My darling, clementine.

The beautiful thing about having a migraine for six days is that when it's gone, you are so intensely grateful for everything about your life.  This morning when I woke up with no pain, it was like a revelation, like seeing Heaven with my physical eyes after existing in Hell for so long.  I felt amazing.

It was a cloudless day.  The sunshine streamed into our living room in blinding rays; we don't bother with heavy curtains or blinds.  I only have sheers on the windows, privacy be damned.  Jeff  jokes that I am solar powered and I am; I live on sunlight.  That makes the migraines so much more painful; I am deprived of my primary element and I miss it when I am forced into the darkness.  But this morning Sam and I rolled around on the living room floor, laughing at each other, letting the sunlight sear through our clothes and into our skins.  It felt incredible.  I felt alive for the first time in a week.

Yesterday I went to Wal-Mart because we needed formula (and if you want to experience a head trip, go to Wal-Mart with a migraine; if anything was designed to wig an already taxed nervous system, it is Wal-Mart) and spied a box of clementines.  They called my name; I couldn't ignore them and so I brough them home.  I ate six of them yesterday, unable to help myself.  I credit them for my miraculous recovery.  They were so juicy and good against my tongue.  Each one tasted like a burst of full summer; in each segment I could taste the heat of July, the smell of sun-warmed earth, the green of new plants lifting their heads toward the sun and hot nights under the full moon.  I looked out at my garden as I ate, lying fallow under weeds and frost, blasted by this arctic air we've been getting.  I dreamed about the coming spring when eventually just the right April day would occur, warm enough to bring the baby to the neighbor's, rent the rototiller from the place down the street and plow my strip of garden fresh again.  I will plant green beans, peas, tomatoes, carrots, potatoes, peppers, sunflowers and maybe corn and wild strawberries as well.  Too much for me to handle, certainly, but I'll do it anyway, like I always do.  I'll remember last year when I planted with hope, not knowing what my harvest would be.  And I'll think about this year and how the harvest is already so abundant, even before the planting has begun. 

These are the sweetest, juciest, orange clementine days.