Monthly Archives: January 2017

January Snow

29 Sunday Jan 2017

Posted by in January, Seasons, Snow, Winter

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This morning there were snowflakes in the air. Just a few, brushing past my face intermittently. I haven’t seen the forecast—not that I think it would tell me whether or not to expect snow. I wonder if there’s something on the way and I dread the possibility.

Snow is only magical at Christmastime. During the holidays, when the lights are up, when we are dashing about shopping and going to parties and buying the tree, snow on the ground completes the scene. It feels homey and nostalgic. Even if it’s a significant snow that closes schools and libraries and keeps everyone home for a day or two, there are fun and special things to fill that time. Trimming the tree can fill a wintry afternoon, and baking cookies can take a whole day. What better time for baking than when we’re stuck inside? Standing in the kitchen, watching the kids make a snowman in the backyard, pulling another tray of gingerbread men or snicker doodles out of the oven is like a small chunk of perfection, all brought  to you compliments of the season and the snowfall.

In January? Not so much. It’s just a snow storm. The joy of a special holiday is replaced with worry, since we likely used up too much vacation time in December. We need to make arrangements for childcare in case school is suddenly closed. We worry whether there’s enough windshield de-icer in our cars and salt in the garage. How many snow-shoveling induced heart attacks will we hear about? Is there enough wine and beer in the house to get through a day or two with the family?

Why is it so different? Why can’t we simply enjoy the beautiful snowfall and the sudden day off? For one thing there’s the expense. That unpaid time off or unanticipated childcare expense is hard, and for people whose jobs don’t even offer paid time off, it’s a cut in income. So is another round of paying for snowplowing and show shoveling. These expenses are the same in December, but in December we’re on a spending spree. We’re rolling up credit card debt at a rapid clip, turning a blind eye to the New Year when the bills come due. Once January comes and we sober up, tighten our belts and start to pay off the holiday bills, the last thing we want is more winter-related expense.

And frankly, snow in January fails to be lovely. There are no colored lights to brighten the mounds of white, no polystyrene reindeer pull sleighs through it. We miss the charming incongruity of Mary and Joseph, waist deep in snow, adoring their new-born babe. The treetops don’t glisten, they sag beneath the weight and threaten to snap. The snow plows lumber along the streets, hurling icy brown sludge to the curbs. Because January is colder than December the snow lingers, outstays its welcome, becomes sooty and muddy and gray. It is not a blanket but a pall.

Not only that, but snow in January reminds us of one inescapable fact about winter: February. With the rapidly building climate change, we get many unseasonably warm days in January (2016 was the warmest year on record for the third year in a row). It makes you forget you’re in the midst of winter and leads you to anticipate spring long before it has any chance of appearing–and we still have February to contend with.

I just checked the local forecast, which carries no prediction of snow. I also checked the National Weather Service Website, which carries the headline ‘Tranquil weather for most of the U.S. this weekend.’ Sounds reassuring.

I expect the worst.

Kites

22 Sunday Jan 2017

Posted by in Gardening, Kites, Seasons, Spring

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This morning out on the running path several people passed me carrying signs. There was one young couple and one family group with two small kids. Their signs read Stop Trump and Protect Women’s Health and such. They were headed to the MetroLink train station a half mile away, no doubt to take it downtown to a rally. This will be a busy protest season for many people. I may participate in some, but I realize it won’t do anything. If losing the election by 3 million votes can’t convince a man that he has no mandate from the American people, I doubt that marches will. But I understand the urge to do it, and that it will likely intensify as the weather moderates.

I had been thinking about spring. It’s pretty warm out for a January day, and the first sunny day in over a week, so even though we still have a few months of winter left, it felt like spring was in the air. I thought of what my spring activities might be, aside from political protest. For many years, both as a suburban homeowner and as an owner of rural property, spring meant revving things up, getting ready to plant things, plow things, prepare soil and beds, check the lawn equipment, all with a sense of mixed anticipation and dread. Now, I have no lawn at all to worry about and no garden to enjoy.

Last year I put four pots of herbs in the window of my small apartment. I harvested and used those herbs, and plan to do so again this year. But that’s about the extent of my ‘gardening.’ So what do I have to look forward to in spring, that’s different from what I do all the time?

Fishing—I like that. Trout season begins in March. But I can only go fishing so many times. The best streams for trout are far away enough to make it a full day’s endeavor just to fish for several hours. What else do people who don’t care for lawns and gardens and orchards and beehives do when the weather gets nice?

I have thought about kites. I wonder how much this is a reversion to the joys of my youth. I used to love the thrill of feeling something so far above me tug at the string in my hand. I imagine it’s something like the thrill of flying without actually leaving the ground. But today is fairly windless, despite it being otherwise an optimal weather day, so I think the kites will have to wait.

I also wonder how expensive this seemingly simple pastime has become. When I was a kid, we used to walk to a little market down the street from our neighborhood. If you had a quarter, you could buy a paper kite for ten cents and a ball of string for ten cents. If you could get your mother to give you a worn out shirt or an old sheet to tear in strips you made a tail and were ready to take to the skies. For less than 25 cents. I’m guessing I won’t get off so cheaply these days.

But you’ll notice that as I think about what to do with my upcoming warm spring days, I am thinking about leisure activities—fishing, kite flying. In years past everything was about important seasonal tasks that needed doing. Planting the garden, weeding the flower beds, cutting the grass. Somehow I miss those things, even though they are a lot of work. But not enough to want to return to them. In my life I have never been wealthy, never actually been that comfortable: I have made a living, but I have gone from being house poor to being land poor. Never have I had the time or the resources to enjoy myself with any regularity. Now the thought of doing exactly that looms before me, and I approach it with apprehension.

I am leaving the apartment soon to get groceries and do a few other errands. I wonder where they sell kites? I may stop by and see what’s to be had, ask a few questions. It has been over forty years. Nowadays they probably have remote controlled kites. I can imagine the conversation:

‘Do you have kites?’

‘Sure,’ says the guy behind the counter, ‘what kinda phone do you have?’

‘Phone?’

‘Yeah, what kinda phone? So you can download the app.’

Or maybe not. Maybe they’re still made simply, with paper and balsa wood. I doubt it, but there’s always hope.

 

 

Jupiter Shmupiter

15 Sunday Jan 2017

Posted by in Ice Storm Jupiter, Ice Storms, Seasons, Weather, Weather Forecasting

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I just finished a morning run, and as I entered the door to my apartment building a haggard-looking woman with a coat thrown over her pajamas stopped me in the hallway. She was eyeing the outdoors with fear in her eyes. ‘Is it icy out there?’ she asked. ‘No,’ I said, ‘it’s not.’ ‘Not at all?’ she continued, suspiciously. ‘I just ran two miles,’ I said, ‘and I didn’t see any ice anywhere.’ I should have added that while there is a little drizzly rain, the temperature is above freezing. As I was walking towards the apartment building I heard birdsong, and I thought of spring. So no, there is no ice. ‘Well,’ the woman said, turning back towards her apartment, ‘I’m not crazy.’

I’m not sure what she meant by that. Maybe she’s one of those people who is often suspected of being crazy, and she wanted to let me know otherwise. She might have meant that she is not crazy enough to venture out on what’s supposed to be an icy morning, regardless of my assertions. But most likely she meant that she hadn’t made up the idea of ice: that there was truly, really, actually supposed to be ice out there. So where was it?

They called it Jupiter, an ice storm of such massive proportions that everyone was cautioned to stay off the roads and prepare to spend three or four days indoors. Stock up on food and buy extra  batteries for flashlights, since there would be widespread power outages. Schools, churches, libraries, businesses all closed—long before a single raindrop fell.

At the height of the hysteria, Missouri’s new governor came on TV and told everyone that he would be mobilizing the National Guard in response to this emergency. That’s really the point when I yielded to the hysteria and closed the library where I work. My staff had been walking around in blackening dread, and I’m sure there was a whispering campaign conducted around the theme of how insane I was to even consider opening on the day of the climatic holocaust. I should have been smarter. I know that new governor is a GOP’er whose main credential to be our state executive is his experience as a Navy Seal, whose campaign ads featured him shooting firearms into various exploding objects (for readers not from Missouri, I swear I’m not making this up), and who clearly had a puerile, macho need to be seen hanging tough with the soldiery.

So Friday came. I was home, and called my mother, spoke with my brother, all of us checking on each other to be sure we were safe and making sound decisions in this time of impending doom. And then I sat all morning and afternoon watching while light occasional showers put down the tiniest film of ice on tree branches and car windows, but completely failed to glaze the streets or sidewalks. It was a complete bust, as far as I (or anyone who would take the time to step outside) could tell.

But the funny thing is that it didn’t change the frantic nature of the reporting on The Event. TV news reporters swarmed the region, letting us know where the worst icing was, where the roads were the most hazardous, where the emergency centers were. It was kind of sad watching a reporter who stood before a building in downtown St. Louis as he asked the cameraman to follow him to a little patch of ice he had discovered near a curb—he prodded it with his shoe and intoned ominously about its dangers. Late in the day came the news of the first death linked to the storm, someone out in one of our rural counties, though nobody mentioned the nature of the death or how it was ‘linked to the storm’—you could just tell the news teams were so overjoyed at being able to report a death that such details became immaterial. By evening I had given up on expecting the storm to make its mark today. Maybe on Saturday we would incur The Wrath of Jupiter.

But as Saturday dawned I came back to reality. The temperature was just above freezing, precipitation was minimal. I quipped that if they wanted to name this storm for a planet, it should be Pluto, the planet that turned out to be too small to deserve the name. I recollected once again that weather forecasts are, first and foremost, advertisements for television news. And for grocery stores. Wow, did our local stores sell out of stuff over the past few days! Even the National Weather Service did not seem to have a grip on things. One guy I work with mentioned on Thursday that after so many warm days in January the streets and sidewalks were likely too warm to ice over quickly. I had the same thought, especially since the temperatures were not exceptionally cold, hovering just around the freezing mark. If a couple of librarians could see that obvious point, couldn’t entire staffs of trained meteorologists figure that out?

The point I want to make is, get out there and see what’s happening. There is still, even in this time of computer modeling and Doppler radar and whatever other technological weather tracking, simply no substitute for going outside and seeing what it feels like it might do. If you hover indoors, staring at your local TV news coverage, you’ll never know anything that’s happening, only what they want to tell you. I know, it’s a sad irony but true, that watching the news will teach you almost nothing of importance. As Nobel Laureate Robert Zimmerman put it many years ago, ‘You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.’

Thinking back on it, I wish I had taken that woman in the hallway by the hand and led her outdoors. ‘Please,’ I would say, ‘just step out here and see. Birds are singing, there is a light breeze and a bit of mist in the air—and no ice.’ But I didn’t. I only watched her turn back to her apartment, likely to spend another day in her pajamas before the TV, shivering and worrying about whether her supply of Beef-a-Roni and canned tuna would hold out, muttering to herself or whoever she thinks might be listening that she is not crazy. No she is not. She is perfectly sane, in the exact same way all of us our perfectly sane.

From the Flophouse

08 Sunday Jan 2017

Posted by in American Dream, Materialism, Minimalist Living, Seasons

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In another month or so I will have spent a year in the small apartment I moved into when I left the ranch behind. Somewhere along the line I took to calling the place where I live ‘the flophouse.’ The word has all those connotations of a place inhabited by the desolate, the drunken and drugged, the indigent and unfortunate, and I do cast my eye critically upon my neighbors from time to time. As the months roll by though I am returning to a more humane understanding of people. I don’t know anyone else’s situation and experience and I ought not to judge.

We judge people in terms of ownership. The American Dream is a dream of ownership, at least at the individual level. From above, it’s the utopian dream that everyone who ‘works hard, pays taxes, and plays by the rules’© should be able to own a home; from the individual level it’s about me owning a home. To my way of thinking this whole system is now in question on two major fronts.

One is the simple fact that paying taxes and playing by the rules is problematic under a government that increasingly disenfranchises whole blocks of voters, that gerrymanders its way into office using the archaic electoral college, and makes common cause with despotic foreign governments who seek to intervene in our elections. As our next president has asserted, repeatedly and emphatically, ‘It’s a rigged system, folks.’ We should not ignore that fact.

The other change is that many people these days are shifting their emphasis away from using the money they earn to own things to using that money to buy experiences. Whether it’s tickets to symphonies, plays, concerts, and sports events, or dinner out at new and interesting places, or vacations to the kinds of exotic locales people put on their bucket lists and usually never get to, the thinking is that there has to be something more meaningful to do with the cash we earn than buying a bigger home and filling it with more furniture. Some call it minimalist living, and it is much talked about. I don’t know how much it’s catching on, but it certainly appeals to me.

In the early years of this century I lived with my family in a standard middle-class subdivision. We all had two-story brick-fronted, vinyl sided, four bedroom 3-bath homes on quiet cul-de-sacs. Most of the time that we weren’t working to afford these places we spent frantically preening the yards, painting the rooms, cleaning the carpets, and shopping for more bric-a-brac to fill them with. In the decade we lived there our vacations, our trips, our nights out to interesting places were few and far between. It was too expensive and all the money was going to feed the home. Neighbors, of course, rarely spoke. We were simply too busy to get to know one another. I did have one good friend, Jeff, and he was the first person I ever heard succinctly describe our condition. ‘We’re house poor,’ he said.

So now I am faced with a decision as I sit in my warm, cozy little apartment here in what is too easily derided as a flophouse. I have good fair-trade coffee with my breakfast of fresh hummus on homemade whole wheat pita, a baroque concerto playing on my Bose radio. I am surrounded by a few furnishings carefully chosen from Ikea. I have a good laptop computer to type this on. I don’t have Internet service in my apartment, but I do at work, and so it will be easy to upload this writing there when it’s done. What else do I need to be happy?

Yes, it causes one to ask seriously what is happiness? I know there are people at the income level that can afford both the big, richly furnished house and the experiences that make life worth living. More power to them, I guess: but I know they are a tiny minority in our world. For the rest of us it seems the question is in order. Do I maintain my material well-being at a level pretty much prescribed by societal norms (and the needs of The Economy to keep growing), or do I martial my resources in support of something other?

It may have been consideration of this question that all along drove my passion to study the seasons. I started studying the subject in that vinyl mansion in that standard subdivision. I knew that I needed something more than those material trappings to find happiness. For whatever reason, I focused on a finer attention to the world around us, as represented by the flow of the seasons. I read a book a few years ago called Holidays and Holy Nights by a man named  Christopher Hibbert. It was specifically about the old Catholic liturgical year and how it defined the flow of the seasons over hundreds of years for a vast part of western society. It was a beautifully written book and very nostalgic for that old cyclical routine, which has been largely lost, even among observant Catholics. Mr. Hibbert noted that regardless of whether one is Catholic or not—and I certainly am not—we in the 20th and 21st centuries are the only people in history who are trying to live our lives without some observance of a seasonal calendar. I think he’s right, and I think it’s a loss.

So I find myself back here, in my small apartment in the flophouse. Soon, when certain niggling legal considerations are resolved, I hope to move on to something ‘better.’ What that better will be is a major decision at my time of life. Will I choose to continue on the path of ownership of more and more nice things, or on spending the last few decades of life experiencing much of what I have missed?

I hope I make the right choice.