The first week of the new year was a little rough on me. The post-holiday blahs set in. I always feel a bit out of sync at the first of the year. I find I’ve been writing the wrong date on everything. It’s embarrassing, but it happens every year and I will adjust to writing 2017 in a month or so without thinking about it. The weather during the week didn’t help my mood at all. It was so bleak. For the first part of the week it stayed just barely above freezing so we had rain and not snow. The rain made the snow we had a slushy, ugly mess. Then toward the end of the week, colder weather descended on us and all that slushy muck froze solid. And then more snow came. Ice and snow, snow and ice – that’s how the world looks right now.
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| The Genesee river. |
The hardest part of the week was saying good-bye to Daniel. He left on Tuesday morning. He was the last of our holiday visitors and his departure left a gaping void in our home. He has always been a noisy child, always laughing, singing, playing some sort of instrument. After he left, the house was unbearably quiet. I had to compensate by playing music all day to fill up the silence.
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| Good-bye to Daniel. |
Daniel’s departure also marked the end of one era and the beginning of another. For over 30 years our home has had children in it. It has been difficult for me over the years as one by one they’ve grown up and left home. Now they are all gone. Yes, Hannah will return from college in July to live and work here before returning to school again, and Josiah will come home from his mission in 2018 and probably be home for a short while, but the official occupancy of our home is now two. I don’t think I’ll ever get used to it.
In an attempt to cope with my funk, I resorted to house cleaning. I’ve always found cleaning to be very therapeutic. I spent several hours on Tuesday morning cleaning out the refrigerator – and I mean really cleaning it. I took everything out, threw a lot of it away, took out all the shelves and drawers and washed them, and then put everything back again. Then I spent the afternoon tidying Hannah’s room and Josiah’s room (it served as a guest room during the holidays). When I was done, I shut and latched the doors to their rooms and felt a wave of sadness wash over me. We have three empty bedrooms upstairs now.
My mood was brightened a bit by the mail. The season of seed catalogs has arrived. I’ve already received a stack of them and more come every day in the mail. Reading seed catalogs is the way I cope with January. The pictures and descriptions get me thinking, dreaming, planning the gardens I will create when spring comes. That’s also good therapy for me.
With the coming of the Arctic air late in the week, we had some lovely frost. I read once that frost forms best on dirty windows and I use that as an excuse for the state of the windows on the back porch and woodshed. I love the patterns the frost makes on those windows.
In an attempt to cope with my funk, I resorted to house cleaning. I’ve always found cleaning to be very therapeutic. I spent several hours on Tuesday morning cleaning out the refrigerator – and I mean really cleaning it. I took everything out, threw a lot of it away, took out all the shelves and drawers and washed them, and then put everything back again. Then I spent the afternoon tidying Hannah’s room and Josiah’s room (it served as a guest room during the holidays). When I was done, I shut and latched the doors to their rooms and felt a wave of sadness wash over me. We have three empty bedrooms upstairs now.
My mood was brightened a bit by the mail. The season of seed catalogs has arrived. I’ve already received a stack of them and more come every day in the mail. Reading seed catalogs is the way I cope with January. The pictures and descriptions get me thinking, dreaming, planning the gardens I will create when spring comes. That’s also good therapy for me.
With the coming of the Arctic air late in the week, we had some lovely frost. I read once that frost forms best on dirty windows and I use that as an excuse for the state of the windows on the back porch and woodshed. I love the patterns the frost makes on those windows.
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| Frost on a back porch window. |
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| Frost on the woodshed door. |
Twenty-five years ago a group of family – Stacey’s brothers Kurt, John, and Bill, and Bill’s son Aaron, and I were contestants on the game show Family Feud. We won and went all the way to the championships when we lost at last. It was a surreal experience for me. We had to act peppy and say stupid things and it made me uncomfortable, but it was interesting to be on television. Yesterday a group of family – Kurt’s daughter Shay, Bill’s daughter Audrey, Aaron’s son Brandon, my son Geoffrey, and a cousin, Tyler, tried out for Family Feud. They touted themselves as Second Generation Contestants. They won’t know for a while if they made it. I’ll let you know if they do.
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| A new generation of Family Feud contestants? |
It is very cold and windy today. A dry powdery snow has been falling since early morning. The accumulation hasn’t amounted to much, but the wind keeps moving it around in great swirling clouds. On our way home from church we drove through several white-outs where I couldn’t see anything. It was scary. But we’re home now and aren’t planning to go anywhere. Well, we are planning to go over to Shillig’s this evening, but that’s a short walk. Even so, we might want to tie a rope around us before we set out so if we get lost in a white-out we can follow it back to the house.
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| Dawn on a very cold morning (Thursday). |
The other day I asked Stacey if she would ever consider us becoming “snow birds” and going south every winter. I said, “If one of our children ever relocates to a warmer climate, would you consider closing the house after Christmas and spending the winter with them?” “Christmas?” she answered, “you mean Halloween!” She’s so funny.
