Snow in the Palouse

Snow in the Palouse

The hills here got another powdered sugar coating this week. Looks like our patch of balmy, 50 degree weather is gone and the weather trolls remembered it's still January. Got my computer up and running again and added external storage for backup, something I should have done ages ago. Now its me that's crashed and burned. The change from dry and cold to damp and windy seems to have kick started an arthritis flare or maybe it just got a mind to do that itself. All I want to do is sleep and that's not the best thing so I'm setting my alarm to get myself up after 8 hours and then taking an hour nap most afternoons. The worst is in my feet and that keeps me from walking much, not good, not good. Just nature's way of reminding me I'm not 40 anymore, or 50, 0r 60, jeez.

Being parked more than usual I've gotten a lot more reading done and some knitting. I just finished "Cane River" by Lalita Tedemy. I really liked it even though much of it was painful to read. The mores of the times are difficult to take in, and makes this family of strong women even more amazing, not just that they survived but managed to prosper. Now I'm starting "The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet," by David Mitchell. I'm only a few pages in and am totally in love with his art with words. It's set in Shogunate Japan where Jacob employed as a clerk with the Dutch East India Company is confined with other traders to an small artifical island near Nagasaki from which they pursue their business.

Life is peaceful and uneventful for the most part. A great relief after the divorce drama of the fall. My life is remaking itself. Every now and then I get some new small housewares to fit my one person household, a six hole muffin tin, a little bread pan that fits in the toaster oven I had forgotten I had. I got a new, small skillet too; not that I haven't kept all the big stuff, company is coming for spring break. Just to keep some uproar in the background I have started tearing wallpaper off both the bathrooms. I'm sure I'll have them painted by the time company gets here. Ha, ha, ha.

One more week

One more week until school's out. I can't think how many years its been since I've been in school, or my kids have been in school but I still look forward to Christmas break.

When my sister Nancy and I were little kids we thought Santa brought everything, gifts, decorations, tree, the whole thing. There may have been lights up around town, a creche at church, and trees in our grandmothers' houses but not ours. The house was undecorated when we went to bed Christmas Eve. We left cookies for Santa and then into the sack straining to hear jingling, or hooves on the roof. Nevermind we had no chimney. My sister Nancy and I would then pop out of bed at dark thirty and creep towards the living room. There would be the tree, lights on, big lights shining in the dark and gifts. I'm sure our little jaws dropped to the floor. It was magical and mysterious. Its still one of my favorite things to just sit in the dark and watch the Christmas tree lights.

Did you have that lead tinsel they used to use on trees? It was silvery and heavy and didn't fly around like the new stuff. We called it rain and carefully picked it off and saved it for next year. It was made of lead not mylar. I was surprised to find you can still buy it, on the web at least.

The Christmas I remember the most I was four which would make my sister two. Old four and old two as our birthdays were in March. That year under the tree were not one but two doll houses with furniture, and a metal wind up train that ran around on a set of tracks with friction sparks blowing out its chimney. I imagine the memory has to have lost some details but it seems clear as a photo in my mind even now. Some years I have had fake trees, decorative branches, even a virtual tree one year made of lights fastened to a wall. This is my first Christmas as a single for years so I decided to get a real tree and put it up in the living room window. I going to get lights, some of the new large ones that look like the big, old, multicolored lights of my childhood. I plan to get the tree with my son and then enlist the grandgirls in decorating. Christmas Eve I will sit for a moment or two in the dark before the family dinner and enjoy some of the peace just watching those lights brings.

Regrouping

There are times when my life seems to be spent unraveling the same knot day after day with the result that it just grows tighter and more unsolvable. My solution since I was a small kid was to pack a bag and run away. Granted at 8 or 9 I didn't go far or for long with my pillow stuffed in my little suitcase along with some peanut butter sandwiches. Sometimes I slept in the grape arbor in the yard and at others in an ancient tree house in the woods. Sixty years later this is still my solution. I pack better and usually these days find a place inside to sleep. Not that sleeping under the stars doesn't still whisper to me; it's too hard to sleep on the ground and trying to get up off an air mattress, oh my! So I left for the Oregon coast with my sister, reservations at Wheeler by the Bay, and a tic in my eye I'd had for three weeks. Let the ocean breezes blow the cobwebs out of my brain.

I tried not so much to stifle old thoughts as to let new views into my eyes and my heart. The view by our room was wonderful but one the first things I saw were these delicate flowers. The owners here have planted flower boxes on each of the little decks on the backside of the rooms. The weather was healing, 70, not the scalding 100 degrees with blowing dust at home.

I called this my Watergate, but unlike some others when you walk through this arch you leave your tangled webs behind. Plop yourself on a bench on the deck, inhale deeply, hear the birds, and feel the slight damp of the morning fog on your skin as the sun evaporates it and warms your spirit. We watched the sun go down from here. By the next morning my tic had left and I no longer carried an aggrieved spirit.

We spent an evening watching an Osprey hunting up and down the long bay, turning and diving for food as the twilight came on and the sun went down. Now, I know there are those that would tell you, you can't run away from your problems, but, sometimes you can for awhile at least, and with great comfort to your soul.