“Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” Charles Dudley Warner
The Marcy Open School Plant Sale flier mocks me from its place on the buffet. I want everything the online order form offers, but I live in Minnesota where a six-month winter is a possibility, and this year, a reality.
A garden? Pfft! Riiight.
One year ago, the average temperature for April was fifty degrees, with a high of seventy-three. It’s still cold this year, and I look out the window, scowling. The snowbanks in my yard are creeping away, but I don’t believe them. And Husband’s phone call from work doesn’t help their credibility.
“Did you hear about the twelve to eighteen inches of snow we’re supposed to be getting this weekend?” he says, chuckling. “And the 45-mile-an-hour winds?”
It’s not funny.
I’d like to think I’m immune to the weather forecast and its fallout. But I’ll admit my physical makeup sets my post-Christmas outlook to bleak and my attitude to droopy. And while March twentieth (or so) might declare a new season, the weather in Minnesota rarely practices what the calendar preaches.
I search for the shiny side—because there must be one—and in time, I find it: the persistent snowcoldgrey has numbed me, muffling my responses to adversity.
“Mom, I bumped into a parked car when I drove around the corner,” one of my teenagers says on an icy day, “but it’s just the front corner of our car that got bashed in. The other car is fine.”
My pulse stays at resting rate. “Oh.”
“Mom, I just vomited,” my middle schooler says over the phone from the nurse’s office at school.
My heartrate is even. “On my way.”
“Mom, the U of M might have waitlisted me because I got my application in so late,” another teenager of mine says.
No hitch in my breath. “I’m sure it’ll be fine.”
“There’s another winter storm on the heels of the one that’s going to slam us this weekend,” a friend says.
I level my gaze at him, feeling nothing. I’m probably not ready for flip-flops and watermelon anyway.
*Miss an installment of the blog? Or want to catch the story from the beginning? Visit http://www.tamarajorell.com/blog-entries-by-date
*Names in this blog have been changed to protect my family, neighbors, and friends in the neighborhood, and in a nod of appreciation to the beloved Swedish author Maj Lindman, I’ve renamed my three blondies Flicka, Ricka, and Dicka.