This and That

We finally got some snow. While I've been enjoying the strange warm weather, there's been a tiny (tiny) piece of me wondering what's happened to our classic snowbanks this time of year. There are little white flowers, over which I stand puzzling with hands on hips, that keep popping up near the driveway. But last weekend I was reassured that we are indeed at February's end. Snow fell and temperatures dropped and the wind whipped with such fury that I huddled in my quilts, terrified the big tree out back would be blown onto the house and its branches into and through my bedroom window to skewer me in my sleep. The tree stayed put and I concluded my feelings about classic February are misguided. 

I took a rather intense fall recently. I've never been accused of being graceful, but this incident was more stupid than clumsy. I was cutting across the lawn to my sister's house one night and slammed shin-first into a tree stump that I'd maneuvered around a hundred times. In pure Dick van Dyke flip over the hassock style, I took a header into the grass. I sat there for several seconds assessing the damage, and was pleased to find that while my shin was screaming pain, my bones were intact. I was rather proud of myself that I still had it, "it" being the ability to take a fall. Funny, how as we get older that falling isn't an embarrassment anymore. If we can catapult over a stump and walk away, that's a badge of honor. Time's marching band, beating that drum.

I was on an airplane recently and sat next to a woman who was wearing so much perfume my throat closed up. Why do some people, more frequently than not female people, think it's a good idea to douse themselves in scent, especially when they're getting on an airplane or going to a movie where they'll be in close quarters with other people? I wanted to tap her on the arm and ask that very thing, ask if she noticed my hoarse voice and that I'd been coughing and blowing my nose for three hours because of her, and how I really wanted to understand her thought process when she'd gotten dressed this morning. "Do you even give this any thought when you let loose with the atomizer, about how someone sitting next to you might respond to all that Obsession or White Diamonds or Black Pearls you're wearing? Did it for one second enter your pea brain that the reeking swirl of what you think smells good might be offensive to somebody else?" Just as I was about to launch she turned to the young man sitting next to her, patted his cheek, and said "I love you son."

So I let it go.

I think I'm ready for spring.