Somehow It is both February and it is Thursday. Yesterday was a write off, sick day. So, of course, I face today feeling like I failed yesterday. I watched one episode of The Wire in the afternoon, but that was all I accomplished. Also, today is pretty jam packed so it can feel like I getting nothing done, whatsoever, just trying to get through the list of appointments. It will be a full day of not catching up on what I did yesterday merely trying to stay on top of today's tasks.
Okay, I interrupt myself to announce that I momentarily stopped typing and turned to glance at the calendar. Yep, I've done it again and double booked myself. So in a mad dash to sort out the order of my day I've actually cancelled out 1 of 3 appointments. This will certainly make the day a bit easier. I did indeed book 2 different things for 1pm. I hope I can reschedule my podcast interview later today and not have to raincheck for a different day/week. I'm pretty excited to talk to Barbara Stewart, author of the book Campie--that is terrific by the way.
The snow has been falling lightly for 2 days now. There must have been some freezing rain on Tuesday night because yesterday all my balcony furniture were encased in ice. It looks pretty funny, all this snow piled up high on the seat of a plastic lawn chair, and then the snow is encased under a sheet of ice. I touched the ice with my boot and some of it shattered like glass. I haven't been out of the house since Monday so I'm only assuming it is hell on ice out there. I really don't mind the snow. Sometimes I don't even mind the cold.
Ah, the cold. Barbara Stewart has a great way of writing about the Northern Alberta winter cold. In the book she ends up driving from B.C. to Grande Prairie to take a job as an oil rig camp cleaner. Her job was to change the beds, keep the floors and bathrooms clean, and to do the camp laundry and she describes her days in the camp trying to work invisibly amongst the camp's men. She also was in charge of taking out the kitchen trash. To do so she had to don several layers of coveralls, coats, gloves, and such in order to take the garbage out to the incinerator where she would burn up all the waste. She explains how much she loved going outside in frigid temperatures for a few moments of clear, sheer, cold and stillness. The cold, she says, slapped her across the face. And it does.
It's hard to forget yourself when you can feel yourself freezing. It puts you in the present, now. It clears away all the other things that don't matter. All that matters is the quiet, stillness, of a deeply frozen landscape and you in it. I like how Stewart talked about the cold. I'm from Northern Alberta, I know the exact landscape she describes. I know that cold all too well. That kind of cold does not happen in Quebec. I don't mean that I need to cold to come and slap me around and make me feel present. No, that's not it. But there is something so very calming about how quiet the cold can be. If heat is the process of atoms heating up and getting all excited and cold is the slowing and freezing of atoms I very much associate heat with cacophony and cold with quietude. That kind of quietude is very fragile. It waits to shatter. Once it starts to thaw there will be the sounds of cracking and melting, shifting and sinking, life returns and rivers flow. There will be birds, and other sounds of life. In the cold, there is no life and that is perhaps what makes the cold so special. It gives a moment of reprieve to contemplate our place in the world, distilled down to a simple equation: me + cold = dead. It doesn't take much. Life is as fragile as the quiet, still, cold. So, be here now.
