Stuffy

Last week, Trouble called to ask if I was having trouble breathing (no pun intended). You might be wondering why she would ask such a question - and if you have never lived on Maui, you would be understandably confused.

Maui grows sugar cane - and to harvest the sugar, they have to burn the cane - which creates thick, nasty smoke, and wispy ashes that blow all over the place. We live miles from the cane fields, and yet, can wake up to a blanket of ash if the wind is blowing a certain way (namely, our way).

This burning results in, well, burning. Burning eyes, burning throat, burning sinuses. And on Saturday morning, we woke up to a great gray plume of smoke on the horizon. Max was the first to notice - he woke up so congested that I was afraid he was getting sick. But then we spotted the billowing clouds in the distance, and realized that they were burning.

And so I am here in bed, stuffy and miserable, with a sore throat and itchy eyes and a mean post-nasal drip. As though the whole world is on fire. I am miserable, Max is miserable, Lucy's eyes are puffy so she is probably miserable too, but not able to verbalize how uncomfortable she is. I am sipping tea, cautiously, because a bug landed in there and drowned, and despite pouring the tea from one mug to another, I cannot find the little buggy cadaver....and I am not wasting my teabag. Let's call it my protein.

It is 6:35am, and I am already in desperate need of a nap.

And that sums up my morning. Post nasal drip, naptime, and bug tea. Happy Monday !