January Thaw

When I lived in New England, the winter temperatures froze the soil, making it as rigid as cement. Ice crusted the sidewalks, stairs and streets. The most dangerous ice, however, was the wafer-thin sheets you could not see. You knew it was there only after you found yourself slipping and sliding in a frantic attempt to maintain some balance. Layers of old snow would pile up and shrink back, solidifying into granular piles of dirty gray. It had no resemblance to the white fluffy flakes that had fallen from the sky days or weeks before. 

What was fun as a child became a drudgery as an adult. At the end of the driveway where the snowplows had scraped the street clean, the snow was packed hard and formed into angular chunks. My shoulders ached from shoveling; piling the mounds higher than my head I was hot under my winter coat while my nose was red from the cold.

“There’s always a thaw in January,” Mum would say with reverence. It was one of the few unexplainable, but she believed. “The snow and ice will melt. We’ll have a short break from winter before it returns again in force.” Sure enough, usually in the last week of January, the temperatures would rise above freezing for several days in a row. The fog from the warm air against the cold ground would form drops of dew on windows.  The snow piles along the paths would shrink and some would disappear.  The top layer of ice covering the pond would turn into puddles. I could almost smell the earth softening.

Winter in North Florida is not cold; I don’t miss snow or ice. This week, it was warm enough for me to go outdoors without a sweater. Inside, I opened the windows and listened to the birds chirping. The old timers here say it is one of the warmest winters they can remember. The same is true, say my friends up North. Although we are glad, it also makes us feel uneasy. Some of us realize that thirteen of the warmest years since record-keeping began have occurred in the last fifteen years. It is hard to miss the photos of icebergs melting and breaking away. The number of extreme weather catastrophes around the globe are increasing year by year; droughts, massive fires, hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes, tornadoes make it hard not to notice that the climate is changing. 

It is more than any January thaw.

Plum Pudding

Mom was grateful for many things; Christmas was not one of them. It was nearly impossible to give her a gift that she liked. My father had given up years before I was born. It was a lose/lose proposition. Mom did not like surprises and she did not like routine, she considered gifts that were not practical to be frivolous while presents that were ordinary she considered mundane.  Dad purchased her a dozen nylon stockings each Christmas from the most expensive department store in the city. Mom silently tucked them in her dresser drawer and wore them only for special occasions, but at least she did wear them. She would feign pleasure when neighbors or relatives sent her a gift and then grumble about the waste or inappropriateness when they were out of sight. Over the years, I gave her wallets and scarves and gloves that she stuffed in the very back of the closet and called “too good to use.”

When at last I asked her why she didn’t like Christmas, she told me that when she was a little girl, she received a lump of coal in her stocking. “No!” I said truly shocked.

“Yes,” she replied. She never quite recovered from that disappointment. Silly as she knew that sounded, she looked embarrassed and changed the subject. I thought that lump of coal had settled in my mother’s heart as a reminder that she was not good enough.

Mom also did not like shopping for gifts. Each December just before Christmas, she would purchase the supplies for making steamed pudding. She would put the suet through the meat grinder and make a pot of strong tea. While the tea cooled, she mixed the eggs, sugar, and molasses, then added the chopped dried fruit. It was such a gooey dough that it required a strong arm to stir. I watched my mother through her weight into the wooden spoon. Even on the coldest day, there would be sweat on her forehead as her shoulder rotated. Throwing the weight of her whole body, she would thrust the reluctant batter into one mixture.

The aroma of cinnamon and allspice from the steaming pudding drifted through our house. While the puddings were cooking, Mom would mix the powdered sugar and butter for the hard sauce. It was my job to roll the stiff icing into balls, forming little snowmen with current eyes.

Mom would sit beside me at the kitchen table, writing out the instructions for re-heating the pudding in three by five cards. “They won’t take the time to warm it properly,” she mumbled, “they will ruin the pudding and people will think it is my fault.”

Its hard to give or receive a gift if you do not believe you are worthy.

If a tree falls on the wood pile, what does it mean?

The November chill has pierced through the walls of the house for several nights. I go out the front door to fetch some of the stacked wood piled high on the porch. Ever since it was delivered a few weeks ago, I have been eager to begin using it up.

I crumple a few pieces of newspaper, lay the kindling, tinder and a single log into the wood stove, and then strike the match to the paper. I wait until I see the flame catch hold. The flames lick the wood like a cat pruning its fur. When I see the flame shrink I open the stove door a crack, letting in more oxygen. Poof, the sparks sprinkle in many directions and the wood begins to glow.

They belong together, the wood, the flame and the air. When they meet at last, however, they will release their energy and die. Fires need watching and tending as they die, I muse, much like people.

As a child I watched a pine tree in the yard of a neighbor. I could see it clearly from my bedroom window. When I first noticed it, it was the height of a Christmas tree, perhaps 6 or 7 feet tall. It grew so slowly that I was surprised one day too see that it had surpassed the height of the houses on our street. It terrified me to watch it during a storm. The tall trunk would sway and tip from side to side. I wondered if it fell, would the top hit the roof of my house?

The loblolly pines in Tallahassee often fall when there is a heavy rain or wind, bringing down other trees, crushing cars, crashing through homes, destroying lives and transforming the landscape. Many homeowners have had all of the beautiful tall pines removed from their yards.

I love the giant trees covered in crusty bark. Their branches stretch towards the clouds and their roots extend deep and wide under the earth. Last summer, we had three trees cut down from our yard because the tops had died and the chances were that they would come crashing down in the next big storm. It pained me to watch the guide ropes being attached and hear the power saws buzz, and smell the wood being ground into pulp. Not more than a month later one of the many remaining trees in our yard fell and landed directly on the woodpile. It seemed an act of suicide. It also reminded me that as much as we might try to predict the greatest threats to life and safety, we can not control what will topple next or where it will land.

Living the High Life

Living the High Life: A nebula with active star formation about 6,500 light years from Earth., a photo by Smithsonian Institution on Flickr.

After Mrs. Gilbert’s husband died, the house that had once been full of conversation, music and laughter seemed hollow. Her two daughters were both married adults with busy and active lives. They were worried about her, she knew that, but there was little they could do except to call her on the telephone once a week.

Before he died, Mrs. Gilbert’s husband had spent his days and nights in a hospital bed. The bed was still in the spot where once there had been a dining room table. Each time she passed that empty bed she felt the stark reality that Howard had died. Oddly she also felt his presence and so she refused to have the bed removed.

Just up the hill from her house was a seminary. “Mom, why don’t you inquire if there are any students who need housing in the area?” one of her daughters suggested. She rather liked that idea; it would give her joy to share her home with someone studying for the ministry.

What Mrs. G. did not expect was that two women, one studying for a master’s degree in Divinity and one studying for a master’s degree in Library Science, would ask if she might rent them both rooms. “Why not?” she said, “One of you can sleep on the third floor and one on the second. That still leaves me two spare bedrooms.”

I was the woman studying to be a librarian. We moved in, relieved to be out of the basement studio apartment in the city that a friend had generously invited us to share temporarily. We felt incredibly lucky to have found such a charming and inexpensive place to live.

In early November, Mrs. G. informed us that she would be visiting her daughter for several weeks in December. She was glad that we would be keeping an eye on things in her home.

The first night after she left for D.C., I awoke. I could hear distinct footsteps coming up the stairs from the first floor. Gripped by fear I lay as still as I could, hoping the intruder wouldn’t notice that I was there. The footsteps went past my door and directly to Mrs. G.’s empty bedroom, then down the stairs again. I never heard the door to the outside open or shut. I decided it was best not to investigate until sunrise.

In the morning when I got up for breakfast there was no evidence that anything was disturbed, no broken windows, no unlocked doors, nothing seemed to be missing. When it happened the second night I began to question my hearing.

“Did you hear anything last night?” I said tentatively to Robin.

“You mean the footsteps?” she replied.

After several nights of interrupted sleep, I decided to take action.

When I heard the first creek on the staircase, I said loudly, “Howard, she is in D.C. visiting your daughter, Madeline. She’ll be back soon.”

I never heard those footsteps again.