When geese lit on Thurston Pond last week, the stripes that formed in the water in the wake of their landing took longer than usual to dissipate. The colder temperatures were changing the viscosity of the water. It was getting closer to becoming ice.
The pond is entirely iced over now. Temperatures plummeted, and there’s wind, too. Geese landing on the Pond now don’t make any ripples at all.
The dog takes the cold in stride. He, after all, has a built-in fur coat. Me, not so much. As the dog and I were out walking yesterday morning, I devoted a moment to counting the items of clothing and related items I had felt necessary to ward off the surrounding cold and negotiate the ice underfoot. Including hand warmers and the crampons on my boots, the total came to nineteen.
The trouble was, not every item of clothing was up to the task. Specifically, my ski mittens were no longer as warm as they’d been when they came to me, decades ago. Last winter, they’d looked disreputable but remained serviceable. This year, they’d become weak links in the anti-cold campaign. A trip to the local REI was in order.
When we left that establishment, it was with a pair of what the staff had identified as their warmest women’s mittens. Odd that men and women should merit different levels of protection, but perhaps the “women’s” was superfluous and merely a reference to hand size.
I took them for a test walk this morning, and they’re the warmest mittens ever, warmer than the old ones had been when they were new. Also, with the addition of a fleece under my jacket, the items of apparel festooning my person reached a full twenty. That should do it for gear for the season. I should be in good shape now.
I’ll need to be in better shape, though, if our walks are to remain as long as they usually are: all that gear is heavy. Out of curiosity just now, I weighed my cramponed boots. They come in at a pound each. Does that make them foot-pounds? In any case, moving the winter assemblage of apparel over a course of a few miles contributes to a greater-than-normal sense of accomplishment.
The subject of discussion in French class this morning was favorite possession. Basically, what would you try to save if your house were on fire and your loved ones were safely outside? Carol’s answer was my favorite. She would save her passport. To her, a passport means freedom and independence. More than that, it represents possibilities. With a passport, endless possibilities lie before her.
I felt wonderful possibilities open to me after Thanksgiving. My nephew and his husband made themselves available for Christmas decorating. Santa has elves. Martha Stewart has minions. And, for a golden day after the feast, we had staff. It was wonderful. No wonder Santa laughs all the time.
Part of the help took the form of manly muscles. Jack and B.J. received the storage bins full of Christmas supplies I handed out through the crawl space access. They handed me out of the crawl space. They carried bins upstairs. They handed me the big ornaments that go in front of the sliding glass door in the kitchen and spotted me as I stood on a stool hanging them in their designated spots. They repacked the bin with what had been hanging there before, carried the bin back downstairs, and passed it in to me in the crawl space. The whole process took about fifteen minutes. Fabulous.
We moved on to other projects. A herd of reindeer ambling through a woods. Arrangements of poinsettias. Something B.J. created and took to calling his “festive bouquet of joy.” Jack turning a standing display into a Christmas village. We had more than one discussion of symmetry versus balance and the young men leaned into balance.
We never exhausted the men’s supply of either energy or cheerfulness. They kept asking, “What’s next?” We laughed a lot and, when I thanked the two of them for all the help, B.J. even said, at the end of the evening, “We had a blast!” We knocked off a couple days’ worth of decorating in a few hours. Hurray for elves.
Jack and B.J. left the next morning, their car so stuffed with items culled from our household and heading to theirs, that the weight of it all probably improved their traction on the road. It made me happy to send them off with things I’ve loved, knowing that those things are going to a new home eager to incorporate them.
6 December 2024