It was early morning. It was one of those mornings where the sky wouldn’t give up its secrets. Blue sky and dark clouds gave me little clue about the rest of the day.
I was on my way to Cazenovia to act as a Mom understudy for my youngest grandson, Will, who had developed one of those unnamed viruses that produce fever and malaise.
My daughter had taken her youngest to urgent care the night before. A fever and malaise in this day and age is nothing to ignore. After an exam and a negative COVID-19 test, he was sent home with instructions to lay low, take fever reducers if he felt uncomfortable , drink lots of fluids and get some rest.
After a phone call from my daughter and 45 minutes along Route 20, I became a part of the prescription for a family where Mom and Dad had strategic appointments at work that day.
The indicator on my dashboard told me that I wasn’t dressed for the weather. My car told me, in mid-June, that it was only 59 degrees. I was dressed for last week’s weather. I turned on the heater in my car. It took maybe five minutes before I felt the appropriate warmth, my clothing faux pas remediated by technology.
In LaFayette I stopped by the McDonald’s drive-thru to pick up some hash browns, a forbidden treat for Will, but allowable when you are 10 years old and feel so awful. Of course, there was a large coffee for Grandma to help the morning and whatever it would bring.
A bit outside of Pompey, the dark clouds dumped their contents … it began to rain hard. I turned on the windshield wipers, front and back, to continue my journey, still comfortably warm and dry.
Then my nerdiness set in.
As I was descending the hill on Route 20 as it winds through the village of Cazenovia, I began to think of John Adams. You know, the second president of the United States, the father of John Quincy Adams, the sixth president of the U.S. In John McCullough’s “John Adams” he describes John Adams’ trips between his home in Boston and his work in Philadelphia and Washington. Adams traveled to and from Boston on a horse, not in a closed-in carriage, but on a horse, riding by himself over nothing like what we think of as roads.
Notably, when it was cold, the horse did not have a heater. When it rained, both the horse and the rider got wet. Trips this long, often taking as much as 10 days, required stay-overs at sketchy hostels where one often shared sleeping quarters with many others, including all sorts of livestock of the itchy kind. The food was, to be kind, not gourmet.
In that same book, McCullough quotes from letters that Abigail Adams wrote to her husband, letters that took weeks to get from Boston to Philadephia or Washington. In one she describes a household of family and servants all felled by some malady such that Abigail had to care for not only the sick humans but also the chickens and other livestock in what was an upper middle class household without indoor plumbing, indoor toilets, electricity, etc. Abigail treated the illness by cleaning the house and its outbuildings with hot boiled vinegar. Not everyone survived.
My morning journey became a time traveler’s lesson as I compared the two experiences, giving props to the hardiness of our forefathers and foremothers, as I daintily sipped my McDonald’s large coffee with two creams, still warm and dry, knowing that my Will had at least one hash brown to eat and more than hot boiled vinegar to assuage his malady.
