I don’t always get sick after I fly, but if I do get sick it’s almost always after I fly. So I shouldn’t have been surprised when my throat began to get sore and I started to cough on Sunday afternoon, six days after landing back in Detroit.

It’s a bad week for me to be sick. Katie isn’t happy about it either. As I cough she barks. As I gasp for breath, tears running down my face, she barks harder.

The community band Christmas concert is tonight, we had our dress rehearsal last night. This Friday Katie and I have her first Rally trial after an absence of four years. We had our last doggie school prior to the trial this morning.

Sunday night, and most of Monday I considered cancelling all these events. No one wants someone sitting near them hacking her lungs out. Plus my head hurts and my eyes hurt, and my ribs hurt.

But I’m the librarian at the band, and I needed to organize music, so I went to rehearsal figuring I’d leave early. And a funny thing happened as I began to play. The tickle in my throat receded. The coughing subsided. The music poured over me like a salve, the music beating the cold back into the recesses of my memory. For a couple hours last night I felt pretty close to good.

That’s what music can do.

Today I’m drinking a ton of water, sucking down cough drops like candy, heating tea, taking cough medicine, and napping. Katie and I fit an abbreviated doggie school into our morning, but mostly I’m saving my strength for tonight’s concert.

I’m not foolish, I’ll have cough drops in my pocket and a bottle of water by my chair, but I’m thinking I’ll get through tonight just fine.

And our Rally trial in a couple of days? Well, Katie says she’s ready, and if I can get my head straight we might get a leg toward her title. If not, she’ll probably forgive me.

After all, her mama is beating back a cold.