I’m sitting under my lemon tree, with a Pegu Club cocktail, listening to Lee Stranahan interview my husband for FX Mogul Radio. The only thing that would make this better would be if NovySan were actually here, instead of sitting in his office miles away.

I had a biography of Abe Lincoln when I was a kid, that told about his early life in Illinois childhood in Kentucky and Indiana.* The rail-splitting was in there, and barn dances with shoo-fly pie. I think I remember it because it stimulated my imagination visually – I had such clear pictures in my head of the woods around the Lincoln family’s tiny cabin, and of Nancy Lincoln’s dying face, drained of life and color by the slow agony of milk fever.

Milk fever, as I remember it, followed the birth of a stillborn child. The poor mother’s unexpressed milk hardened inside her breasts, resulting in pain, swelling, infection and then death. I categorized it as a subset of childbed fever – really, puerperal fever caused by poor hygiene. (When I tried to Google it today, all I could find was a description of certain “morbid symptoms” which might appear in the week after childbirth, but which don’t appear to be fatal, and several references to a hypocalcemic condition that may affect dairy cattle, goats and dogs, and which may well be fatal if not promptly treated.)

And then today, researching something else entirely, I learned that Nancy Lincoln died of milk sickness, which was caused by snakeroot poisoning. A common affliction in the early Midwest, it occurred when cattle ate the very toxic white snakeroot, and passed the poison through in their milk.

So what about that stillborn child, I thought? That younger brother or sister whose death robbed Lincoln’s mother of life? Never existed. There was a younger brother, who died in infancy, but five or six years before Abe’s mother died. There was, however, an older sister, Sarah, called Sally, who died in childbirth at the age of 20. Her baby died, as well.

Somewhere in my mind, then, Lincoln’s mother Nancy (who might well have had milk fever after the stillbirth of Lincoln’s younger brother) and his sister Sarah morphed into a single person, buried in a grave under the poplar trees, where irises bloom in the spring. Always assuming I didn’t make that part up, too.

*And that’s something else I learned today – Lincoln didn’t grow up in Illinois at all. Now I’m wondering how many other bits of history I’ve just got wrong!

Memorial Day Weekend, 2005.

There was a stack of particle board leaning against the wall in the office, and I needed to get to the outlet behind it. “I’ll just ease it out away from the wall,” I said to myself.

Have you ever tried doing that with a stack of wood? It gets heavier the farther it gets from vertical. I think the pull of gravity must be stronger, closer to the ground. (Yes, you guessed it. I never took physics.) Anyway, everything was fine until the boards reached about a 45-degree angle. Suddenly, I couldn’t hold them up any longer, and I couldn’t push them back toward the wall, either. So I dropped them on my leg.

NovySan was outside. “What did you do?” he asked.

“Dropped a stack of particle board on my leg. But I’m okay! Really!”

“Go get an icepack,” he said.

“No, no. I’m fine.”

“You have a show tomorrow,” he said. And I did. So I got an icepack. NovySan is very wise. And the bruise really wasn’t so bad – it didn’t affect the muscle at all.

I can’t say that for the one I picked up a few days later, when I sat on the corner of a metal filing cabinet at work.

Yeah. That shit hurt.