Lovin Me Some More Winter

I offered my neck to Martin this morning so he could touch my gland, which is, I am not kidding you, swollen to the size of a golf ball. I love this time of year. Really. I love bundling the children in ten layers of wool to pick someone up from school. I love looking outside and watching the snow blow in great icy clouds from the neighbor's roof. I love that we crawl from one cold to another. My sister used to say--I think it was in Wheaton, IL, where we had come straight from the shifting sunlight and warm floors of Kenya to the wind tunnels of our college where our snot froze as soon as we stepped from the teeming heat of the dorm building--"Just relax. It's colder if you tense up your muscles. You have to EMBRACE winter." So I'd try to unknot my shoulders, unlock my kneecaps, slacken my chattering jaw. And it was true, what she said, but I lack the discipline to relax so consistently.

Sarcasm does not become me, or so my mother would tell me if she were here instead of in WA cooking big pots of chili in my father's abscense.

This is how my mother cheers herself when my father is on a trip: she cooks, watches programs my father does not particularly care for, sleeps in (this does not mean SLEEPING IN the way a teenager might, but the way my mother sleeps in, until 7:30 or so), and shops the thrift stores.

When my mother travels, my father consoles himself by going to the grocery store and buying a head of iceburg lettuce. My mother looks down her nose at the stuff, perferring something with integrity, but my father secretely pines after his own mama's iceburg salads. Perhaps my parents hit mid-life crisis at some point, but it was not particularly dramatic: no motorcycles, swift red cars or religious conversion. Only waterlogged vegetables and new chili recipes. It's the way I like it.

Drama is good on TV series but not in families. And not in weather! This chapter of winter needs to come to a satisfactory conclusion. We've got February and April to go until the robin appears in our garden path. I'm not impatient exactly, just ready. That's it, I'm just graciously ready for some warmth. And so is my poor sore throat.