Playing for Time

We need the kind of winter we aren’t having this year – with plenty of snow and cold to replenish the soil and annihilate every bug. So far it’s been “string of mild days” followed by “plummet into the cellar” for a couple, shampoo, rinse, repeat, and with only a dusting of white to show for those few wintery days. The photo above was taken in the 1950s, my two little sisters and me atop the fifteen-foot snowdrifts in our grandparents’ orchard, which was endless fun for us but sobering in the destruction the storm left behind.

I have a soft spot for the raging blizzards of my childhood despite their danger, mostly because they seem to have gone out of vogue. Pretty sure, after observing weather patterns over a lifetime, that the climate change phenomenon at work in Lawrence America and around the globe is a thing to be dealt with, sooner rather than later, and the changes we’re seeing will continue to proliferate until we’re in real trouble, maybe as early as yesterday.

Not my circus, not my monkeys, however, I’m just along for the ride, so might as well enjoy the warmer days as they roll through. Forecast says 53º today, 37 tomorrow, with only a hint of any precip on the horizon. Life IS and we roll with it, you know it’s true. The bitching and whining we do is all window dressing, which of course doesn’t apply only to weather, amirite?

Go out there and make your Wednesday a happy one for you and everyone within range of your influence, why not? Staying alive continues to be a good thing, I’m in line to kick it in the fanny one day at a time, and the whole thing gets easier if we team up, so let’s just do it.

Warm Winter Savings

Not nearly enough paeans to Monday mornings have been penned over the years, would you agree? After surviving almost seven decades of them I’m finally learning to appreciate them for what they are – the lull before the actual week – which runs Tuesday through Thursday – cranks up. The privilege of this is not wasted on me nor unappreciated and it was worth the slog to get here, she says, not suffering pangs of guilt, not ever, at all, but given enough coffee and therapy she’ll get over it.

There’s a Monday Morning level of quiet that happens – a hush composed of minute layers of sound and aroma: coffee on the warmer, the laundry gurgling and sloshing at the far end of the loft, the faint scent of detergent and softener, muted traffic noises under my windows, faraway voices muffled by winter humidity, people walking to work but not hurrying, because Monday. Faint construction sounds, too, and the now-familiar slight moans and groans of our steel and concrete building. If home is a state of mind, that was the nickel tour of mine, free today just for you.

And now assorted sirens from a few blocks over are saying it’s time to move it, so I think I will. Make your Monday feel like a Friday if you can. And then there are only three actual days until Real Friday – you’re gonna love it.

• Record all those accumulated websites and their logins in your handy-dandy password keeper, which works like a dream when fully utilized.
• And just like that you’ve also checked task #2 off your bucket list: Get rid of every last coffee-stained note on your desk, and stop DOING this.
• And oh look, what’s this but another bill, fortunately an ACH this time, whew. Girl, you have got to reform at last, and hey, with all this free time on our hands…
• Establish a login for each of those sweet lil’ apps you’ve downloaded to your phone, and figure out how the heck they work anyway.
• Meticulously purge every folder on every device. Every folder. Get real – all those recipes? There’s enough there for three or four lifetimes, you don’t cook anymore, and Kim is not the scullery maid. Pick five from each category and lighten the load – this is not brain science.
• Heartlessly ditch contacts whose names you no longer recognize, and get totally realistic about the rest. Unless you’re a Young Turk who’s still networking nonstop you will never need a goodly number of those contacts, nor have a use for what they represent.
• Dive into and finish that major closet purge you’ve been postponing since you moved three years ago. That was SO not difficult, WHAT IS YOUR FREAKING PROBLEM?
• Haul a couple of small truckloads full of treasures to Goodwill in honor of their recent revamp and redeeming online rep. Come home feeling not magnanimous but relieved and grateful that at least a few of the world’s goods will find their way into deserving hands instead of gathering dust bunnies on shelves that will be better put to use.
• You could make your surroundings so enchantingly Zen that you would find yourself with the psychic freedom to write your buns off, for hours every day.
• You might become so engrossed in the lovely, soothing minutiae of daily living that you entirely forget to sweat the sneaky destruction in progress around you and miss the war altogether. Could happen.