“I went to the prison today; I went to the gym; and I saw my friends,” Cheryl said as I walked in. “I feel like a normal person again.”
“You mean Christmas was disrupting your life?” I ventured.
“Yeah, well next year, I’ll really get into it, but this year, I just want to get my prison project right.”
We’d just spent the last two weeks wandering outside of our normal routine. Cheryl went down to LA to see her 85 year old father two weeks before Christmas. She’s been doing this every 2-3 months. Once she gets there, she has little to do. Her father has daily house and personal support coming in; his sister-in-law also lives on site and helps out with routine household chores. And her father, whose will to live has given out before his body and his mind are ready to let go, spends nearly 20 hours a day in bed, and the other four in a nearly immobile state.
She takes day trips to places like the Getty museum and takes walks up in the Santa Monica Mountains above her family’s house. She reconnects with friends from 40 or more years ago. And she tries to be around for the few moments a day when he father seems engaging.
During her trip this time, the temperatures here at home plummeted below freezing, and we started to get a little snow. I was off work the entire time she was gone, and froze up thinking about decorating the house. I did manage to pull a few boxes out of the basement, and set up our Santa and Snowmen collection, as well as the ominous Nutcracker soldiers we got from a corporate potlatch party 15 years ago (“Our Vision Comes Alive”). But getting a tree, much less burdening it with decorative apples and kitschy ornaments was clearly beyond me.
I was dreading my promise to Annie, burrowed away at her first Whitman college year in Walla Walla, to drive her home from school. It’s 300 miles one way, a five hour trip, and it had snowed east of the mountains the day before. I left at 8 in the morning the day Cheryl was to return, and headed over the pass. Luckily, I was between storms, and the only weather excitement was the BITTER single digit weather between the summit and the Palouse. The last 50 miles into WW were over “compact snow and ice”.
I arrived in time to wander around campus for 45 minutes with Annie, delivering her last paper of the semester. The place was a wonderland. Not only was there still at least 5” of fresh, light powder on every branch of every tree, and no pavement to be seen on any city street. But the sky was clear, and a bright, though low hanging sun lit up the waning afternoon. This was just the preliminaries, I was to find out.
After sleeping all day Wednesday, Annie started to make the rounds. She feverishly planned parties for the upcoming weekend.
“You don’t want to go anywhere tonight,” I told her on Friday. The NOAA weather service guys were writing longer and longer discussions about the storm(s) floating in – a combination of a bent-back jet stream, pulling in cold arctic air from Canada through the mountain passes meeting a low pressure cell traveling south along the coast – apparently a great set up for incessant snowfall.
And indeed this came to pass. It started snowing on Thursday, and seemed to gather momentum through the weekend. Schools, which had started 2 hours late on Thursday, just gave up on Friday, the last day before winter break.
Two bursts brought 4-8” each on Friday and Sunday. Two of Annie’s friends spent the night on Saturday. College freshmen have a great child/adult mix in them. They are smart enough and organized enough to make plans and see irony, but still young enough to enjoy the magic and unique opportunities of a sudden snowfall in our usually rainy environs.
They scrounged up two snowboards and a plastic sled from the garage, and went out onto the hills of our little neighborhood. In the eerie twilight which night has become in the 21st century, they rattled down the slopes, getting thoroughly tired and soaked. Cheryl and I went down the driveway to catch the show, and were heartened that these newly hatched adults, whom we’d known for so long as children, could still have such innocent fun.
But it kept on snowing, nearly for a week, snowing the way it usually rains around here – a little bit here, a little bit there, and soon, it adds up to floods and soaked hillsides. No one could get anywhere by Sunday night. If the tightened ratchets of our newly chastened economic lives weren’t already doom enough for merchants, the loss of the final weekend before Christmas was enough to evoke tribal memories of the dust bowl for me.
Our particular isolated homestead is burdened by being in a hollow – three ways out, and all up hill. And it all starts our driveway meandering 100 yards downhill over gravel through the woods to the neighborhood road. A sharp S curve then aims you up towards the “side street” (as in “the main arterials are clear, but the side streets are still burdened by snow and slush”), which leads – uphill in three directions, to a semblance of civilization. We live literally on the border between the city of Gig Harbor and the County. In recent years, with rapidly rising property assessments, Gig Harbor and the County have managed to scrape up enough civic pride and resources to spring for some snow plow activity. But these dumps must have exceeded that meager capacity.
And our neighborhood street? It’s private, so no hope for plowing there. The last 25 yards rise rapidly up a 12% grade, and it was on this obstruction that local two wheel vehicles could be regularly heard whining and spinning in vain attempts to launch themselves over the top. The true difficulty is the ingrained pattern of slowing there at the top, to idle through the intersection, ready to stop instantly should a car being barreling down one of the three hills aimed out our little street. So it was treacherous to leave the house; but really, where was there to go? On Sunday, nothing was open, and we were reduced to glumly exercising on the stairmaster or the exercycle we have set up in our loft. Despite the rain, we’d prefer to be outside for what little light there is this time of year.
(To be continued)
Despite the onslaught of aqueous crystal hexagons, Annie’s friends managed to drive up Saturday night, and, by parking their large SUVs in our parking area, saved at least 400 square feet of area from being covered. This made the shoveling job Sunday morning only take an hour. I scraped up strategically angled turn slots for our cars, and this lulled Annie into thinking she could actually get around in the two wheel drive Prius. While the air stayed sub-freezing, she could get by just fine. By Tuesday (Christmas Eve) morning, however, she failed to get up both the final grade to 38th, AND the final grade back into our driveway, stranding the three friends she had over THAT night, leaving them fearful of missing out on their first Christmas back home from college.
Having spun out, slid into ditches, and just generally experienced multiple pummelings by all manner of winter driving misery, I have finally, after 44 years of torture, arrived at a point where my cars and my skills can get me through just about anything anywhere in the winter, as long as I’m dealing with an official road and snow that stays below the hubcaps. So having to go out once again was not something which put me in the Christmas spirit, after cleaning off the driveway enough for the all-wheels, and saving Annie’s bacon by laboriously digging out the 12 foot long little hill up into the parking area.
But then, Christmas IS all about the kids, isn’t it? While there have been a few memorable presents between the spouses in our family (pre-millenial carbon-fiber mountain bike and SLR Nikon digital camera come to mind), most of the fun at Christmas has been filling the floor under the tree with stuff for our three offspring. Now that they are not so enamored of either surprises at Christmas, or our taste in gifts, it’s become harder to find ways to feel fulfilled as a parent at Christmas time.
So Christmas eve day, I spent doing for my kids. After digging Annie out and letting her friends leave our compound, I headed on up to SouthCenter, where I was going to help Cody transport a Christmas surprise for Cheryl from Ikea. While the freeway driving was a breeze, the parking lot at Ikea was not. Six inch deep grooves of frozen slush greeted me there, as well as the word from Cody that he would not be ready for “some time yet”.
This gave me time to drive up to Seattle, to get Shaine. Luckily, the hill up James Street had been plowed, sanded, salted, waxed and buffed. But once onto Cherry, I was glad I had the Suburu. She came bounding out around the corner, and hopped in. I think her hair must keep her warmer than the rest of us; she wears the thinnest coats, focussing mainly on being stylish. And just this once, she didn’t look at all out of place wearing mid-calf boots.
Back to Ikea, into a darkening rainstorm (thank God it wasn’t snow anymore!), where Cody said, “still have a few hours to go”. What is he doing? Measuring each screw bolt for depth, width, and curvature? He finagles a trade of cars, which normally wouldn’t be that bad of an option, but today, driving that little toy thing he has seemed like a peculiarly modern form of freeway madness.
But before we got to the freeway, we had to take a detour up into East Hill above Renton. I missed the very obvious freeway entrance, and Shaine, oddly enough, kept quiet about it. So we ended up driving through the snowy ruts of the suburban wilderness for several miles. It felt like a cross between bumper cars and Autopia and Mr. Toad’s WIld Ride at Disneyland, where you are locked into a track, and jerked around each corner with no options for self maneuvering.
The freeway was no better, in that little Smart car with its rear end sawed off. A Volkswagen Beetle (the original version) would have been more stable and less intimidating. We got back before dark (barely), and waited two more hours for Cody to show up with his load. I was exhausted from digging my kids out and hauling them around the snowed in Pugetopolis all day.
Round about 6 PM, Shaine said, “So, mom, I think you should trade cars with me for Montana. I tried that Saturn in the snow, and I don’t think snow tires are going to help. It’s just not safe.” This was classic Shaine in several ways. First, she instinctually knows just what button to push (her mother is a safety freak when it comes to cars – there is no room in the rear end of her vehicle, after the box of flares, extra water, emergency pee bowl, jumper cables, warm blankets, and who knows what else.) And, she is always mooching off someone else – cookie, diet Coke, camera, car – whatever. Sigh – it’s Christmas, and we might as well do something nice for her.
Except Cheryl starts going on about how her car will need new tires, and Cody points out the car is burning oil somewhere, and he suspects that the head gasket will need to be replaced, and Shaine is leaving on New Year’s Day, and how will we get all this done? Certainly not tomorrow – we must open presents!
Somehow, we manage to get to sleep. Cody in particular was planning to stay up all night, putting together a new desk for Cheryl’s electronic photography studio. He plans to not only erect the furniture he hauled back from IKEA, but also move her entire “darkroom” – computer, monitor, scanner, printer, and associated paraphernalia, including the terabytes of hard disk storage she needs for the 40,000 pictures she insists on retaining in her digital memory. And not just move the stuff, but move it all into a new space, his old room. All this to surprise her.
It turns out he has not bought a key structural piece for all this, so will be unable to create his surprise. No matter, he’ll just make her wait a day while he gets the part and puts it together on Boxing Day.
With no one under the age of eighteen, we’re lacking a certain dynamism, and instead of diving right into stockings and packages, we divert to the kitchen, and attempt to re-create the old days, when Dad would make pancakes for the Kids, in the shape of the first letter of their names. Ever try to pour pancake batter so it makes a serviceable “S”? “A” is even harder. Scrounging through the pantry, I discover the pancake flour, apparently left over from the 90s, when I actually did this sort of thing. This begins an extended tour through the shelves, finding that Cheryl has managed to save numerous boxes and cans dating from the early 90s to the present, as well as a few of more uncertain origin. A box containing “Mapelene” lists “Seattle, WN” as its point of origin, and lacks the Nutrition Information sidebar. A can of enchilada sauce has desiccated completely; unopened, it clearly contains only air. Cody insists his has been around since before he was born.
During the kitchen detour, I hear some Christmas music which sounds like it comes from Ann Wilson. Curious, I go up to my computer, and scan through the iTunes music store to find, finally, the Wilson sisters’ version of “Blue Christmas”. I’d heard this song on the radio several years ago, and was unable to nail down exactly who did it, so I bought Sheryl Crow’s version from the Apple online store. But the nagging feeling remained that I’d missed the bought, and the REAL sounds I wanted were somewhere yet to be discovered. Now here she was; instant purchase, and right onto my Holiday playlist.
Annie Wilson was a high schooler in Bellevue in the late 60s/early 70s, and then founded the band “Heart” with her guitar playing sister Nancy. Ann had a Led Zeppelin fixation, as well as being an unabashed belter. This version of Elvis’ classic is a slurry, bluesy satisfier. I found a few other And and Nancy songs to download (“Love Hurts” is a particular favorite of mine). I went back to the KMTT web site to follow the Christmas playlist there, and got diverted by the concert list, showing SUSAN TEDESCHI coming Feb 22nd. Checked by schedule – yup, I’m free that night. So I buy tickets, print them out, and hustle downstairs to stuff one into Cheryl’s stocking at the last second. I LOVE the 21st century!
Last year, on Christmas, the barest of snow flurries flew by shortly after noon. Thinking it might be our only chance for a White Christmas, we raced outside to capture the moment by remote control – the five in our nuclear family, plus Cheryl’s dad Duke, and our Chinese Daughter For a Year Mu Chen. The Santa hats were meant to be proof of Christmas:
But this year – this year, we had a REAL White Christmas to photograph. The result, on the first try no less, captured our spirit that day perfectly: