![]() ![]() ![]() This wasn’t a hulking monster covered in fur with glinting fangs and glowing red eyes, but a bug so small it could squirm into my body undetected. I squeezed my eyes shut, struggling to imagine what such an invader might look like, but no image came to mind. Up to that point, I’d been scared of boogeymen in the closet and ghouls under the bed. Perhaps because of the fever, the thought of invisible enemies seared itself into my brain. “Not that kind of bug,” she replied, placing a hand on my forehead and a thermometer in my mouth. Why hadn’t I felt its tiny, wriggling legs on my skin? ![]() “While I was sleeping?” I asked, incredulous. “A bug got inside you,” my mother told me. More than that, though, I was mystified by how I’d gotten sick at all. Shivering, I felt a wave of disappointment over the cancellation. The aching in my arms and legs grew steadily over the course of the morning. Sneezing, coughing, and feverish, I lay sprawled on the couch under a heavy blanket, while my mother phoned the parents of my party guests to tell them it was called off. The day I turned seven, I fell sick with the flu. This is In This Climate, a column by Amy Brady on climate change and childhood nostalgia. ![]()
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