Cabin Fever

Between the Super Bowl and the first pitch of baseball time stands still. During this interval families have the opportunity to share and draw closer. When our children were growing up our family usually shared the flu and drew close enough to exchange threats of bodily harm.

Then there would be a break-out of cabin fever.

You know when you have cabin fever. You only check the weather report to find out how much worse it will get tomorrow. Work becomes boring. You find yourself wishing you had answered those ads inside matchbook covers and had become a trucker. Little things start to get on your nerves – like the sound of your spouse breathing.

We went to great lengths at our house to fight cabin fever. First, we tried making snow ice cream.  My children were far from impressed.

“But Daddy, I wanted chocolate.”

“I can’t make chocolate snow ice cream, it only comes in vanilla.”

“But it looks like chocolate on the street.”

“We can’t eat that, it’s dirty,” I explained.

“Grandma says that all snow is dirty.”

“Why don’t you ask Grandma if she would like you to stay at her house for a week?”

“I already did.  She said 'no.'”

Next we tried working a jigsaw puzzle. This one had been a real bargain from a discount chain. It was a 1000-piece circular puzzle of the sky. No clouds, no birds, just sky. Still, with nothing but the shape of the pieces to guide us, we finally got down to the last piece. It was nowhere to be found. I cannot tell you on a Christian website how I referred to our puzzle project at that moment. 

Then we took a stab at playing games. By the time I had finished reading the Monopoly instructions, my son, the designated banker, was accused of embezzlement. Hungry Hungry Hippos was cut short when my daughter wanted to see if a marble would fit up her nose. 

It did.

As for card games, we discovered that people only have a certain number of Old Maid and Go Fish games in them. When this quota is exhausted these games no longer hold the allure they had during the first seventy-five hands.

As a last resort, we turned to television. At our house we selected shows democratically. Thus, college basketball lost out to a twenty-four hour Sponge Bob Square Pants marathon.

Since evenings and weekends did not provide enough togetherness, school was invariably cancelled at the first sign of snow. Ever tried to explain to your boss that you won’t be in because your wife has locked herself in the bathroom and refuses to come out? 

Perhaps the cruelest twist of fate is that the card companies and florists squeezed Valentine’s Day into the middle of cabin fever season. It was difficult to find a valentine card that expressed my true feelings toward the woman who had given birth to my children. It was no coincidence that Cupid shot arrows.

Cabin fever tests even the best marriages. The only reason there are not more divorces during this time of year is that family lawyers typically winter in Florida.

As I struggled to maintain my Christianity, my marriage and my sanity, I went out every day, scraped away the snow and prayed for the first sign of Spring: crabgrass.

J. Rick Brown is a recovering lawyer who has gotten some of his biggest laughs from judges and juries. A product of a mixed marriage – his father was a Methodist and his mother a Baptist – Brown lives in Cary, NC, where he assists his wife teaching first-grade Sunday school. (She teaches, and he is the bouncer.) They have three children over the age of 21 – though he avoids the oxymoron “adult children” – and four grandchildren at last count.