A Cozy Pocket
Finding warmth in the new year
Last Sunday was a year ago, I think.
The morning was clear and cold with polar-chilled air riding in on a biting north wind. We’d planned to host a little family party to celebrate my cousin’s fortieth birthday, but before we got to filling the water decanter and setting out silverware, I convinced my teenager to bundle up and join me on a walk with Cricket dog.
My regular running route from our house includes a half-mile jaunt to the end of our dirt road, crossing a two-lane farm-to-market road, and a second half-mile stretch in the bar ditch until we reach the sidewalks of suburbia.
I love that bar ditch stretch.
The bar ditch burts with wildflower blooms in spring. Cricket and I can walk or run safely away from whizzing cars and semi-trucks, and there are always many treasures to find. I once had the thrill of running up to hundreds of one hundred dollar bills strewn out a car window, some of the edges burnt. Was I witness to a bank robbery gone wrong? A horrible domestic dispute? It took me embarrassingly long to find the fine print “PROP MOVIE MONEY” disclaimer on the front of each bill, at which time I looked around frantically trying to find a camera crew just out of sight filming me for an episode of Punk’d. Real main character energy, I know. It’s really something to live with this brain.
As my girl and I walked Cricket through the bar ditch on Sunday, I pointed her attention to a heap of black and white hair, the final remains after weeks of witnessing the daily decomposition of a skunk on my runs.
“Gross, Mom.”
Hardly, my darling girl, for your mother is a weirdo.
My daughter is not cut from wholly different cloth, though. When we finally made it out of the bone-chilling headwind and onto to the manicured streets of the subdivision near our home, I stopped short of stepping on an anole lizard so dark brown it might have been purple. It looked dead, but its body lay so soft and tender in my hand that we wondered if it was just cold.
“I’ll put it in my pocket and see if I can warm it up.”
And so we walked and talked about the trials and tribulations of middle school, of which there are still very many, and my girl warmed a lizard in her pocket, hoping it would come back to life. She confessed that it made her feel like a silly little kid to hold a reptile in her pocket all the way home, a sentiment that made me all at once wistful for the days when it didn’t feel childish and grateful that she was still wanting to hold her new little friend close.
When we got home, the lizard, sufficiently warm and most definitely not dead, jumped from her pocket and ran under the dishwasher. All I could think was that we tried, and hopefully there would be enough crumbs on the floor of our well lived in home to sustain the lizard for a while.
By Sunday evening, the school district was already contacting families with the news that there would be no school on Tuesday due to impending threat of snow and ice. Thrilling for the children! Mildly panic-inducing for a writer on deadline. My best writing work gets accomplished in the hours that my children are at school, and things go especially well during weeks when the news cycle isn’t distracting, which is to say that this week has been… challenging.
Monday brought Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, Inauguration Day, College Football Championship Day, the true start of the winter storm in our neck of the woods, and the midpoint of a surprise four-day weekend.
The snow was beautiful, and if you know me, you would agree that my true obsession with building and burning a fire for days on end cannot be overstated. I did not get as much work done revising my novel this week as I would have liked, but I did get a lot of work done on a few jigsaw puzzles, so there’s that.
In addition to wrapping our pipes and grabbing up extra groceries ahead of a potential snow day like all good Texans, having livestock means a little extra prep. We stock up on alfalfa and grain for the donkey and goats, grab crumble for the chickens, put down lots of extra fresh bedding to fluff their spaces, and we get ready to haul water. When we woke to ten acres of winter wonderland and snowflakes falling on Tuesday morning, the kids helped me break the ice on the water troughs, and I carried buckets of hot water to the critters. “Tea,” we call it. Cold critters love hot tea.*
Eddie, our hand-me-down, twenty-something-year old paint donkey, and his goat sisters Violet, Sadie, Annie, and Lupe live in a three-sided loafing shed. This arrangement works well during hot Texas summers, but things get a little chilly when we dip into freezing temps for extended periods of time.
Early in the week when the temperature was expected to drop to the low twenties, and I was busy praying that the heat tape on our hot water heater would keep our pipes from freezing, I remembered the yak wool blanket that I brought home from my grandmother’s house in Arizona. Mom and I met her sister and one of my cousins at Gigi’s house in 2021 before it was sold to liquidate her estate. It is a gift to have many sweet treasures from that trip. For the last few years, I’ve gotten into such a habit of saying, “This (dress/glass dessert plates/pin/Christmas decoration/ring)? Thank you. My grandmother’s.”
And then the other person would inevitably get an certain look on their face, and I would say, “Oh, she’s still with us, thank goodness. 96 and doing great!”
Last June when I heard that she had passed, one of the first things I thought was how hard it would be to not have this line of comfort in my back pocket.
Gigi and my Grandpa collected many interesting things during a life lived abroad. Grandpa was the Naval attaché to Sri Lanka, and my mother and her siblings spent much of their youth in India and the Philippines. The blanket is so unmistakably warm and heavy that crawling into bed on cold nights this week was like sneaking into a hug.
I shelved the blanket last night as the temperatures are starting to climb back to normal Texas winter levels, and that turned out to be a great call. Sometime in the middle of the night, our nearly ten-year-old who knows that I am the deeper sleeper and less willing accommodator of nightmare victims in our bed, woke her daddy and convinced him with absolutely no resistance that she needed a spot under our covers. He stayed with the two of us for as long as he could stand my snoring and our combined body heat. He eventually fled for the couch.
“That’s probably the last time she’ll ever ask to do that,” he said this morning as we dressed for the day and I joked about him being a bit of a pushover. He may be right, and I am grateful that she still comes to us in the middle of the night when she’s scared.
When my alarm went of this morning at such an ungodly hour that I won’t publish here for fear of public shaming, I realized that all of this had transpired. My gift for deep sleep had me surprised to find Greg on the couch, so I tapped him on the shoulder and suggested he take my spot next to our youngest in our bed so that my noise and light wouldn’t bother him.
When I returned the half-and-half to the fridge, a flash of bright green against the brown wood of our floors caught my eye.
My big girl’s lizard friend. Cozy and warm, the green having returned in force, and doing just fine with the prevalence of crumbs on the floor.
*Cheers to Greg who hauled nearly all of the tea this week. I only did that first round, and then magically found myself busy during tea time. My water-hauling honey left town this morning for work, and I’m going to miss more than just his willingness to do the colder, heavier chores.
I love your writing, and photographs and main-character-energy-brain so much. Thank you for this treasure of words.