Jacob woke me up this morning by whispering that there are thirty days remaining until March first, and that I have survived the dark ages, and graduated to over nine hours of daylight at last.
Once there was a way to get back homeward
Once there was a way to get back home
Sleep pretty darling do not cry
And I will sing a lullaby
Golden slumbers fill your eyes
Smiles awake you when you rise
Sleep pretty darling do not cry
And I will sing a lullaby
I find winters here very difficult, and that's a general observation not borne out of any other reason besides a horrific disdain for more dark than light of a day. Something I can't explain but I talk of often. The summers are glorious here, with the sun baking our little corner of the planet from the middle of the night to late in the next night, it's beams piercing the bubbled glass at 5 in the morning and providing a relentless glow until long after 10 pm. We get little time to hang upside down in the dark..like bats. I'm not a bat. I would do well in Denali, says Jake.
One of my disdains is for these room-darkening, insulated curtains. The kind we quickly discovered we needed, and we spent hundreds of dollars on them and then a few hundred more on better curtain rods and hardware with which to anchor these twenty-pound panels.
But they work, and around this time of year they choke off my enthusiasm and I begin to resent the hell out of the shroudlike weight of these protective fabrics that prevented the light.
And the cold, let's not forget the cold on a morning that saw the hinges on the screen door just about refuse to budge and I couldn't get back in for a few moments. The cold that makes me appear to puff down the road like Henry's favorite TV train character. Even though no one can see me, they're all safely nestled behind their own insulated drapes.
This week also heralds in a full moon on Thursday and so the children will be wild and we will be slightly moody and wondering why and it will all culminate into a surreal existence in which we have epiphanies that spark a new understanding, of how we can exist as skeptics and then fall back on something as simple as the hours of daylight or the phases of the moon or the dates of an ancient calendar that we cross off to find our place and gauge our moods. How I scrape the snow away from the sundial in the yard and peer at it as if I'll be able to wish it into service.
Jacob is trying to help me keep my faith through what might prove to be a difficult week but I'm going to focus on small, insignificant things and glide through it like I'm on a rail so that I don't linger too long and take those dreaded two steps back once again.
So far so good.
