There are crumpled tissues everywhere, and I’m a little dizzy. My head is throbbing, my temperature is high, and my eyes are watering. There are a million things to do, but I am stuck in one place, right here, with my head floating somewhere near the ceiling.

It’s just like being stuck in a checkout line at Walmart…for five days straight.

Well, not quite so bad as that, I guess.

Days of various stages of a cold and fever, my head hurting, my face hurting…the whistle of the teapot might as well be the scream of the Nazgul flying overhead. Vin has taken the kids to the store a few times so I could rest in a quiet house, alone with the cats and the tissues and tea.

Just me. Me, on the couch with the white cat at my feet, and the stripey cat on the other couch, laying on top of a mountain of unfolded laundry. We are all equally productive.

And yet…if I could move off the couch, I would fly free through the house. I would fold the laundry, I would scour the kitchen, I would have lunch prepped and ready for their return. I would water the plants that are wilting and I would even polish the teapot. I would tackle that writing project and balance the checkbook. I would be in a fever to conquer all of the big and little mountains that are neglected through the week in this brief oasis of time and space of quiet. Of peace.

I think of all these things, and sneeze. Wipe my nose, wipe my eyes, and wipe the agenda. I look at the pile of tissues scattered all around me…consider picking them all up…and remember how utterly exhausted I am. My greatest accomplishment this week has been to read the last 29 chapters of George MacDonald’s The Princess and Curdie.

A mountain is a strange and awful thing. In old times, without knowing so much of their strangeness and awfulness as we do, people were yet more afraid of mountains. But then somehow they had not come to see how beautiful they are as well as awful, and they hated them – and what people hate they must fear. Now that we have learned to look at them with admiration, perhaps we do not feel quite awe enough of them. To me they are beautiful terrors.

We’ve been having a heat wave in Alaska and passed 90 degrees on Monday. My temperature hovered just around 100. We missed church on Sunday for Father’s Day and actually called in sick for the first time in years. I think. Wait a minute…what were we talking about, again? My brain is fuzzy and ideas are fleeting…oh, yes – Father’s Day.

So we played hooky. Four of the kids were hacking and coughing and could not go to their classes anyway, and the thought of them coughing and hacking on us in the middle of the service, in the middle of the sanctuary, did not appeal. But by the afternoon, it was 85 degrees and we decided to suck it up and go to one of our favorite places for a picnic. We would sweat it out.

We went to Hatcher’s Pass. Right up to the mountains.

I will try to tell you what they are. They are portions of the heart of the earth that have escaped from the dungeon down below, and rushed up and out. For the heart of the earth is a great wallowing mass, not of blood, as in the hearts of men and animals, but of glowing hot, melted metals and stones. And as our hearts keep us alive, so that great lump of heat keeps the earth alive: it is a huge power of buried sunlight – that is what it is.

We stopped right there, not bothering to go further up. We walked a little and looked at the Little Su. We waded in it. We threw rocks and sticks in it. We argued about whether it is a river (it is) or a creek (more like it). Depending on who you ask.

Now think: out of that cauldron, where all the bubbles would be as big as the Alps if it could get room for its boiling, certain bubbles have bubbled out and escaped – up and away, and there they stand in the cool, cold sky – mountains.

– George MacDonald, The Princess and Curdie 

But you know what happens when you call in sick and then decide to suck it up and go somewhere, don’t you?

Sometimes…you get busted.

There we were, leisurely picnicking along the Little Susitna, and a vehicle pulls up. Two vehicles, actually. And hands are waving at us out of their windows…and attached to the hands are our dear, smiling friends. We had missed seeing them at church that day. And, apparently, they noticed our absence. And I didn’t hear it myself, but I think this is the phrase Vin heard one of them say, grinning:

“Sure, we cover for you at church and then come up here and catch you goofing off!” Guilty. Come a little closer, pal, and let me sneeze on you.

That was Sunday. I remember it because we have pictures and I’m pretty sure I was there. I don’t remember much about yesterday, though. Something about soup, followed by ice cream. Lots of tissues…

Wait, it’s coming back to me. Vince took the kids to Walmart to…buy…something? I don’t know. I just have these vague memories of him saying he was going there with all six kids, and me reaching toward him in desperation: “Don’t do it! You don’t have to prove that you’re a hero!” But he did, and survived, and came home in a fever, swearing to never do it again.

But he is a hero. So he went again the next day, with all six kids…to a different store.

My energy ebbs and flows, comes and goes like sunlight on a partly cloudy day. And here I sit, at the foot of a mountain of laundry and to-do lists that will also sit. I will breathe and rest at the feet of the One who heals me. I will stop right here and go the rest of the way up the mountain on a different day.

The things on my to-do list are beautiful terrors that I will conquer later in the week.

Unless Vince beats me to it. Because he’s a hero like that. He makes me dizzy, too.