Like the song

It's hard to dream of coziness when it's sixty degrees out, when you still wake up with allergies and go to sleep with the windows open. Where is my winter?

I will tell you where: lost in a bed, under rumpled covers and tattered copies of old Harry Potter paperbacks. December has clobbered me with two illnesses, for three weeks in a row now. I am forgetting what the holidays look like. How they feel. 

Our tree is up, at least. And when we put the baby to bed and turn off all the house lights (I like a dark house at night) the soft white of it sets a mood. I listen to Christmas music at work. Once, last week, I passed a pair of white ice skates out on the curb; a vintage holiday calling card. 

I don't want December to fly by like the rest of the months do. I want it slow and meandering, dark and frigid. Long like the song. My girl walks now. Communicates. I want her to remember this month as the one where everything changed for her, where things became possible. 

I wish you and yours a season of peace and light and joy. 

A Willa Cather winter

It's been a long winter, says everyone in the US. Me too. Despite my insisting for years that winter is my favorite season, that I crave the cold and dark, I'm leaving it behind this time. No more winter love from me. This winter has been a season of mismanaged expectations. Things I thought would happen never did; things I thought would take longer happened right away. A few times I gave up on things I'd long counted on, only to have them snap open by themselves in the middle of the night like haunted books.

It feels like a Willa Cather winter. If you read My Antonia, you know what I'm talking about: a season you might not survive. Some nights I pick up her Selected Letters, heaving that brick of a book onto my stomach; it's so uncomfortable to hold when you're used to a tiny Kindle. (How did I manage textbooks back in the day? Are my wrists out of shape?)  Still, I read on, enthralled. I'm struck by her challenges, her gifts; Willa the person, not the author. How her dimples shine through her old photos, how through her old letters I start to think of her as a friend.

I didn't keep any letters from my childhood. These days I don't even save emails; I'm purging things wherever I go, trying to make space for something new. I wonder, what kinds of nonfiction collections will be published in the next hundred years, since no one writes letters anymore? How will our future descendants get to know us? How will they know what our winters were like?