of grass stains and dirt, and I can hear my mother laughing on the porch, and the sweet click-shushing of a sprinkler tending to the yarrow and bee balm and purple coneflowers.

And I understand, watching the crystal, that in some world I am always running up that green hill.

And that somewhere, in some place, I am hauling another tub of dirty dishes down to the kitchen of that New Haven restaurant.

And I am still in Kansas, calling out to the cats to come in from the storm. Standing on the porch, reaching out. Making a plate of my fingers for the fat raindrops to fall into.

And I am cutting mint from the garden.

And I have fallen asleep against the polished wooden pew in the Catholic church as the choir practices hymns for an Easter Mass.

And I can feel my father, in that place, thinking of me.

When I wake again, I am greeted by the streetlamp. The crystal is hanging against the glass, dark and clear. Down on the street, ringing out, the laughter of a couple walking to dinner.

A sense of clarity, uncalled for.

A sense of the apartment defining itself around me. The bathroom. The hallway. The tea kettle in the kitchen, waiting to be refilled. The tug of life, remembering itself.

A stillness, like I have only known in this moment. Like I’ve only known, and forgotten, and forgotten again. Slipping away with the duvet cover as I stand, put on my socks, and search out the lamp.

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Tonya Morton is, among other things, the publisher of Juke.

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