Preparing for Polar Air

In a log cabin the logs get chilled all through in deep winter and then radiate cold -- indoors. That's my least favorite part of living here. Then I use my extreme-temp strategies. There's no gym, church, coffeehouse, library, club meeting or anywhere to escape to this year, so:

 

• Wear over-the-knee wool socks and long underwear under fleece-lined sweats, and maybe leg warmers and headgear. Indoors. I do mean it.
• On the weekend, place the closed car or other vehicle in the sun (if there's sun). Let the sun heat it up real good. Go nap in it. Warms your bones.
  
  
• Eat higher-calorie food to sustain body weight. It is not healthy to "get thin" because of cold temperatures.
  
• Curtain or shade all windows, or tablecloth your window, as I did this morning. If possible, tape the curtain's edges to the walls. Science says a curtained window loses 25 to 35 percent less heat. 
• Take vitamins and eat citrus daily. I like water with lemon. Here are lovely honeybells (cross between grapefruit and tangerine. Their skins "unzip" very neatly).
• Make and consume soups and herbal teas and lots of water. That sounds counter-intuitive. It isn't. Single-digit temps and indoor heating bring very dry air, dry air means dry and vulnerable membranes. Intersperse intake of caffeine drinks or alcohol with glasses of water.
  
• Set and patrol mousetraps because furry company is likely to creep in seeking shelter.
• For the duration, forget economizing. Use all resources.
  
• Leave a stream of water running in the slop sink so the pipes won't freeze.
• Exercise will warm cold extremities.
• Find an active, distracting household task: Ironing, long recipes, repairs and alterations, dusting, cleaning the oven or the ceiling fan blades, shoe and boot care, and so on.
• Don't complain or call people to complain that you need spring or summer. Move to Florida if Missouri's too much of a challenge for you.
  

Still Life

This rare (of course!) neurological thing lets me walk and sit just fine but my legs tremor when standing and they demand I lean on something or sit down. At last I know why hour-long exercise classes wore me out, why I leaned on walls at parties. Mom had a more common and disabling tremor; fortunately she didn't live to see mine. I can stand for a while, more with a cane, but then the legs tremble and I widen my stance (this is called "the Frankenstance"), and widen and widen until I either have to start walking or sit down. I carry the cane to show folks I'm not drunk. It does not hurt, nor is it fatal. Neurologist (my first ever! He's really nice!) can only give stupefying anti-seizure drugs. There is almost no research because no public figure has anything resembling this except Germany's former chancellor Angela Merkel.

Well, I never wanted to stand in lines anyway. So I carry a collapsible stool or wheel a handsome, top-of-the-line  folding rollator (a rolling walker with built-in seat) that I have named The Bolt, or carry a featherweight aluminum folding chair I took fishing. On hikes and mushroom hunts I can sit and rest and then keep going. It was news to me, but the act of standing takes big bandwidth in the brain, and one tires easily.

There are some benefits. People are helpful and kind. If I must seat myself at the hardware store while discussing what wrench I need, the clerk will squat so we're face to face. When I unfold the portable stool in the checkout lane people ask why didn't they think of that, or where did I get it because they need one too, and they tell me why. And in the woods today while sitting for a minute I saw a perfect little still life of oak leaves and the side of the acorn cap that looks like the iris of an eye, and one tiny hopeful green February shoot.

Another doctor prescribed physical therapy, and the exercises increased my strength, balance, and standing time. Exercise holds this thing at bay. If it thinks I am an easy mark, it's mistaken.

My Retirement Party

I cannot resist a sign saying "Pond" with an arrow pointing the way; "pond" is one of my favorite words. It snowed yesterday, about two inches. It snowed four weeks ago, two inches. That is this winter's total snowfall. Today, a quartz-crystal, unworldly January day, about 31 degrees, I took my first real exploratory hike in many moons.

After months of calculations and arrangements today was the first day, after 50 years, I no longer have to work, although I will continue to work because I like it. So I'm not "retired," but merely began drawing on retirement savings, easing up a little. My feelings were quite new and mixed, as if this were not an end but a beginning. I phoned my sister to sort it out. She said God's timing is perfect.

"The money should be in your account at the end of the business day," the money man had said, music to my ears. Back at home, lunch. Then what? Ideally I'd give a party. Can't in a pandemic, and if you live on rural roads no guests will come to a party in January anyway. Yet I desired to do something special. Chose a hike at a once-familiar place not visited for more than a year, maybe two. Thought as I trekked about how a year from now I may fish in Missouri without a license. After half a mile of beaten trail mine were the only footprints in the snow. I saw the word "Pond" and the arrow and walked uphill to a pond with the sun thawing a thumbprint into its ballroom of ice.

It remained only to give myself a retirement gift. What I have (embarrassingly) wanted ever since somebody gave me an insanely delightful three-month subscription 20 years ago was a full subscription to Fruit of the Month Club. I couldn't think of any reason why this would be bad.

Good Things About the Dead of Winter

• No bugs.
• No bug bites.
• Everyone else is flabby too.
• Heating pad for car seat.
• Tired of chocolate.
• No garden worries.
• Lengthening days.
• Hats to cover up unwashed or unstyled hair, parkas to cover unwashed and unironed clothes, etc.
• Big thick anorak-style hoodies with agricultural logos.
• Sitting in the rocking chair staring into space is okay.
• Hands encircling warm cups of coffee or tea.
• Citrus.
• Having trails all to yourself.
• No waiting at the pedicurist.
• People bake.
• Soups.
• No bell-ringers.
• Everyone buys lotto tickets without shame.
• No one is on your case to go out and have fun.

How to Get the Freaking Ice Off Your Freaking Satellite Dish

Overnight the ice storm coated my WiFi satellite dish: a very serious matter because WiFi is my freaking life. I suited up for freezing rain wondering how to de-ice it. Of course I should have sprayed it with Pam at the start of winter, but I forgot, and now the dish two-and-a-half feet wide and seven feet above the ground with a quarter-inch layer of ice on its face presented a problem. I had to restore my freaking WiFi. Whacking the ice with a stick or garden tool might damage the dish and then I'd have no WiFi for weeks until the satellite people from India got here. I could see myself telling them "I hit it with a rake." I'd have to melt the ice, not break it. Planting a stepladder there would be too treacherous.

My solution: Soak three rags in a bowl of hot water. Take the bowl, plus a worn-out corn broom kept on the porch to chase raccoons with, out to the dish. Wring out a warm rag and lay it over the broomstraws. Lift the broom overhead and rub the rag on the dish for about a minute until the rag loses all its heat. Replace it then with the next warm rag, and the next. Go back into the house, refill the bowl with hot water. Realize that the rags left freezing in the yard should be soaked in hot water too before re-using.

Bring the rags back into the freaking house, soak them in the bowl, bring the bowl back into the yard, wring out a freaking rag, put it on the freaking broomstraws, and keep wiping. The thinnest ice threatened to refreeze. I concentrated on the top third of the dish until it was clear. Went into the house for my can of Pam spray, lifted it overhead, tilted it heavenward, prayed and its spray reached exactly the top of the dish. Each time I melted another sector of ice, I Pammed it. Repeated this activity for 25 minutes, sometimes gently tapping the thickest ice with the broom handle and cracking its thinner edges just enough to broom the ice off the dish, bit by bit. Yay.

Brought rags and bowl into the house, hung the rags to dry, washed the bowl. Crunched across the frozen grass, picked up the broom and put it back on the porch. Tried the WiFi. It worked. It's now 1:30 p.m. and I myself can get to work.

The Animal Friend

Hermann here grew up feral, and bit by bit--it took 13 months--my friends Tom & Julia beckoned him onto their porch and gained his trust. They set out a bed for Hermann, fed him, and one day he came indoors and now enthroned on their bed he allows them to pet and hug him. But Rufus, the big ginger cat who rules the rest of the house, is fiercely jealous. So I the cat-sitter was instructed to keep them separate, and every day I entered the bedroom, shut the door, and talked to and played with Hermann, but he wouldn't let me touch him. Then I left the bedroom door open by accident and heard awful hissing and returned to find Rufus in the bedroom squaring off with Hermann for the fight of the century.

I stepped into this violent situation yelling and without thinking. Rufus clawed my left palm, a wound just shy of requiring stitches, and my thumb and forefinger. He retreated looking embarrassed.  Hermann cowered beneath the bed for a day and when he came out for his evening snack he let me pet (with my good hand) his beautiful striped fur and even rolled over for a belly rub. Delightful. There is nothing like making friends with a cat. I took this photo at the last breakfast I would serve him, because his mom & dad were coming home that night.

Life Is Hard

Life is hard sometimes, especially when you don't do everything perfectly and to everyone's taste, or do or say anything without first considering every person's experience in life and their personal needs and opinions and how they might feel or react. Makes it kind of tough to actually do or say anything.

And I've never understood how people put a lot of stock on what is said rather than what is done. That's why you have miserable people saying, "He said he loved me, so I know he loves me, but he never calls," "I know she will make good on her promise because I made good on mine," "My boss told me a year ago I was up for a promotion and a big raise; he must be getting ready to promote me." Or the classic "Check's in the mail."

That's why I live in the woods, where right now a few cedar berries remain in areas, such as deepish road shoulders, where birds aren't finding or getting at them. They aren't true berries; they're actually little tiny cones, because cedars are conifers. I must remind myself that things aren't always what they look like -- but most of the time they are.

Rock Those Booties

My mother and stepfather, appalled to see me barefoot in their 80-degree fully-carpeted house, immediately found me a pair of these, the one constant and bane of my childhood and still haunting  me in adulthood, whenever I visit and even when I don't, because they surface too in my mother's scary Christmas packages: knitted house slippers. Sometimes they're crocheted. Doesn't matter; they're all psychotically handmade by old women using synthetic and non-absorbent yarn in hideous colors, are terribly slippery to wear on smooth surfaces, never fit, and are ugly as sin. (Why the decorative ties?) They are meant to warm the feet. They prove only that it's true that feet sweat at a rate of a quart a day. And that the wearer never expects to have sex ever again.

These slippers go back, historically, to the rural and pre-sidewalk admonition "Take off your shoes at the door," but I also associate them with central and southern European immigrants and Americans from the Depression era, who were practical, poor, had skills now obsolete, and to whom "barefoot" signified not only poverty but a lack of class. I had formal knitting lessons when I was 10, at a Sears store to which I was sent by bus. I never got the knack of knitting, although forced to knit an hour a day so as to justify my mother's investment in my skill set. Thus I do know that this pair, modeled by myself (in my giraffe-print pajamas), are knitted (in stockinette stitch) rather than crocheted. I think. See you in the nursing home.

The Basics

Here in eastern Missouri we had an easy December 2014, with one or two snowfalls, but are having a ridiculously easy January 2015 with, like, no snowfall (only some rain and a token bit of sleet), no ice storms, no below-zero temps, and highs regularly in the 40s and 50s. It's not the January thaw, because January never froze. Another good sign: a Yellow-Shafted Flicker at my feeder, on his way north. We can now take walks at 4 p.m. and be back before it's dark, enjoying January sun and shadow unmitigated by foliage, and scenery we're usually too cocooned to see, like this simple view -- this tallest tree is a sycamore--taken while walking Doc Sargent Road. Everyone I know is pleased. Do I speak too soon? Should I knock on wood so writing this won't hex us?