After much unneeded stress and conflict we ended up buying a house in the Hudson Valley that my wife has hated from Day One and has progressively lost its attraction for me.
Granted, it’s a beautiful house on a beautiful piece of property that we’ve subsequently spent over a decade improving, but the initial reason for buying it never worked out.
The first day there was craziness as our hundreds of boxes and furniture were piled everywhere and we had to squeeze through narrow canyons barely wide enough for the dogs to get anywhere. Our only goal for the first day was to get a bed made ready for sleeping that night in the downstairs bedroom and we barely got it done.
(By that time my normal energy levels were almost non-existent and I’d usually be asleep by eight or nine at night after work.)
We crawled into the improptu bed, the dogs snuggled between us, and it took us both hours to fall asleep as each drip, or creak, or each time the strange fridge came on would wake us up. Eventually though, sleep did come.
At some point in the middle of the night (we hadn’t unpacked a clock yet) I woke up feeling like I was sleeping in ice water. I was freezing cold, covered in sweat, and my shivering became so violent that I bit off a bit of tongue and started pulling muscles. The shaking of the bed became so much that it woke my wife up who then piled every sheet, blanket, and afghan she could find on top of me to try to get me warm.
This strange fit went on for hours, and just as the sun started to come up it stopped as suddenly as it started and I passed out asleep.
In the subsequent craziness of unpacking and trying to adjust to our new commuting lifestyle the shivering fit would be forgotten in the mix.
Until it happened again.
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