This one’s from yesterday. I was falling apart from the cold and snow and how we couldn’t get the car out—or was that this morning? All the days begin to feel the same in single digits! But when I walked out to scrape the windshield, something shifted. The frozen powder snow fell off the windows when I touched it. Ten degrees with no wind in the sun at seven thousand feet was almost comfy and glory lay all around. I just give up, you know? I just give up.
Idiot’s Surrender
Staring me right in the face
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This post really brings back my own memories of trying to shovel out as it keeps dumping on me and the propane is almost out. That was three years ago and I might not have survived that.
My first winter in Arkansas was the one time we ran out of wood with no back up and I shoveled out a quarter mile lane with a new baby strapped to my front and a two year old on my back. A neighbor lady came over to help. She had a bunch of kids herself. Snow drifted up to 12 feet and we did not get to town for two weeks but a guy dressed in the white swami outfit got wood to us in his monster truck, thank all the Gods.
That relationship did not survive much longer. I have to ask myself why I marry these people. Hopefully I am done with that.
So right now I am living in the back of my truck in sunny Arizona. Ha!
Dear God. Two weeks! What a history. Are you writing a book about that? I thought you were living in Ashland, Oregon or some such place. I think about my mother’s old place in Tucson from time to time. It was very nice, actually. Couldn’t see being there except in the winter, dammit. We could have bought it for a song.
I’d consider moving to a milder climate. Problem is, a move would bust us at the moment. There’s a lot to figure out.
You are right. There is a book waiting to come out and thank you for the inspiration to get it out there. In fact, I always explained my hard times as “gathering material” but really it is just the rebel in me.
As I’ve surely noted before, I moved to the Ozarks in ’71 (leaving a college teaching job) in my VW bus with a white German shepherd, my electric guitar (nowhereto plug it in!), 50 pounds of brown rice, and a book by a yogi entitled “How to Know God.”
JHF…have not thought of you in years…lost the bookmark and got distracted. My neighbor’s sister, Marcia Carter, just passed in Taos…and you came to mind…and I found you.
New bookmark.
Ah, the beauty of nature! Sometimes the only thing that keeps us from tipping over the edge. What a gift.
I find that the first two weeks of the New Year are hard to get through but there is no way to get around it if you can’t afford to go somewhere else. But maybe that wouldn’t help. Have you noticed that lots of people leave this dimension and move out in January. Unless you ski its a hard month.
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