Common Cold Blues

About one o'clock in the afternoon Norris decides to quit malingering and try to make herself useful around the house while waiting for her soup to melt.

Unlike other people, she usually made food from scratch and was comforted by the fact that no mother's presence was required to produce some chicken soup; a sure fire remedy for everything. Her soup had come from the freezer and was still in a solid state now in a pot on the stove.

Norris was no giant, and so it was that staggering around the kitchen in hangover mode that she noticed that the grime atop her small apartment sized refrigerator had reached crisis status. She'd been getting by the last few weeks with hapazard swipes at the accumulating crud, but feeling ill generated an urge to clean house.

I hate being sick in a dirty house, she often reminded herself. If it was not one malady, it was another, and in fact, Norris spent most of her time being nauseous, dizzy or both for reasons she could only guess at, and that numerous doctors had deemed to be non existant, though being frail or a hypochondriac in final analysis amount to the same thing.

Standing on the kitchen stool, Norris discovers that window cleaner and a paper towel are not going to do the job. Why did I have to start this? She wonders about this urge to clean while scrubbing vigorously with ammonia and squinching her face in another direction to avoid the fumes. Finally, she manages to clean the few items that sat on top of the fridge top to her satisfaction; (I'm really getting things done now!)as well as the refrigerator itself.

Moving on to another part of the kitchen, she broke the top of her sugar jar while trying to dislodge a knife jammed in the silverware drainer. It really was a tiny kitchen. She assembled all of the pieces of lid and considered throwing the whole thing out. Then she thought about what it would cost to replace which led to some cogitation about people who keep broken crockery and people who do not keep broken lids but keep things which are obviously missing lids, and so never use the items. It was a gift she had actually liked, which was a rare instance indeed, and that made the whole thing worse.

Weary, she dished out her soup and sat to relax and contemplate the situation further. All this comes of carelessness she thinks, and 2 lousy drinks. Why are there carrot skins in this soup? This doesn't happen at Campbell's. The whole episode truly irritated her.

Norris resolves not to be quite so handy all the time.