February Made Me Shiver

I seem to be having a little motivational crisis.   All I really want is to go back to bed and stay there until spring with perhaps a few forays into the kitchen for coffee and brownies and a stack of books.  

It is easy to say I am tired of winter, and it is true, I am tired of winter.  But so is everyone at this time of year and this has been a winter particularly trying to human patience.  But blaming it on winter is such a cliché, even if it does hold a kernel of the truth.   Winter is not over yet, there is still February, and February somehow seems to be both the longest and the shortest month, long because there is usually at least one brutal snowstorm waiting in the wings, long because we are all tired of winter, long because spring doesn't really start to come until April. In February, April seems like a long long way away.

I was cold all day yesterday.  I was wearing a warm sweater, the thermostat was set to 70 degrees.  But still I was cold.  Truthfully, the house wasn't really 70 degrees except in a few warm protected spaces and the smaller rooms, which are all bedrooms and therefore all the more appealing as a place to curl up and hibernate.  This is the downside of having a big contemporary house where the rooms are all large open spaces and the entire west wall is glass. Glass facing the Hudson River is beautiful, but it also exposes us to the bitter force of icy winds blown across the country to our house, battering our glass walls, sending shivers of cold through the house so powerfully that no oil furnace can keep up.  A few nights below zero, a day or two with no sun, a bit of wind and a chill begins to set in.  No wonder I love to knit big thick comfy sweaters this time of year. I live in a scaled down contemporary version of a drafty old castle.  At least it warms up more quickly when the sun finally reemerges.

The whiteness of snowfall that I loved so much in the early part of the winter seems oppressive now.  Yesterday the whiteness seemed to glare at me, to taunt me, and it was not accompanied by the soft enveloping silence of many snowfalls.  Instead we had wind, the roar of wind against the glass, the cold fingers of icy winds through the windowpanes. We do have insulating blinds, but they are not enough, and the wind seeps around the corners and curls down to the floor, creeping into one's toes and up into one's bones. This was a cold brittle whiteness, the whiteness of emptiness and despair.

Or at least that is how it seemed to me.  But then I know this really isn't just about winter.  It is about fear. It took me all day to write yesterday's post, not that it was all that much, but I just couldn't do it.  The idea that things were going well just wouldn't make the leap from my brain to my fingers to the keyboard.  My hands would freeze up.  My brain would burp.  I would think "I need a cup of coffee", or "I should run some laundry" or whatever it could throw at me to keep me from admitting that things are going well.  Am I afraid of happiness, of good things?  No I don't really think so.  I am happy to be happy.  But I am also fearful.  I am afraid to get to wrapped up in this happiness, to count on things too much, to be vulnerable.  Instead of saying things are going well, I fret about all the things I haven't yet done and think how much better they will be when I finish.  

I am thinking about how much safer I will feel when I finish things.  I am afraid that this happiness, this improvement in G is only temporary.  Oh hell, I know it is only temporary, I know the facts of dementia and the statistics.  Of course no person is a statistic and the reversal might not be so bad.  But my experience is that the reversal will occur, and I will not be prepared and so I am afraid to get too comfortable with this happiness because I am afraid it will get jerked out from under me.  This has been my experience.  But what am I actually afraid of?  What is safety?  Why do I think that doing things will make me safe?  They will not.  They merely distract me.  Winter is cold and brittle.  I don't want my heart to become cold and brittle but I am afraid to bring it too far out in the open as well lest it be caught unawares by a fierce cold wind.  But if I hide behind doing I will miss the warmth of just being in this moment.  The fall will be no less harsh because I was afraid to feel the joy of the heights but the loss may, in fact be greater.  And yet I am afraid.  

I am thinking that today, faced with whiteness, freed from the obligation of need, of work, of responsibility to the world outside, is a time to celebrate the world inside.  Today may be a day to snuggle.  Perhaps I should give it a try.

* Title taken from American Pie by Don McLean