Life So many things were disrupted this week that I don’t know where to start. I’ll start with the most important: despite a health scare, Zen is okay. On Thursday morning, Zen started to show signs of discomfort due to constipation, and by the early afternoon her health appeared to have deteriorated rather quickly. Despite our vet being closed due to the weather, we managed to get her an appointment with an emergency vet six miles away.
After a wearying week of winter weather, bouts of insomnia, and seasonal ennui, I found myself on this path near the end of my morning commute. I would like to say that I was 100% thrilled to be going to work this morning, but I was not. I was exhausted and irritated and overwhelmed and pretty daunted by all the slipperiness pictured. I can be pretty idealistic about my profession, but I wasn’t feeling so hot about the logistics, not today.
Here’s how my evening commute went today: 15:15: I decide to stick around past quitting time in order to avoid some of the traffic on snowy roads. This decision has the added benefit of helping out at work a little, too. 16:30: Quitting time comes and goes. Snow continues to fall. I remain unperturbed. 18:00: The library closes early and I leave with two coworkers to walk across the traffic-laden street and get into my car.
Freezing rain continued to fall overnight, and I couldn’t get my car defrosted enough to drive in this morning. The roads and sidewalks were so icy that it took me twice as long to walk to and from the bus. But look at how photogenic the ice-covered trees are! The power has flickered twice this evening already, so I’m going to bed. I hope we all thaw out in the morning.
I survived! It was a bit painful waking up at a terribly early time this morning just to catch the bus, but come quitting time I was very glad that I wasn’t driving myself home. Trimet to the rescue! The bus couldn’t go faster than 25 miles an hour due to the chains on the tires, but it got me home safely. Writing from: my study in snowy Portland, Oregon. Listening to: ice pellets hitting the window.
“Snow!” screamed the child in the street. I glanced out at our garden and saw the wet flakes glopping down. They wouldn’t stick. They didn’t last. Magical all the same. I’ve fancied myself a minimalist before, although you wouldn’t know it for all the things I have accumulated, spread out across continents. Objects loom larger in memory, just like the they do in the mirror’s warning, pulsing with intention: a small leather notebook in a basement, a grandfather clock in a storage unit, a doll-house in an attic.