This winter, most of my quests for excitement have collided with a paralyzed will, or body. Yesterday, my mom offered to babysit the girls so Jeff and I could enjoy a kid-free outing. Jeff now has the cold I had a week ago (and older daughter (‘OD’) had a week before that), so we decided to do something that required little walking – a movie and dinner. But upon arriving at our favorite second-run theatre to see “Skyfall,” we learned that we had gotten the show time wrong, so ended up talking in the car for two hours, heading to the grocery store for cough drops and ibuprofen, then getting dinner at one of President Obama’s favorite hamburger spots, Ray’s Hell Burger.
I later realized that this was a perfect afternoon because in everyday life, I rarely get to talk. Both kids talk constantly; they’re full of rhymes, songs, potential projects and fresh observations. They are the texting keyboard to my sticky-keyed manual typewriter. (Knowing that this is temporary and that all too soon they will be shadows passing silently in the hallway, the language stays inside, or hides in my bedside notebook.)
Even as my body begs for more sunlight, I don’t want to let the winter go until we have a good snowstorm, at least enough snow to operate our sled and build a snowman. We may get it on Tuesday night, it seems. Fingers crossed for ending winter with a bang. 🙂
This time of year, I love Stephen Spender’s poem “Polar Exploration,” for its sense of suspended animation:
With faces swung to their prodigious North
Like compass needles. As clerks in whited banks
Leave bird-claw pen-prints columned on white paper,
On snow we added footprints,
Extensive whiteness drowned
All sense of space. We tramped through
Static, glaring days, Time’s suspended blank.
_______________________________________I cannot sleep. At night I watch
A clear voice speak with words like drawing.
Its questions are clear rifts:–Was
Ice, our rage, transformed? The raw, the motionless
Skies, were these the Spirit’s hunger?
Between Gods 