Toes poking through the snow

“Oh, I just wish I could get back into bed and sleep for the whole day.”

Rowan said that this morning as he stared out of the frost-covered window in my bedroom. We’re doing our best to hit the ground running after Christmas break, but this is hard, because the ground is frozen solid and covered under several feet of snow, and, frankly, all I want to do is crawl back into bed and sleep until winter is over. At least, I want to crawl back into bed and sleep until the mass of freezing air from the Arctic that has descended over Northwestern Ontario has found somewhere else to settle, taking with it the -45°C-with-the-windchill temperatures that have become the norm over the past couple of weeks.

At least the sickness slowly subsiding. We were a viral/bacterial buffet here over the holidays: me with that double-ear/sinus infection (I am pleased to report that I have caved only once — once! — to a Q-tip craving in just over a week!), Rachel and Isaac with head colds, and Rowan with, oh, pneumonia (although, really, if you ever saw poster child for pneumonia, it would be this kid; barking cough aside, he tootled around the house as usual, making every stray bit of detritus on the floor into his own personal soccer ball. I twigged into the fact that he actually might be sick for reals when Rachel took the boys tobogganing one day over the break and Rowan lay down at the bottom of the hill to catch his breath. We have been known to occasionally be a wee bit too lax when it comes to taking the kids or ourselves into the doctor, and after our latest round of ignoring what turned out to be impetigo, I managed to squeak him in to see the doctor on the Saturday before New Year’s. Say what you will about antibiotics, but I am grateful for them and for a doctor who works on Saturdays.)It’s cold. We are blow-drying the frozen pipe in the basement bathroom. That is not a euphemism. The car doors have frozen shut, as have the seatbelt buckles. They just won’t pop up. That is not a euphemism, either.

To survive, I am cooking food in mass quantities. In a fit of organizational fervour, I sketched out a two-month meal plan for January and February, one that relies on cooking a big batch of something each weekend. On Sunday, to kick things off, I prepped eight meals’ worth of chicken souvlaki and roast chicken, and whipped up a huge batch of tomato sauce — the freezer is full, although this didn’t stop us from making pizza bagels yesterday for dinner (with said homemade sauce!), which Rowan deemed not a “real dinner” before eating his in its entirety as I mostly did my best not to engage him in that particular argument until his stomach was full and he dropped it.

Yes, lists and plans and cooking. I found this in the bottom of the cereal cupboard this morning, a written reminder of every single thing that had to get done before school.

I’m also surviving by remembering what lies underneath all the layers of winter. Like the garlic I planted in October — it’s getting ready to burst out of the ground in a couple of months. I’m counting on that. And sure, on the surface I’m wearing a toque in the house and four sweaters plus microfibre long underwear (oh yes, top and bottom). But underneath all that, I am here to tell you (well, all of you except my father and my brother, who should stop reading this paragraph right now) that I am choosing, every day, the laciest, prettiest, least practical and sexiest matching sets of lingerie I can possibly find. (This, of course, is the upshot of my online lingerie shopping binge of February 2011, and my slightly more restrained online lingerie shopping binge of last month, about which I will write more here one day.) I painted my toenails yesterday, because even though nobody except me in the shower will see my feet outside of wool socks for the next three months, I want to know that something pretty — something bright red — lies in wait.

Spring will come. It will. Until then, we are eating soup and souvlaki and cuddling up against the cold, with the bright red of our toenails keeping us just a tiny bit warmer.

Grace at the walk-in

As you may recall, I went to the walk-in clinic a couple of days ago, where I was gently chastised for my over-clean ears. You will be pleased to know that I have been Q-tip-free for three and half entire days now. It totally sucks. But I’m going to push through. But this post isn’t about my ears. My waxy, crinkly, itchy, unsatisfied ears. This post is about the walk-in clinic — surely one of the least happy places on earth. Especially in Thunder Bay, during what has turned out to be a record-setting cold spell, two days before New Year’s. If you are at a walk-in in Thunder Bay in December, you already feel like crap, enough so that you will brave the cold and the waiting and the other sick people just to get some relief.

I have been amping up my meditation/mindfulness practice of late (a whole other blog post, or series of posts in itself; on the other hand, maybe no blog posts at all — you know, the first rule of meditation practice is that one doesn’t blog at length about meditation practice), and I decided to do my daily practice at the walk-in. Put away the phone, my borrowed copy of Blue Is the Warmest Color, and just sit up straight with my eyes open and be in the room, observe the people and the goings-on without judgment, with compassion. The attractive man sitting next to me, accompanying his elderly father; the young couple in their 20s, she with stomach pains each morning; the teenaged boy and his mom; the coughers and the hackers and the snifflers and the grey-haired man directly across from me burying his head in his hands and sighing. I did my best just to observe them all.

And then an elderly woman approached the young couple.

“Excuse me,” she asked them, “but do you by any chance drive a Honda Civic?”

They nodded.

“I just backed into your bumper,” she said, miserably.

The couple looked at each other, and then at her.

“Don’t worry about it,” said the young man.

The woman shook her head, uncomprehending.

“We just bought a new car,” said the young man. “It’s okay.”

“Are you sure?”

“Well,” he said, “… is it bad?”

“There’s a hole in it.”

He shrugged. “Enh. Don’t worry. We’re good.”

The woman looked like she was about to cry. “I’m shaking,” she said.

“Happy new year,” they told her.

And then she went back to her seat and the doctor called in the young woman, and I thought about how lucky I was to have seen that happen, how lucky I was to have been right there, right then.

Home/sick

Rowan is home sick today. Just before midnight last night, our bedroom door opened and he appeared, backlit by the light in the hallway, and then … well, you don't need to know the details except for thank God hardwood floors and not carpet. I love kid logic: I think I need to barf. I'll go see my moms. Today, he's home, bopping about the house in his pajamas and seemingly perfectly fine, if slightly low-energy. He's kept down food, he has good colour, he's practicing his tae kwon do patterns and creating bigger and better Pokémon decks and revelling in the pile of books we picked up from the library and the extra iPod time. He's totally happy — a quiet day at home, both parents to himself with , dare I say it, no sibling to dilute the attention.

It's so rare to have just one child around the house with both of us. And despite the extra laundry and the nagging worry that we haven't seen the last of this gastro bug (why, why, why did I decide it was a good idea to finish off his uneaten oatmeal yesterday?), I do like it. One minimally ill kid is so cozy, so happy, so easy. He wanders into my office and hugs me, offers me trivia tidbits. We lie down on opposite ends of the couch with our reading material and his bare foot nudges my thigh. I sent a couple of e-mails, write a couple of paragraphs, fold a couple of sheets, ruffle his hair, and revel in this sweet, quiet, stolen day.