Cozy With Challenges

My title today comes to you from a voice in my head whispering, “Cloudy with a chance of meatballs,” the title of one of my nephews’ favorite books when they were little, as well as from a couple of conversations with locals, two of whom, separately, told me that winter is their favorite season. Is it yours? Why or why not? One winter aficionado said he loves it because it’s “more like the way life used to be here.” (That must have been back in the days of the “old school,” when Northporters didn’t run to Traverse City every week to do their shopping--and then complain loudly and bitterly about traffic and crowds.) I’ll have to ask the other friend why she ranks winter #1 season of the year. 

Winter is beautiful.

Winter is quiet and cozy. I have to give it that. Coming into a warm house, stomping snow off boots and pulling off jacket and cap and mittens to enjoy a hot cup of cocoa … reading by lamplight in a big chair … gazing into a cheery, flickering fire or out the window at falling snow … going to sleep under mounds of blankets and comforters--all of that is richly cozy, and the colder the wind and the deeper the snow, the cozier one’s snuggly home comforts.

Kneaded dough

Rising dough

On a snow day, too, nothing is more satisfying than kneading bread dough, although making soup is a good snow day project, too. Anything that adds warmth and mouthwatering aromas to counteract the lack of sunshine! Onion soup or a stew made from scratch (here is a yummy cauliflower soup) is good, but sometimes shortcuts work out well, too. One recent evening I had leftover shrimp fried rice and added it to a can of Progressive tomato soup, throwing in a generous handful of okra and drizzling with hot sauce at serving time, and that made a very satisfying supper. 

Shortcut

You’ll also want to wash out and save the Progresso soup can for making English muffins. It’s just the right size.

 

Desk work can be enjoyable while it’s snowing and blowing outdoors, especially if the “work” is writing letters to friends. You don’t even have to sit at a desk. A cozy reading chair with a big book for a lap desk works equally well, and you’ll want a cup of tea or cocoa nearby as you write, chatting on paper and picturing your friend’s pleasure when she receives your news in the mail. More and more of our visits, I’m thinking, will be this kind as we grow older….

 

It goes saying (but why would I deny myself the pleasure of saying it?) that reading is a most delicious winter pleasure. Grass doesn’t need mowing, and gardens don’t need weeding, so after you’ve shoveled snow and exercised the dog, maybe done a bit of laundry, who can blame you for sitting down with a book? And if you’re like me, you’ll want several throughout the house. You need something to page through idly, perusing and skimming while tea water is heating. Cookbooks or art books, even a volume of cartoons work for those times. For me, the loveliest of my casual browsing books is one I'm keeping these days on my dining table: a book of the history and geology and agriculture of the canton of Blesle, in France’s Alagnon valley in the old Auvergne province. It was in the medieval village of Blesle that the Artist and I spent one magical evening, night, and morning. Everything about the place made such an impression on me that I find it hard to believe our time there was so brief.

Just right of center is the old fountain,
across the street from La Bougnate, where we stayed.

I usually have at least one serious nonfictionbook going, and right now that is John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Age of Uncertainty. Wow! Talk about a writer who can make economic history come alive! Such a witty and pithy maker of sentences, a clear distiller of thought! Still, economic history isn’t something to read straight through cover to cover, at least for me, so although the book is generously illustrated as well as entertainingly written, I take it in small doses.

 

For bedtime, I tend to choose novels or memoirs, because I almost invariably fall asleep and then wake up at 3 a.m. to read a bit more before my second sleep, and if I attempt something serious or, worse yet, something horrifying (think political!), how will I ever get (or get back) to sleep? Margaret Hard’s A Memory of Vermont filled the bedtime bill for two or three nights, followed by Miss Buncle’s Book, a humorous novel by D.E. Stevenson about a woman who wrote a novel about people in her little village and then found almost everyone in the village up in arms over the way they had been portrayed. Before those, Albert Murray’s four autobiographical novels carried me through many dark evenings, and after them Moberg’s Unto a Good Land lasted three nights. The bedtime book doesn’t have to be fluff, though a little fluff now and then never hurt anyone.

 

Having enjoyed The Book Charmer, by Karen Hawkins, a while back, I yielded to the temptation of its sequel, A Cup of Silver Linings, another tale set in the little town of Dove Pond. I wouldn’t call it fluff. I’m also hesitant to classify the series as chick lit, though it has some of the earmarks. And despite lurking love interest, the books are certainly not rom-com. Each story presents men, women, and young people in the Dove Pond stories, but the most important relationships – at least, those in the foreground  – are between sisters or mothers and daughters or friends. There are secrets that cause problems, but there are also problems that aren’t so secret and can’t be eliminated but have to be faced. Not heavy but not fluff. Interesting without being obsessing. Perfect for winter bedtime.

 

Problems that can’t be eliminated but have to be faced, I just wrote. That is the other side of winter: the challenges. Like cold. Like higher bills. Expenses go up, income goes down: that is one big challenge of winter in a nutshell. Heating is expensive, as is snowplowing. But walking and driving can be hazardous, too, without summer’s firm footing or clear roadways. 

 

Then there are the holidays, which present their own challenges. The Artist and I had long ago stopped traveling for Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays, weather and traffic being productive of stress, at best, and completely out of our control. Our last Christmas together, in Dos Cabezas in 2021, he pronounced “the most relaxed” he had ever had, when after a big breakfast and opening a few presents, we lay around snacking and napping and watching movies and petting the blissed-out dog until dinner time, enjoying the quiet, peaceful lack of fuss. 

What is “lack of fuss” with a soulmate, however, is different with just a dog. --You should excuse the phrase “just a dog,” please! Sunny Juliet is a great comfort but not a conversationalist or even much of a cuddler! Oh, and she needs and wants to go out and play in the snow, too!

Do I want to go out and play in the snow? When the temperature is hovering in the ’teens and the wind is more than nipping at my nose--biting my face, rather? It doesn’t matter. We must go out!

Out! What if the power goes out? It has happened before, but the Artist was here with me. Still, I am as prepared as I can be. With propane, I can use my stove and gas fireplace; I have candles and oil lamps; a couple of stock pots are filled with water for emergency use; and I have charged up the little portable phone charger my sister gave me last year. I’m also well stocked with dog food and paper products--life’s essentials!

 

So that’s what I think of winter—cozy with challenges—and I can’t call it my favorite season. In the old days, with the Artist, I might have named autumn my #1, since we traditionally took a little vacation every September, but now I’ll probably go with spring, the season of promise, of new growth, of lengthening days, long days not yet bringing the hectic pace of summer. 

Spring will come again, I remind myself.

And yet, truth be told, there’s no telling when a nearly perfect day will drop down on you. An unexpected encounter or an errand unexpectedly turning into a delightfully surprising and wonderful time, the making of a new friend while visiting old friends. It happened to me last Tuesday, and it can happen in any season of the year. There is no foretelling life’s gifts.

 

An old friend told me a few days ago that he often quotes me. “What on earth--? You quote me?” “You said,” he reminded me, “that what bothered you most about the thought of dying was that you wouldn’t know how things turned out.” True. I did say that. Delights and torments, adventures and schemes, will continue, but I’ll have to leave the party while it’s still going on. 

All the more reason, while still here, to get out of bed every day, even in winter, and bundle up and get out there! As the Artist and I said to each other so many mornings, throughout so many years, as we wondered what a day might bring, you never know!

 

Sunny Juliet is always ready!

And on Saturday the horses came to Northport!

I'm glad to be there for that!

Companions in Our Isolation

We are not “birders,” the Artist and I, but here in Arizona on our annual seasonal retirement (scheduled to end in May, but who knows right now, given the current world situation?) we pay a lot of attention to birds. The hawk that swoops in front of our car and settles with beating wings on a mesquite tree by the side of the road, the droll little roadrunner, the “confiding” canyon towhee, and all the rest. But I told the Artist the other day, as we sat out watching birds, that every time I see the bright red male cardinal, I am carried back to my graduate student apartment in Cincinnati years ago. 

It was one more evening alone, studying in a one-bedroom apartment much roomer than necessary for someone with almost no furniture. My few clothes hung in a luxurious walk-in closet that could have housed, I often thought, an entire refugee family. Few clothes, little furniture — and yet I felt unbelievably fortunate, for in my first year of graduate study I received a monthly fellowship check which, thanks to frugal living and cheap beans and cheap beer the last week of every month, covered my living expenses. And all I had to do to earn that check was read and write: my obligation coincided with my chosen work. Heaven!

But the scholar’s heaven could be lonely, too. 

I think I must have been holding my awareness of loneliness at mental arm’s length for quite a while, because when a tiny red mite appeared on a page of my book, I was struck with inordinate delight: another living creature! Charming! Fascinating! A companion in my evening solitude!

If you search online for information about bright red clover mites, tiny creatures each smaller than the head of a pin, you’ll turn up all manner of pest control results, although everyone admits that the clover mite is harmless. It isn’t poisonous. It doesn’t bite, anyway. And even if it invades en masse, the invaders won’t live long indoors. 

Well, easy for me to say, maybe, because for me there was only the one. One tiny, tiny creature the brilliant color of a cardinal. What happened to it? I don’t remember. How long does a clover mite live, anyway, in the best of circumstances? That minuscule receptacle of life achieved a kind of immortality, though, because even now, years later, every time I see a bright red cardinal I remember with fondness that other, much smaller, long-ago, anonymous visitor.

The following day, when I shared the story and my response to the mite with another graduate student, expecting him to laugh, I was surprised and gratified when he shared a similar story. For him, a spider had provided companionship during a long evening of solitary study. A memoir called The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, by Elisabeth Tova Bailey, tells of how much a small creature’s presence meant to one woman confined to her bed by a mysterious illness, and Barbara Kingsolver, in High Tide in Tucson, tells of a hermit crab she inadvertently brought back from a Caribbean vacation and the efforts she and her daughter made to keep it alive.

Other living things! They mean so much to us, these our fellow passengers on spaceship earth, perhaps especially when our socializing with human family and friends is necessarily limited. 

While those of us who share our homes with dogs and/or cats — or birds, fish, or reptile pets — know better than to take their companionship for granted, ever, I’ve been thinking of how much comfort and companionship we gets from plants, as well as from animals, during these days of staying home and “sheltering in place.” When I first shopped, as advised, for a possible two-week quarantine — how long ago was that? — one of the impulse items I added to my cart was a little $4.99 plastic pot containing a clump of three small succulent plants. The souls as well as the bodies of our household require feeding, I felt. And I don’t even know the name of this succulent plant. Maybe it’s some kind of hybrid. It doesn’t matter. I had bought the beautiful round clay planter at an estate sale, and the planter begged to be filled. A rusty piece of found industrial iron added height and variety. 

I can’t tell you how much I love looking at my little pot (it is right here beside me now) and inspecting the largest of the three small plants to see if it’s any closer to flowering than it was the previous day. On warm days it lives outside, but with the threat of freezing overnight temperatures (and we did have a hard frost that night) it came indoors, taking priority over stacks of books and magazines (can you believe it?) on the little table between our reading chairs. And actually, carrying the planter outside and back indoors increases my feeling of relationship with the plants in the pot. 

When the Little Prince in St.-Exupery’s story of the same name discovers that the rose he tended with such dedication was not, as she claimed to be, the only rose in existence, at first he felt hoodwinked, as if he had wasted his time caring for her. He is set straight (was it by the fox? I don’t have the book at hand) thusly: “It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.” 

The other day my hiking partner neighbor, after we had been out in the foothills with our dogs for a couple of hours, asked me if I would like a planter of mint. Sarah and I continued home, and Therese left the mint outside her gate for me to pick up with the car later. So now, when the Artist and I sit behind the cabin watching the birds, I also gaze fondly at a planter filled with healthy, vibrant, bright-green mint. My friend had advised me that I should water the mint when I got it home. Oh, good! The mint needs me! Responsibilities of caring for animals and plants that share our lives, like the responsibilities we have to each other, create bonds. 

Is it time to put another suet cake out for the birds? I’d better check....

…I thought I had finished a draft of this post, and then I looked online for other quotes from The Little Prince. When I got to this one, my skin broke out in goosebumps: 

“What makes the desert beautiful,” said the little prince, “is that somewhere it hides a well….”

He loved his desert, I love mine. 

I ask you, what does it matter if the imaginary cat in the box is alive or dead? What matters to me is whether or not the sheep has eaten the beloved flower…. Books are also our companions, and The Little Prince gives us, in fantasy form, another example of an everyday hero, along with an ethics of care. Be well, stay safe and healthy, my friends!