Winter, for me,
somehow seems most heartless in the mornings. Growing up in Chicago, winter mornings
were cold with deep snow. When I was quite young, I didn’t think much about
cold mornings but anticipated going sledding. We lived in a park with a small
hill that was just right for a five- or six=year-old to sled. By the time the neighbor children and I
reached ten or eleven, we were bored with the hill’s smallness.
My mom used to
save statistics she found in the newspaper about how much soot fell per square
foot in Chicago during the winter. I was young long enough ago that many
households still used coal for heat. We did at least until I was in my teens,
and my dad would get up extra early to light the furnace and shovel coal. And
snow never stayed white for long—all that burning coal turned it a dirty gray.
In Missouri, where
I was in graduate school in the small town of Kirksville, winter mornings were even worse. Everyone in
that town burned coal, and I remember waking up and looking out the window and wishing
just once I could see something over than that vast expanse of gray snow.
I think I found
the kind of winter mornings I dreamt of in Santa Fe when the children, as teens
and older, and I would go for Christmas. Eventually those became ski vacations,
though I never went near the slopes—couldn’t bear the thought of the ski lift nor
of standing on top of a mountain and plunging down it. But the snow was clean
and deep, and the air was that crisp cold.
By contrast,
winter mornings in Texas should be easy, but I have let myself become spoiled.
I have pushed those extreme cold memories so far back that I moan and groan on
mornings like we had today. Thirty-seven and wet, dismal, damp, bone-chilling. Today,
it set the mood for a stay-at-home day, and I cancelled plans to go to a
breakfast meeting. Of course by noon, things changed, and the sun came out,
though it’s been cold all day. But we didn’t get the snow that had been
promised—and I am just as glad.
When my children
were little, we had a beloved housekeeper who used to predict cheerfully that
it would “fair off,” and sure enough today, it faired off enough that I felt
guilty about not doing my errands. But I’ll do them tomorrow when it’s supposed
to be warmer.
Even Sophie with
her thick curly coat doesn’t like the cold. Tonight she doesn’t want to go
outside, though I have tried to explain
that she needs to go pee now, because we aren’t going at three in the
morning. She is curled up in a chair, regarding me with baleful eyes. I’ll have
to resort to bribery with a piece of cheese.
I’ve been feeling
sorry for myself even before the weather turned, because I’ve been fighting off
a cold. A couple of nights ago I couldn’t sleep because a scratchiness in my throat
kept making me cough. It turned briefly into a sore throat, then just a tightness
in my throat, and tonight I am left with just an annoying cough. Wish I knew what
I did with that abundant supply of cough drops I used to have.
Jordan and I had a
lunch fiasco which didn’t brighten the day. I opened one of those boxes of
tomato soup from Trader Joe’s. It turned out that the foil covering was
punctured before I opened it, and I had stored the soup in the pantry, not the
refrigerator, We didn’t figure all this out until I’d taken several spoons full
and found it quite good. But discussion led us to figure out that neither of us
opened it, and that was a bad thing. Jordan refused to eat it, and I threw out mine,
hers, and the remainder. I hate to waste food!
Sophie has just
gone outside and quickly come back in, and Jacob has brought me some cough
drops. All is well with the world—I hope it is in your world too.
