Autumn is usually lauded for its beauty, but it has its downsides.

I've written many posts about the joys of autumn. The colored leaves (yet to come here this year, but the idea anyway), the night insects, the cooler weather in the evening, and so on. There are a great many good points to autumn.

But there is one big bad point: Autumn is typically the start of flu and cold season. Autumn allergies too, but those usually aren't as bad as in the spring. It's the ease of catching a cold or flu due to the drastic temperature changes and our tendency to not wear enough that haunt this season. Even as adults we sometimes fall prey to this season, but it is kids who tend to get sick and suffer the most.

And that's exactly what happened to my oldest. The other day he came home from school with a fever, then slept for 12 hours straight. In the morning his fever was gone but he still didn't feel well. Then at night it came surging back, passing 39°C (102°F). We took him to the doctor and, you guessed it, flu.

Oh well, that's how it goes. He'll bounce back in a few days, as kids tend to do. But at least for the time being, he's having a rough time, with body aches, pains, and all the works.

At the risk of catching the bug myself, I was sitting with him last night. Mostly reading silently, but telling him motivational things when he started complaining about how much it hurt. Sometime in the process, I pulled out a notecard and wrote down the above haiku.

I originally wrote the last line as my poor son but I think it does better without the adjective, allowing the reader to fill in their own image.

There are several kigo (season words) related to sickness. I was surprised to see that flu is in my saijiki (kigo encyclopedia). Surprised because flu in Japanese is "influenza", but rendered in the Japanese accent as i-n-fu-ru-e-n-za, which is seven syllables! If one wants to use this kigo and follow the traditional 5/7/5 form, this could only fit in the middle line and it would take all of it. More common would be kigo like seki, "cough", or kusame, "sneeze", or other symptoms. Most are kigo for winter.

David LaSpina is an American photographer and translator lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time and searching for the perfect haiku. He blogs here and at laspina.org. Write him on Twitter or Mastodon.