The spring of our malcontent seems to be upon us. People are kind of grumpy these days, or is that my imagination?

I find this odd since life, as we know it in Weatherford, America, is really pretty great, right? With the possible exception of the additional road construction ahead, but we can make it through the next 18 months if we buck up and pull together.

A week before I sat down to write this column I was standing by the fountain at Chandor Gardens. The Bridal Fair was in full swing. The gardens, in my opinion, have never looked lovelier. The best of Parker County restaurateurs were present, and they were handing out luscious delicacies. I tasted my favorite food item in the whole world — wedding cake. (I love wedding cake because it tastes like hope and love and the future and best of all, butter cream frosting).

I was surrounded by a gaggle of beautiful, high-energy people wearing exquisite gowns and tuxes. Life couldn’t be better. Combine that with the fact that we now have the best, most compatible crew at the magazine that we’ve ever had, and my optimism has reached an all-time high.

We’d been terrified that rain would pelt down on the silk confections the girls were modeling but that never happened.

Half-way through the bridal fashion show my throat was feeling scratchy, and I felt a chill in the air. By the end of the show I barely had a voice. Dog-gone allergies, I thought, denying to myself that I was catching what Steven was slowly getting over.

By the next morning, I couldn’t talk and could barely breathe. By Tuesday, I was scrambling to find a doctor who could “fit me in.” By the end of the day I found one and (wonderful man that he was), he gave me four prescriptions.

The rest of the week was spent working from home, hoping I wasn’t going to die while trying to be creative or get lost in the house that I seem to have forgotten my way around. Feeling like I was at death’s door while working on an issue about weddings and spring and love being in the air was not all that easy. Not to mention, my lovely journalist/runway model, Crystal, forgot that she’s a journalist and not a world-renowned chef, and sliced her typing hand with a BUTTER knife, winding up with three stitches between her fingers. My dedicated writer, Phil, had also picked up a case of the mystery illness, but still managed to plow through. Then the account executive, Cadar, started threatening to catch the office plague. Even Hazmat had begun to look questionable.

I was back at the office probably a week before I should have been, but was getting the stink eye from Kaki, the only one that managed to avoid the terrorizing germ, who was running all over the office with a bottle of alcohol. Yes, it was the rubbing kind, although after the Bridal Fair fashion show either was a possibility. I still felt like death, but I needed to push it all into high gear if we were to get this issue to press. Just as I felt like I wasn’t going to survive (yeah, writers can be a bit dramatic at times) my spouse showed up with a carton of Southwestern Corn Chowder soup from Brioche Bistro & Bakery along with an Aztec-flavored cake ball.

The sun broke through the clouds. My friend Liz Blitzer came by and talked to me from across the street (she had a silly notion that I might somehow be contagious), but she made me laugh. Then Kay Huse popped in and made me laugh a little more.
Life was surprisingly good again.

The moral? Life is full of ups and downs. The trick is to enjoy the ups and have courage to get through the downs with a minimal amount of whining.

Marsha Brown
Editor and Publisher,
Parker County Today Magazine