Oh, my aching head

I woke up this morning with a headache. The kind that goes from the top of my head and down into my neck to my shoulders. That's not uncommon for me, unfortunately; I wake up with one probably once every couple of weeks. I don't know why. I've always been prey to headaches and have had a couple of episodes of what I used to mistakenly call cluster headaches: a period of about a month where I would have a nasty, make-me-want-to-cry headache all day, every day that no amount of aspirin, Advil, or Tylenol would convince to go away. They'd just stop on their own after about 30 miserable days.

But this morning was a just garden-variety, wake up with a headache kind of morning. Mostly. I took an aspirin and went back to bed for a little bit (the headache woke me up before the alarm) , hoping to feel better at actual get up time. No such luck. So I dressed gently, brushed my teeth gently, fed the cat gently, etc and got in the car to come to work. I felt a bit nauseated as I left my neighborhood and by the time I was half-way to work I was afraid that I was going to throw up. You know the feeling - your mouth starts watering a lot, so you're swallowing a lot, you feel very warm, the usual. Unfortunately or fortunately, I eat breakfast at work, so there was nothing in my stomach. Fortunately, I keep a bottle of water in the car and nothing is as easy to throw up as tepid water. (I know this from experience, but that's a story for another time.)

Being a tiny bit of a hypochondriac, I started to wonder if a headache that's bad enough to make me want to vomit isn't really an aneurysm ... Considering that I have a show opening in three weeks, I don't have time for an aneurysm, so it's not that.

So I'm sitting in the sort of traffic we get in this area when white stuff is going to fall from the sky, sipping my tepid water, and contemplating throwing up out of an open car door in traffic (Don't you wish you were me?) when the rain started to get all clumpy and turn to snow.

I love snow.

Now I'm sitting indoors with a nice, hot cup of tea, the nausea is mostly gone, the headache is now just a remnant behind my left eye, and it's snowing to beat the band. Not the kind that sticks to the road - all the preceeding rain put paid to that - but the kind that swirls around in the air like legions of microscopic ballet dancers in white tutus dancing the dances they see in their heads. The snow is falling down and running sideways and vaulting up. There is no gravity for them, just snow revels and snow races and every pattern you can think of.

I can barely see to the next block and the trees and the grass are looking prettier and prettier, but the traffic is still moving. And I'm silently singing my snow song. "It's snowing, it's snowing, it's snowing....."