A New Bloom

And before you ask, no — I did not mistype the title. I did not mean ‘weather vanes’.Here’s what had happened:What had happened was, last year around this time, I had to stop going to the gym. There were mornings I simply could not get out of bed it seemed, due to body aches and pains. Back, neck, shoulders, knees, ankles, you name it: they all screamed in agony (if they had mouths, they would scream … sorry — channeled Harlan Ellison there for a second. But I digress.) like I’d been lumberjacking for hours, days, weeks, months on end.Of course, I blamed it on the early get-up and get-out plus the grueling regimen at the gym. At first, I stepped back to three days per week, but that did not help. I was nearly in tears some days. I stopped going for about a month and my pain subsided.I felt the creep of similar pains over this past week so I took the opportunity as often as possible to sleep in.Marvelous stuff, staying in bed.I miss my walks and so forth but the soreness in my limbs is too much of a deterrent, just like it was a year ago. I looked for information and found conflicting answers (of course) about seasonal soreness, weather-related aches and pains, and even the combination of Seasonal Affect Disorder and body pain. None got to the core of what I was trying to find out but all the articles I reviewed suggested the possibility of barometric pressure being part of the cause — it is possible that as the pressure drops or increases, fluid in the body, in the joints, reacts. I have not taken time to look at whether there have been barometric shifts this time of year (yet: I see my Nana in my mind’s eye as she checks the Farmers Almanac for all these issues. I need to get a subscription because she was never wrong when she consulted this small yet mighty volume) but instead took the time to put the pot on to brew a container of sweet tea. While it cooked, I stretched, much to the delight of my monsters. Sputnik took up residence for a time at a spot on the floor where she could access my left ear. She breathed in it a few times and attempted (successfully, once) to lick me. Woola found a spot hear my left foot, then my right (he has a thing about feet and takes every opportunity to lick mine, or at least my calf, in passing at various times throughout the day). Coaches, right?My left knee used to not be able to lay flat against the floor; when I would sit with both legs out, the left one was obviously up higher than the right. Not so much these days.However, it won’t bend back much beyond the 90-degree point, which means I can’t kneel onto my heels if on the floor. Sitting cross-legged is basically impossible. If I lay on my back, grip my bent leg just below the knee and attempt to pull it down to my chest, I cannot do so with the left leg in such a way that the calf is close to the back of my thigh. The knee protests with spikes of dull ache and I stop after a short while.Here’s another what had happened was that I may have shared at some point. A couple of years before I got pregnant with my son, I got rear-ended. I had Sven then and he was a tank; you could not tell from the exterior, save for the busted tail lights, that he’d even been touched. The trunk was mangled on the inside though and I took a good smack. The older woman who hit me was driving a Delta 88 or something.When she smacked into the back of me, my left knee hit Sven’s dashboard. I had to have arthroscopic surgery to clean the muck out and it was never really the same afterward. Fast forward about 24 years and here I am, with a knee that won’t bend right.The seasonal aches, whatchamacallits, or whatever, don’t help.I will not give up though and plan to spend some part of my evenings whilst watching television as stretch time, sitting in the floor. I am sure my two coaches will be right there to help. Or something.And if you were wondering, I did check the Farmers Almanac; the dew point was higher yesterday than it was on the same day a year ago. See? Told you.