Everyone is quite correctly giving me a wide berth these days. No one needs to get whatever it is I have. Besides, it's not as if I have hordes of close friends traipsing through the homestead even in normal times.

I don't mind being alone, but I don't like being incarcerated either. My living room is mostly glass on two sides, so I have a great view of the weeds as they grow higher. They've taken on a kind of personality, like a character playing opposite me in some dark drama. I'm not sure if I'm going to turn out to be the hero or the victim.

Within the last few days the weeds have really started drying out. Last year I had the yard cut back long before the green turned to gold, but this time around I'd been determined to do as much as possible myself. Then I got this cold and all I could do was look. Feeling a little better today, and getting a bit stir crazy, I made up my mind to get out and do something, even if I could last only a few minutes.

And then the wind came up. Those high, brown weeds were bent over sideways. Even the trees were leaning dramatically. The last thing I need as I try to recover is to be out in that kind of wind, so here I sat. Watching. Wondering whether I'll ever get back in control of the situation.

By this time next week I know I'll be able to get out and work in the yard again. I just wonder how bad it'll be by then. There's so incredibly much to do, with the big grasses in the back forty and the little sprouts in the garden proper, that I'm afraid I'll be tempted to throw my hands up in despair at ever getting back to where routine maintenance is all I need to do.

I like having things around me that grow a little wild, but this is getting way beyond wild. This is becoming riotously uncontrolled. I'm starting to feel smaller, like a puppy lost in traffic. And I can't do a thing about it until either the wind dies down or my head clears up.

It's kind of overwhelming to look out on the power of the natural world to take over in such a short time. It's the way things grow, but it's also the way the wind can take a yard full of high weeds and jerk them back and forth and make them lie nearly flat.

It's daunting to know that it's my job to try to get it all under control, because I know that no matter how hard I work at it, I'll never get ahead of the game. Every lapse, like this last week of forced inactivity, increases the amount of work left to do by some impossible geometrical proportion.

It's almost enough to make me want to give up. It definitely makes me grateful for the four walls I have around me.