Cold Contemplation

I rubbed my feet together under the blanket, as I watched the first snowflakes of the season drift like frozen whispers past the window. My dad used to do the same thing when he was content. It’s funny how things like that can be genetic. 

I like the house to be cold. There is a level of comfort that can only be experienced in the winter, when the air carries a chill that almost bites the skin, causing you to retreat beneath the covers. When the weight of the blanket feels as safe as steel.

Morning light mixed with charcoal shadows along sleeping walls. The house slept, drawing long raspy breaths  through wood and plaster, exhaling through floorboards and window sills. 

My own heat pulsed out from me and circulated in currents, trapped by crisp, cool fabric. In moments like these, I think about life. The cold, the remnants of night giving way to day, the misty gray pallor of morning, all remind me of walking alone to the school bus as a kid. 

Leaving the safety and warmth of home and stepping into the uncertainty of a day, always left me feeling anxious. My home, my family, my life were all dysfunctional. You would think I would have wanted to escape, even briefly, but there was comfort in the chaos, and besides, I didn’t have a clue that we were dysfunctional. I wouldn’t have even known the meaning of the word. 

I can still feel the knots in my stomach, always in a state of fight or flight, on the verge of tears, and never fully understanding why. I wore my coat like a hug, like a fragile shield against the world.

It wasn’t far to the stone wall at the entrance of our trailer park that served as a bus stop, but the walk left me feeling overwhelmed with emotions I couldn’t name, let alone handle. Of course, there were the familiar emotions. The ones experienced regularly, such as fear and confusion. 

She was mean, a genius of malevolence and she hated me. In the whole of my life, I’ve never experienced dehumanization the way I did at the hands of that childhood bully. Yellow hair, cut blunt at the shoulders, and fierce eyes. 

What was this great anger in her about? Had her father given it to her? My father told me that if I backed down, retreated home with clean hands, he would take the belt to me, because that’s what he was told when he was my age. All I wanted was to be invisible, but she saw me. She saw every insecurity, every flaw, and she made me suffer for them. 

Icy fingers of air probed around, finding skin, plucking up little hairs and goosebumps. I pulled the blanket up over my nose. Some memories make me cold on the inside and no heater or bowl of soup can reach and warm those places. 

I was baptized in the river, in snowmelt that flowed down from the mountains. I stepped down into the water, breaking the current in two. It was February, my breath turned to a block of ice in my chest and my skin burned. All of my body systems stopped their regular functions and ordered my immediate retreat to the shore. 

I don’t know what was worse, plunging every follicle and pore beneath the glacial waters of the Deschutes or climbing out, and feeling the wind, like thousands of frozen needles piercing straight through me. My heart was warm that afternoon, though, and I was thankful and humbled. I sang a hymn with a towel around my shoulders, trembling and smiling. 

Then, at home there was the pain of hot water on my numb skin. The beautiful agony of healing and renewal. Like when you cry for the first time in a while and the tears cut their way out of their ducts. It stings bitterly, but the release is essential.

I look in the mirror and I see crooked teeth and a narrow mouth. I see me. I sat on the floor in my grandma’s room flipping  through photo albums and then, I saw my face, only it wasn't me, it was a relative whose name I can’t remember. 

I’m the result of so many hearts and faces and stories merging. Like the parts in the Bible I always used to skip over because they seemed unimportant, the begats. The listing of generations, of names standing alone, rungs in a ladder. But each of those names represent a lifetime, a person’s portion of birth and death, joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain. Someday, I’ll be just a name or a nameless face staring up from someone’s grandmother’s photo album. 

My fluffy, soot black dog snorts like a piglet in his sleep. The mighty Shih Tzu dog who hundreds of years ago was bred to keep the emperor of China’s feet warm. I don’t understand how feet warming skills are passed down through the blood line, but he just instinctively gravitates to my feet. I’m no emperor, but on mornings like these, when his little body, like a space heater, guards my feet, I’m grateful to the many Shih Tzus before him.

Pretty soon, light would break the day open and wake up this house. My son would burn the toast and stir the hot chocolate to death. My husband would sit on the couch and drink his coffee and bark orders at the kids. I would pull my daughter’s hair into pigtails and let the dogs out. The washer would stir yesterday’s towels around, and the neighbor’s truck would complain about the cold until it was forced out of the driveway.

Little pieces of comfort, life’s cadence, the familiar. Distractions from the inevitable passing of time. The Monumentally Mundane that add up and fill the space between the dates on a headstone.The noise and the movement would smother these thoughts, the ponderings of a cold winter morning from beneath the covers.