The Winter Loves Me

"The winter loves me," he retorted, and then, disliking the whimsical sound of that, added, "I mean, as much as you can say a season can love. What I mean is, I love winter, and when you really love something, then it loves you back, in whatever way it has to love." -Phineas, A Separate Peace, John Knowles

I have always loved this quote. I just wrote it up there from memory and only had to make a couple small changes after I Googled it to check for accuracy. 'Course, in the book, Gene doesn't buy it. But he honors that Phineas thinks it's true and so he doesn't argue. He says his 17 years of experience has shown the claim to be more false than true. I am squarely in Phineas's camp. Not only do I love winter and winter loves me back, but I think this applies to other stuff, too. But that's a different post. This one is about winter.

How I love winter. Truly love it. It's my favorite season. Has been for just about my whole life. There are lots of reasons for this. Some of them:

- I hate the heat. HATE HATE HATE it. When it is over 78 degrees, I am uncomfortable. I run hot anyway, so this makes sense.
- My birthday is smack in the middle of winter. And I love my birthday, too.
- There's something to be done about the cold (unlike the damn heat). You can put on more clothes, walk faster to warm up, and stay in by a nice fire. (I can hear the arguments already about air conditioning. I will say that it is expensive, not everyone has it, and a fan is just not the same. And, not being able to go outside sucks.)
- No lost sleep. It is so hard to sleep when it's hot. But when it's cold, bring on another blanket and snuggle in!
- It brings SNOW! And snow means skiing and snowshoeing and snowball fights and snow angels and sledding and so much great stuff that ANYONE can have. You don't need a ride to the ocean or lake and you don't need a boat and you don't need other stuff that leaves out people who are poor or struggling. It is fun in an equal way that anyone can access.

We had the second big storm of the season yesterday. I missed the first one - being away in Puerto Rico (where it was too hot) for Xmas. I had the aftermath - had to clean off the car and shovel some when I got home, but it was nothing in comparison, and it melted very quickly afterwards. This one is epic. The snowbanks are huge! The piles of plowed and shoveled snow are tall! The entire world looks like a winter wonderland. It's so beautiful!

Yesterday afternoon, a friend and I carried our snowshoes over to the Arnold Arboretum, which is across the street from where we live and we put on our snowshoes and grabbed our poles and headed out. I wasn't really prepared for how amazing it would be. I've snowshoed before, in Vermont, in the woods. But here I was, in the heart of Boston - in the 'hood, actually, surrounded by trees and snow and untouched fields. There were people with sleds, people on cross country skis, people on snowshoes. Sometimes we were with or around other people, sometimes we were all alone for a long while as we trekked.

I know the Arboretum quite well. I know the main paved roads that run through it as well as some of the other paths and trails that go through the forests. Yesterday, though, we were totally turned around - a few times. Everything being white, we had no idea where we were. At one point, we cleaned a foot of snow off a sign so we could at least try to get our bearings. We climbed up hills, we trekked through big fields that had marshy grass underneath (we could see a couple of tiny exposed spots) and we found places we'd never been before. Because when there's a foot or better of snow, you can walk ANYWHERE! Even places you could never walk otherwise, because you'd be trekking through the aforementioned marshland.

There are so many different types of trees in the Arboretum, from many different countries. There are some with red tones to their bark. Yesterday, they were practically glowing red. With low light because of the cloud cover and no competing colors since everything else was black/brown and white, the red really stood out. It was very cool.

This morning, after the gym, I was driving home at 7 a.m. The sun had just come up and the sky was not quite blue yet. It was pink and orange and green and blue. Looking through snow covered trees with this background made me stop. I wished I had my camera. Then I pulled over to mail something and got a look at the city in the distance. JP is lined up with the Pru and that other building with the dome top. The sun was reflecting off them and the orange behind them with the snow in the foreground was spectacular. Little moments make the big ones more bearable.

Next weekend, I go skiing and then do some more snowshoeing in Vermont. And hopefully, this snow will last for a while so some more Arboretum snowshoeing can be had. One of the downfalls of living as far south as Boston and so close to the ocean is that our snow often melts away as quickly as it came. Temps this time around sound like we might hang on to this for a while though.

I am not bothered in the least with the effort snow takes. It means shoveling out the driveway and the hard piles of snow the plow leaves at the end of the driveway - often more than once. It means shoveling out the car - chipping off the ice - making sure I always have enough windshield wiper fluid in the car. It means driving slower and more carefully. It means looking more carefully at intersections lest I miss a car or a kid behind a huge snowbank. It means dirty shoes that have to be taken off at the door instead of just waltzing into my house as usual. It means a car covered in salt residue and having to wash the car more often. It means looking harder for a parking spot because in Boston, you do not park where there is an end table or a lawn chair or a trash can. This is a mark of pride someone left, signaling that they worked long and hard to dig their car out, and when they return, that spot should be there for them to park in again. (Mayor Menino keeps threatening to send out the garbage men to pick up all these markers and haul them away as a message that this practice isn't acceptable, but it's never happened, and most of us support it, anyway.)

I am not bothered by any of that effort, because when you love something, that love takes effort. And the winter loves me back - it gives me gifts. It makes my body feel better, it allows me to snuggle under my three blankets at night in my favorite jammies all warm. It allows me to drink hot tea and chocolate. It lets me stand at the top of a mountain and then fly down at speeds I otherwise never experience. It gives me weekends with my family and friends in Vermont, something I've had since I was a baby and that has continued for over 30 years. It brings the occasional snow day with no work and being shut in the house with nothing to do but watch 8 more episodes of Rescue Me or read the rest of the book I'm loving. It gives me my birthday, which each year I celebrate somehow with friends and family. It gives me WinterFest at Cobbett's Pond. And as its final gift, it gives me Spring when it finally decides to close up shop for the year and allow the leaves to bloom again and the crocuses to pop out and the flowers to grow again.

I know not everyone loves the winter like I do. And in return, it doesn't love you very much. That's okay. Summer doesn't love me, and I'm fine with that. Winter is my boyfriend. And so far, its given me years of happiness. I expect a lot more of them to come.

My Tiny Mother With a Big Pointy Tree

My mother works at a large, public, city high school. She works in the building set aside for first-year students, who are separated from the general population to help them better make the transition from middle school to high school - it works, too - their attrition rate has dropped since they moved to this model several years ago.

She is not a teacher anymore. Now she is a specialist who supports teachers, supports the administration, and does a lot of MCAS (state testing) stuff. Even when she was tied to a classroom all day, she was a team player and generally helpful, but now that she is more free to roam freely about the building without kids in her care, she's taken on that role even more. She is the one who convinces the janitor to help haul boxes upstairs and she's the general problem-solver for things from how to organize the testing materials to putting away the Christmas tree.

Hence this story. I'm hoping I can do it justice in writing, because when she told me the story, the two of us were laughing so hard we could barely talk.

The Christmas tree that had been decorating the main office in her building had been taken down and put back in the box but it had been sitting there for days and nobody had put it away in the closet where it belongs. Finally, Mom got sick of looking at it, and bent her 5' 3", slightly overweight, 65-year-old body over and hauled the tree up onto her shoulder. The box was about 5 feet long, and the tip of the tree was sticking out the end like a javelin. She stood there for a moment, and then asked if someone would please open the door for her. Someone did.

She headed down the hall, likely moving as quickly as she usually does. Mind you, she may be only 5'3", but I've spent my entire life, with my 34" legs and 5' 10" self asking her to slow down so I can keep up with her. So she's hauling ass down the hall with the giant box on her shoulder, passing by teachers watching this whole thing as she goes. She gets to a 50-something guy teacher, and instead of offering to take the box for her, he says, "Hey, got a nickel?"

At this point in the story, I stopped her. "What?" I asked. "What does that even mean?" She said she didn't really know, other than his way of giving her shit, asking her to do something that would require using a hand to dig in her pocket for a coin. Just a way to mess with her further as she made her way past him.

"What did you say to him?" I asked. "I don't know," she said "Something like, 'I'll get you later.' What I wanted to do was poke him in the chest with the tip of the tree." I pictured that in my mind's eye and started cracking up again. My mom, as tiny as she is, using the tree as a sword and poking this guy in the chest with it. HILARIOUS!

I asked her to continue the story. When she got to the end of the hallway and to another door, she had to ask someone to open it again. She had to ask! Nobody just opened the door for her! She may not like that I'm going to say this, but she's a damn senior citizen. I know she doesn't look or act like one. But she is, for fuck's sake!

So that door gets opened, and she asks someone else to open the closet. They do, and then they watch as she throws the tree up over her shoulder onto the top shelf of the closet in one movement. And then she closed the closet door and went about her business.

Now I ask you, what is the most amazing part of this story. Is it:

a. That my senior citizen, almost midget, slightly overweight mom is really a hidden superhero, mover-of-heavy objects?
b. That nobody offered to help her?
c. That she didn't actually assault the idiot asking for a nickel?

Up to you, my friends. You get to decide which you think is the most amazing. Me? I just wish I had video of the whole thing.

Tutti Fruity Bug Repellent

NB: Our little picture wasn't this cute.

So off I go to Puerto Rico with 4 of my girlfriends for a week for Christmas. Can't get much better than that, right? It was pretty great. We rented a little villa with a kitchen, full-size fridge, bed, pullout couch and a loft. We chose our spots, unpacked our stuff, walked on the beach, checked out the hotel and environs, and headed right to the grocery store to get all the supplies we'd need to eat breakfast and lunch each day.

We also needed a few toiletries. One person needed toothpaste, we needed some sunblock, and since we knew we were going hiking in the rain forest later in the week, we needed bug spray - you know, like Off or something.

Let me back up for a moment and say that of the 5 of us, two are fluent in Spanish. One person routinely conducts group sessions for teens in Spanish in Boston and one has lived and worked in Mexico and Colorado and majored in Spanish. Two others of us are proficient. We can get along and basically be understood, but get a little lost when the conversation gets complex or higher level verb tenses are used. And the fifth of us has little to no Spanish at all. Of course, we sent the one with no Spanish to the toiletry aisle to get the sunblock and bug spray.

We were in a big modern grocery store, Amigo, which appeared to be a big chain in PR. It had anything you'd need, basically. Nobody working there spoke English, but they carried a fair number of products written in English from the Equate line, which is Walmart's. Christy found the sunblick fairly easily because it was Equate and in English.

While three others of us were waiting for the dude to come back to tell us if they had anymore half and half, finding out they didn't, and deciding to get the Tres Monjas milk because it was so cute with three little nuns on the carton, Christy was finding the bug spray.

She came up to the rest of us and said "This is all they have" handing us a little tub of yellow gel. On the tub, it said it was para ninos (for kids) and that it was to "repelar piojos" with a picture of a bug with the red circle and cross through on top. Sure, we said, this must be some crazy version of bug repellent for kids. We checked the shelf, and there wasn't anything else.

"But it's Tutti Fruity! How will that repel bugs?" someone asked. Someone smart asked that. But we just moved along, not really thinking about it, tossing it in the cart and buying it, along with a big bottle of rum, a bunch of mixers, and breakfast food. Ah, the life of 5 single women let loose in paradise.

The day arrived to go hiking in the rain forest. Someone went and got the bug gel jar and prepared to slather it all over their body. Suddenly, Kate said, "Wait. Piojos. That's the word for lice!" She looked at the jar again and suddenly we realized it was for kids' hair! You were supposed to use it regularly in their hair to ensure they didn't get lice! HAHAHAHAH. Much laughing and hilarity ensued as we tried to imagine if we'd put it all over our bodies and then hiked through a forest, just inviting the bugs to dine on our delicious tutti fruity selves.

As it turned out, we didn't need it anyway, because it was raining so hard in the rain forest, no bugs were even out. And, we'd escaped this mistake, but I'd still been the one to buy a small bottle of what I thought was body lotion, at Target, in Boston, and used it for two days before someone else noticed it was actually body wash!

We left the jar, unopened, in the bathroom of the villa. The girl checking us out at the register at Amigo probably wondered what our deal was, and so might the woman who cleans the villa - Amalia, who we met when we arrived. Will the next people who stay at the villa wonder too? Hopefully, they'll understand enough Spanish and won't open it up and use it on their arms and legs when they head up the mountain to the rain forest!