now fortified with impotent fury!risperdal

I fucking love where I live sometimes. That may be the bailey’s I’ve just drunk talking. Sure, I could do without the overpowering aura of fundamentalist Christianity permeating so much of life’s daily little activities, but there is shit I take for granted that my compadres on the coasts just either don’t get or don’t believe. There’s just something about here, about the pharmacy tech knowing you and remembering your kid’s name, and slipping them a roll of stickers just cause. About the doctor’s office working you in, and calling you over the weekend to make sure you’re ok. About neighbors amiably hanging out over the holidays, and college kids coming home and happily seeing the babies of the neighborhood who are now big kids. About a pace of life where people don’t expect you to be working straight through the holidays, and valuing the time off. I can’t quite explain it: most of my colleagues are dumbstruck at what I can take for granted (like, the neighbors calling to borrow potatoes, and this being a normal occurrence. Or them helping to install the sink and faucet from hell. Or the insurance agent calling us after the hailstorm, not the other way round, or the tile guy swinging samples by after work, or the 4 star restaurants that welcome our child).

And where the 4 year old knows all the words to ‘Snow Day’ and precisely what it means already.

There’s a lot about here that sucks. But the more I work in a very coastal industry, the more and more I appreciate the attitude around here.

“On my knees and pray! (On my knees and pray!)
For a snowy day! (For a snowy day!)
Cause I need a break and I wanna sled the day away
I need a snow day!”

And around here? Everyone understands what that means.

I am a giant stressball. I am creamy port cheese that’s been rolled in nuts. My dining room looks like Santa barfed all over it, as the table in there is gift staging and wrapping central and the tree is in there too. It feels like everything is salted in a fine veil of glitter, thanks to the child’s crafting machinations. I have yet to bake OUR cookies, though I did get done the three squintillion for the lad’s office the candy for the school the double batch of truffles for my office when there was a big meeting. I managed to knit all but one of the teacher gifts, and the one I didn’t isn’t back till Jan 2 anyway. Most of the grocery shopping is done, but there’s still bits and bobs and did I mention I’ve decided to make a cassoulet from scratch starting the day after Christmas because I am apparently fucking high?

In the midst of all this, we still haven’t gotten our new health insurance cards (joy! must rifle through mail and make sure they didn’t get lost, or then call), the Service light came on in my car, and we had an infestation. Last Saturday, I bundled the child up and ran a breakneck rondeau of errands- the kind that leaves one huffing and puffing and full of hate for humanity with the PLEASE SHUT THE FUCK UP backgrounder of the Salvation Army bellringer making you inch ever closer to going postal. As we slogged home in the pretty snowstorm, I realized the implications of the infestation: every other house on the block is trimmed with pretty white lights. Ours was trimmed in giant squirrel traps, each with a giant dead tree rat body swinging gently from it, each dead ingredient for Brunswick stew coated in a genteel, festive, pastoral dusting of perfect snow.

Most years this would be enough to make me snap. But several hundred miles from here, a friend and colleague of the lad’s lies in a hospital ICU in a medically induced coma after a horrific car accident at the beginning of the month. And so this season I hug Sean a little tighter, I spend more time with the immediate family and less time scribing perfect notes into cards for distant family members I’ve never laid eyes on. I go out for dinner with friends and say to hell with shaping giant bows to trim the newel posts of the staircase. The holidays will happen, and it will be fine, even if the bows on the presents aren’t symmetrical, the cookies baked at the last minute, dinner served in jeans and a sweater at the kitchen table instead of in the dining room. That stuff is not what is important, and this year I finally have the shield to hold the onslaught of cultural pressure at bay about what is a perfect holiday.

And this year I light at candle at Christmas, and pray for a man half a continent away.

I’m sitting in the airport waiting to fly to (not so sunny, the news here is blaring news of flash floods where I’m going) California. Here it’s a frozen slushpile; snow and sleet and ice yesterday, temperatures below freezing. You would think I would be squealing with glee to get where it’s 30 degrees warmer.

But I realized that- despite my hands growing to look more and more like hers, the landscape of veins and tendons becoming prominent, like the hands I remember from my youth- I am not my mother. I actually like winter. I adore that my child was beside himself to get to shovel the driveway. I need the change of seasons. I need the hard rock station making everyone cry with a Hope for the Holidays campaign, and then launching into Voodoo. I need the honesty of a school that does a giving tree for the child abuse protection advocate program, and not what the chic charity of the month is. I need that stupid earnestness.

I’ve finally realized it. I’m really a midwesterner. Or at the very least, a snow-belter.

God help me.