My cough is back, 3

This is not me, obviously. But sometimes it feels like it might as well be.

I'm writing and posting this today to put a mark on the calendar. I hope I'm wrong, but it feels like today is the beginning of Coughing Season for me. Yes, it's the same damned allergic cough that I've complained about regularly for years (and that I've lived with regularly since long before I started complaining in these pages). Look up the posts tagged "cough" and you'll see what I mean.

Based on my calculations last spring, I guess this season—if that's what it is—should last till the end of February. Four months. That gives me hope for an endpoint.

It's funny how sharp the dividing line can be between On and Off. Over the last couple weeks I've had moments where it feels like my allergies are building up, but they have passed immediately and not returned until days later. I'm pretty sure I haven't taken a single cough drop since last February. Today I took five of them, to calm and soothe my throat. 

Just in time for the holidays, I guess. And in other news, ... I visited with Wife this afternoon and we talked very civilly for a couple of hours.

What was the occasion? A month ago, I sent Wife the links to a couple of articles. 

• One was the now-famous article in Jezebel in which a journalist described contacting a witch on Etsy to buy a curse on Charlie Kirk. Two days after the article was published, as you may remember, Charlie Kirk was shot dead at a public event. (Since the shooting, Jezebel took the article off their website. But I saved a copy in PDF, which you can access here.)
• The second was a later article by Mark Stavish, reflecting on the Charlie Kirk assassination and pointing out that if the general public starts to believe witches are cursing people—successfully!—the result won't be good for witches.

Anyway, since Wife used to identify as Wiccan, I wondered what she thought of the articles. So I sent them to her. And in a very unusual move, she replied. She said that she found the articles very interesting and would love to discuss them, but that she couldn't type out all her comments on her phone. I reflected that we had been able to talk together amiably enough last winter when we got together for Son 2's graduation, so we could probably do so again. Since I had a couple of books I kept meaning to deliver to Son 1, I arranged to drive over there this afternoon with the books so we could chat.

At a micro level, there were any number of little problems with the planning and the arrangements. I tried to contact her several times today to check if this was a good day, but when I finally arrived it took her completely by surprise. In the course of the conversation she complained idly about things in her life that I was able to ignore (as a visitor) but that probably would have rankled if I still lived with her. There were lots of tiny irritations of that sort, and mostly I ignored them.

But at a larger level, we were able to talk. As I was leaving she said it was the first time in a couple of years that she had been able to talk to an "intelligent adult" about things which interested her. Obviously she has talked to her doctors in that time, and presumably they count as "intelligent adults." But they won't talk to her about magic. Nor will Son 1, who thinks the whole topic is silly and embarrassing. As for Son 1, she claims that most of their conversations consist of him criticizing her for being behind on the housework. That can't be true at a literal level, but it is a subject Wife has always felt victimized by (see this post from the first month of the blog!). And I can vouch that if the day-to-day stuff isn't getting handled, it can ruin other conversation. (See any post in the first few years of this blog, almost at random.)

What did we talk about? Well the articles, of course. And the magical principles involved in the topics they raise. Wife wondered what she should do to protect herself, and I tried to condense some of the pointers I've gleaned from John Michael Greer about psychic self-defense. But we also talked about mutual friends. I explained that Ma Schmidt died, and that I was there for a few weeks this spring to help with her. We discussed Schmidt and what he might end up doing now. She talked about the people from her old training coven that she used to know, and how distant and vestigial her contacts with them are today. Oh, and apparently the husband of her late teacher [You might recall that her former teacher died in 2020.] now identifies as a woman. Wife remarked that he was never a handsome man, and that now he is a particularly ugly woman!

And there was other stuff. I don't remember it all.

In the end I guess I was there around two-and-a-half hours, or just under three. Son 1 was elsewhere, probably visiting with his girlfriend. I would have liked to meet her too, but to everything there is a season. Anyway, it wasn't a bad conversation.

P.S.: Oh wait, I remember one other thing we discussed. Just as I was heading out the door, I stopped and sketched out for her the idea I proposed to you in this post here. And I asked her: Do you remember doing this? Am I right that this is just about the time you were desperately incapacitated for a year or so? And do you think the spellwork might have caused the incapacitation?

Her answers were: Yes, she remembered the event. Yes, I remembered the timing correctly. And Yes, there might have been some causality there. More interestingly, she said the idea had occurred to her independently, a while ago.

Good to know.