Last night I felt okay for about an hour. Not that my body felt any different, but I had such a sense of being free from the swarming chiggers of anxiety, guilt and fear with which I am usually beset. The editor in me wonders if chiggers swarm. Think I’ll check. Yup chiggers swarm. They are ugly little things and dig in, bury themselves under the skin. I was free of chiggers for about an hour yesterday, but during the night they started burrowing and this morning I am scratching at the itchy welts they left behind. I’m going to research chigger cures and see if I can apply them figuratively. One old-time remedy was to bathe with bleach in the water. Chigger shock and awe. Think it’s better for me to take it one chigger at a time. So today since my anxiety has been focused on the fact that my knee hurts more than my hip when I walk, I’m going to get to work on that chigger. I’ll make an appointment for an x-ray and either confirm my fear that I need a knee replacement as much as a hip replacement or ease it. And today I’ll try not to read about tragedy in Afghanistan or Haiti. There’s nothing I can do about it; and my phone just pinged me that mandatory fire evacuations underway in a nearby neighborhood. One chigger and a possible fire evacuation is plenty to deal with today.