Sorry to keep you in suspense for so long. We were packing, flying, getting settled in…

“Oh,” you say. “Bravo! They didn’t get sick after all!”

Not so fast, optimistic readers. We did get sick. Today.

For God, capricious trickster that he is, needed us to get across country, spend one day with our family–thereby, assumedly, infecting them all, like Typhoid Marys in fancy dress–and only then did he lay us low. Or lowish. I must confess, I’m mostly just tired. Myra-Jean, however, threw up all morning. But now she’s out back playing with Mike. Kids. The resiliency is incredible. Also? Puking is easier for them. They do it, but they don’t seem put out by it the way we adults do. There’s a certain nonchalance.  I guess life is so filled with outrageous surprises for them that this is just one more. “Oh. Now my liquidated stomach contents are shooting out of my mouth into a mixing bowl. Maybe after I can go to the park.”

On another, perhaps even more disturbing  note: In the one day we spent in New Jersey I got two ticks on me. On my leg and  on my foot. I was wearing jeans, for fuck’s sake! And every conceivable kind of bug spray, from the homemade stuff my mom’s friend made–just for the wedding!–using sun-steeped teas of oregano, basil, and geranium, to the DEET-based it’s-so-toxic-that-you-should-throw-your-clothes-away-after kind. Guess what? It’s all bullshit. The ticks are coming, and there’s nothing anything in a squirt-bottle can do about it.

It’s depressing.

At least it looks like we’ll be better for the wedding. In this sense, at least, the bugs haven’t completely won out. We’ll be there with bells on.

And oregano. And DEET. And tweezers.

Still–paranoia be damned–we’ll have a beautiful day.

The pill bottle in the background–which I captured by accident–is my mom’s antibiotic prescription. For acute Lyme’s.