Depression Talk

My legs are itchy.

No good can come of my legs being itchy.

Every summer I act as field manager for a dear friend’s berry farm. It is a wonderful job that I love, and at the same time, it is an insidious job that no one in the free world should ever have to do. I go back every year because I love the owners and their beautiful, wonderful children, and the Berry Queen always keeps me well stocked in beer. Not to mention that her husband, the Berry King, makes the best Strawberry Daquiris on the planet, and the kids all make me beautiful cards for my birthday. Plus, they pay me money to do this job, and ninety five per cent of the time, I actually do love the job itself.

Last year I had one particularly stressful day that led to me having hives. I’d love to recount the entire incident, but it was long, involved, spanned over three days, and might make you want to shatter your screen so that you can poke your own eye out with a shard of glass.

The end result of the incident was a serious case of hives. It was so serious that I ended up buying out the entire pharmacy’s stock of anti-itch creams. I kept them with me all season long, and had to apply them multiple times each day. The Berry Queen eventually felt that if she saw me apply an itch cream to my red and swollen legs one more time, she would break my beer bottle over my head and proceed to poke her own eye out with its shards of glass. The hives were that irritating to those around me; use your imagination to determine how irritating they were to me.

I’m not exactly stressed at this point in my life, although I do have a fair amount of stuff going on. I can usually pinpoint exactly what it is that leads me to break out in hives. It usually has to do with a boyfriend or my need to be heavily sedated; this time, however, I can’t seem to figure out what it is.

The last few nights I have gone to bed with large, conspicuous itchy bumps on my legs. They haven’t been breaking out in droves like hives usually do. Instead, they have been breaking out one at a time, starting as a little pink itchy spot, growing to about the size of a nickel, itching like mad, and then disappearing before dawn.

Perhaps I am allergic to one of the new fabric softeners I’ve been using; perhaps I am allergic to working in the barn or digging about in my garden.

Either way, my legs have been itching like mad for the last several hours and I’m starting to think that the hives are imminent.

Bring on the anti-itch cream. It could be a long and scratchy summer.