Frosty Fun

I said I'd do laundry, and god damn the weather, I never let my people down.
The snow was bad. Really bad. Even the mailman stayed home.

While I was working in New York City, my friends Albert and Tori invited me out after work. It was "TWO degrees," I protested in vain. Now, I continually remind myself that if I can brave that weather, New England has no power over me.
That, and every winter, I remind myself of One Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovich, the story of a prisoner in the Gulag. The cut-off temperature to be excused from work is something ungodly, like forty below zero.
Comparing [insert task at hand] to his experience always steels me...because I invariably feel like an unparalleled wussy.
There's this war veteran, wearing nothing but a light prison uniform, slaving in thirty-nine below zero, and there's me, bundled like an Eskimo, lamenting that I have to brush two inches of snow off my Avalanche.
Come on.

I stepped out into snow up to my knees while the violent, snow-laden wind circled me like a frost anaconda. Crouching behind the laundry as if it were a police shield, I made my way to the laundry machines.

Predictably, they were broken. There was no reason for this except that it was time for a punchline in the comedy script of life.
I set out on foot in search of laundry machines.

Some part of me thought I should just go home and do laundry another day, but if you allow yourself to accept small defeats, failure will eventually consume you.
As you pick your battles, so must you also pick your surrenders.

To the sleighriding father I eventually encountered, I must have appeared as some crazy yeti emerging from the frozen mist beside an autonomous pile of brightly-colored medicine-stained infant clothes.


Wet and weather-beaten, I politely asked for directions...which surely sounded like a call to Cthulhu in the screaming winter wind. Nevertheless, he pointed me toward shelter and washing facilities.

After doing the laundry, I stood on the hill overlooking the path of my tromping footfalls. I can't remember the last time I really had to fight through snow. I think I was a child...and probably sleighriding.

I felt like my ancestors, their bohemian fur coats fluttering in the wind like the skins of giant cats. Actually, the cold really wasn't that bad. Even with the wind chill and the single digits, it wasn't nearly as cold as it was that entire winter when I walked miles every day - for the exercise. This whole experience...was actually fun.

I can't remember the last time we enjoyed a proper snowstorm.
We had them when I was a child; school would close because we'd have feet of snow. I can't remember the last time we had one foot of snow - it's been more than a decade, at least. Immersed in a blizzard once again, I recalled the joys of childhood - sleds and hot chocolate and Godzilla-esque snow-trampling. "RAWR!" I said to myself, lifting my legs high as I bounced through the snow.

Then I slipped and fell and slid down the hill on my ass. It's been so long since we've had snow that I'd forgotten the lessons I'd learned as a child. The snow nearly covered my knees. I laughed out loud.

I'd forgotten how much fun winter can be.
I hope you find the opportunity and inclination to enjoy it out there.

Pets

When I was a little girl, I asked my Dad for a pet monkey.


A squirrel monkey, just like the one in the above photo.

Then it tried to kill us all.
Bad George. You should not be curious about the taste of human flesh.

I wonder if I can cut my son off at the pet pass with a preemptive puppy.