Cell memory…

In January and February, during the shortened days and the exhausted living…I remember the feel, the odd combination of terror and invigoration…the desire to remain forever under thick blankets.

Standing late at night outside the heated house, wearing thick socks…observing the warm lights in the living room window. There was chili, hot buttered biscuits and apple pie waiting in the kitchen; I imagined the delectable tastes as the snow actually crackled and split with cold…when my skin roughened as breath hung frozen in air.

Watching blue snow that glittered brightly under the moon…eating scalding hot french fries with mustard as I walked home late in the evening from a basketball game…not being able to feel my finger tips while my tongue burned…

Gordon Lightfoot’s ‘Song for a Winter’s Night’…enjoyed and set aside during summer days, the warm lyrics are tucked away in my mind. Yet they linger at the edge as the leaves begin to fall. They wait to be reborn at the end of January when everything is frozen and sleeping exhausted under frozen crystal, salted roads.

How could I have forgotten one of my favorites? Our good neighbor to the north…

A hearty voice booms out a cheery greeting to someone I can’t see…a conversation continues down the hallway and fades. I can’t know the outcome because I am in the other room. Who spoke? Are there plans for lunch?

January meals; we leave our homes reluctantly and we charge up against the wall of grey cold, armed with only a grilled cheese and tomato sandwich on rye, crisped in curried butter; a bowl of cold, crisp and vinegary coleslaw and a mug of black coffee and fresh cream, boiled strong. This is a gut cleansing lunch meted out in bits and bursts and bayonets; heated with friendship and talk of the storm, politics and the playoffs.

From the other room I imagine the battlefield…caffeinated steam rising up beyond the window and over the dirty edge of the Genesee river…as we ready ourselves for the final week of January.

Saturday at the Public Market…a true Rochester jewel…hidden deeply within the heart of the city. An abundance of fresh, local produce…fruits, vegetables, wines, pastries and woven clothing items lie stacked and cascading over heavy wooden tables and upside down scratched and muddied plastic bins.

Each owner’s booth contains a large and bulky floor heater kept busy pumping out blasting streams of hot air in the attempt to stave off the bitter wind chill. The floor of the entire length of the tented stalls is damp, grey, slippery in places.

At the end of an hour of brisk wind chill, fast trading and loaded up shopping bags…homemade, hot and fresh yeast raised sugar doughnuts await us at the bakery across the street from the fish shed. They are by far the best doughnuts I have ever had.

They melt away on my tongue and the back of my throat, driving away the seafood smell, the wafting forced heater air, reaching the deeper reaches of our chilled innards. Yeast sugared gold…worth all the sniffles and frozen faces.

‘Why are you still here?’ I hear his little voice and I look up from my chair. One of the smaller ones, the boy with the cocoa silk eyes stares at me questioningly. ‘Hey, why are you still here?’ I am seated on a small chair, the perch where I sit to teach this particular first grade class and the minutes of the class have ended. It’s time to move on to a waiting kindergarten group. He recognizes something is amiss in my timing.

He’s a kind one, this smallish boy. Last week he noticed the print on my canvas ‘drag around’ bag and pointed it out. ‘Hey, what do these tiny letters say?’ I looked at the picture of the bird and then gestured to the print. ‘It’s the name of a very famous book. It says ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’. It’s a very good book and I want you to promise me that you will read it when you are grown up’. He stares at me, eyes as wide as they might be. ‘Kill a Mockingbird, well…well, that’s just horrible’. He is deeply perturbed. ‘No, no we don’t want to kill a Mockingbird. They don’t hurt anyone or anything. All they do is sing’. I pat him on the back. ‘You’re kind to think about these things. I appreciate it’. I continue. ‘Do you remember how we talked about words, things we say that might not actually mean what we are saying? Those silly phrases like ‘It’s raining cats and dogs’ and ‘He’s pulling my leg’…remember?’ ‘Hmmm…yes’. He’s thinking about it. ‘Like ‘Teacher space, get out of my face’…like that? You need room for your legs but you don’t ever want us to say ‘Get out of my face’…we joke about it because the words are the same’. ‘You mean they rhyme…?’ I want him to be clear. ‘Yes…they rhyme’ he responds. ‘And we definitely don’t say ‘Get out of my face’ but we can say ‘Teacher space’…he nods his head.

I return to his original question. ‘I am still sitting here because my back is very sick this week. I am in a lot of pain. It really hurts my whole body to move and I do not want to get up out of this chair, because it hurts’. He looks at me. ‘Oh’, he smiles. I continue. ‘I’m sitting here just a little bit longer. Does it bother you that I am still here?’ He shakes his head. ‘Oh, no. I was just wondering why you are still here’.

‘Me too’ I laugh. ‘Me too’…and then with a fairly unwieldy lurching effort I rise from the chair and leave the room as he watches me from where he is seated ‘criss-cross applesauce’ on the rug.

I lose complete control of the laundry once a week.

I regain complete control of the laundry once a week.

Life cycles and seasons I understand.

It’s a wash…

Sunday solitude with a full moon…but it’s hard to tell while bright sunshine streaks snow. It is a mere 14 degrees and this winter confuses. Wind days and power outages and the threat of a looming Nor’easter…and recently we watched the infant heads of croci stretching up.

It is as if God lazily moves pieces around, observing ebb and flow. But that is bad theology. Rather, we spin like maddened wind up toys in the palm of his hand.

He waits for us to settle…

Recipe for a Jackson Pollock kitchen…first, spill a full pan of chicken broth everywhere…then, forget about a pan full of red tupperware in the oven…(counter space issues)…next, turn on the oven to pre-heat for a pumpkin cheesecake…wait, and open the door to discover melted red and white plastic spread beautifully over a bent silver cake pan and the bottom of the oven.

So course, I had to lick the orange batter in the cheesecake bowl…

Overheard on Zoom: 10:30 am…’I can’t turn my camera on, Miss…because my hair’s not done’. Teacher: ‘What would you like me to do?’ Silence. ‘Well, my Mom is still sleeping so she can’t get up right now to do my hair’.

Teacher: ‘What are you proposing? Can you wear a hat and turn your camera on?’ Silence. ‘Honey? Can you find a hat?’ Slowly…’yes, I guess I can find a hat’. Teacher: ‘Please turn your camera on when you get your hat!’ Silence. Camera still off. Math lesson continues…’what are the factors of 12?’…

I have a new definition of civilization after a long week at work. Civilization is when one continues to say ‘please’, ‘thank you’ and ‘I appreciate it’ when what one really wishes to do is to temporarily gouge someone’s eye out with a long, cold finger.

Temporarily.

That’s it, I think. Civilization.