And things of that nature

If I were a diligent blogger I'd:

1) change the look of my blog at least once a year
2) blog regularly

but I'm not.  And I don't.
Many reasons -- some existential some practical.

The existential.  I became a writer for the reason most writers became writers.  To be seen and heard.  And to make sense of my self.  Now at 64 I can say, as at least 2 presidents of these united states have declared, "mission accomplished".  Not to say that it's been all psychotherapy.  Between bouts of confessional poetry I've written some theater work and some short stories some essays and some po-ems that will stand the test of time.  (Remember my name remember my name remember my name.)

The other reason?  I am heading towards work in Le Public Sector and like a cat shoveling dirt over my feces, I am covering my digital tracks.  I must appear to be a woman of rectitude after all these long years as an accidental bohemian-without-portfolio.  Those who knows me now that would imagine I've said and done the things I've said and done?  Almost with no regrets; I am as much an anthropologist of my own life and behaviors as I am as others.  The life of a writer is defined by the habit of detachment.  (I'm sure there's an exquisite French word to describe the state of living one's life while observing one's life.  But, I dunnah know it.)

I am slowly, inexorably being sculpted into being a teacher and with that, at least in the tradition that I know and respect it means modeling an exemplary life for my future students.  I am going undercover; forging a persona, a way of being that I've had these 10 years in New Haven to practice and perfect.  And what is that you may ask?

I love that I've been un-blogging for so long that it will be perfect strangers and not friends who may stumble across this entry.  This is my equivalent of the confession to strangers when you're in transit.  It is sometimes, perhaps always easier to talk to someone you'll never see again.  Or perhaps that's just me and my love of the arc of a story.  One and done.  Unlike how one has to talk with spouses and therapists.  But, I digress.

So, my persona, you ask?  I am gray.  I am old.  I am sexless.  Harmless.  Thick waisted.  No longer subject to raging passions.  Safe.  Assumed, if not known.  Free to be radical, because I am invisible.  Thick-waisted.  Slope breasted.  Old.  Old.  Old.  Odds of leaving this mortal coil are high -- whoot whoot.  I can excuse every faux pas, every crazy utterance as nascent dementia, if need be.  Or, I can be firmly grounded in the World of the Sane.  My choice.

I am working in a public school now.  I leaped at the chance to tutor to see what it's like and to put what I've learned into practice.  I am working with 7th and 8th graders and I love it.  These little animals are on the cusp of the the adults they were be and yet still moldable.  They are beautiful in their varied ways, both children and little adults.  And I delight when we have an chance to unlock the mysteries of writing or math.  I am struck how much genuine affection students have for each other.  I don't think it's a function of the school's culture (although I may be wrong) but the clusters, the groupings in class and out are nothing short of amazing.  There are, of course, the outliers, the misfits, the prey, but much less than you'd think given our attention to "very fine people" and such.  There is hope, that a polity can be forged that will take on the work of liberty and justice for all.

Anyway, I'll be lookin' for a job in the local school system in a couple of years.  (Beats playing golf.)  And I must be straight.  This has been a game I've played since 1983 when I was climbing the non-profit ladder in DC.  I lasted about 2 years before I involuntarily cracked, quit and embarked on the life of the poet.  (Words no poet ever says:  The next round's on me.)  Couldn't stay straight for long then, and now must stay straight enough to get a gig in a conservative milieu so I can do the subversive work of educating the next generation.

Oh the life of a crone.  It's a great thing.  But, I miss dancing, I do admit.

So, to my 5 Russian readers and to any hapless folks who read this, adieu until the next dispatch from my middle age.

Thought I'd Drop By ....

So.  For reasons simple and not, I've not posted here in four months.  Part of me dislikes even this much exposure (20 eyeballs reading a post) and to come back now is to get away with something.  It's akin to singing in the shower, dancing in your room, you get the idea, right?

But having defined myself as a writer; a writer has to write.

So.

I am in throes of my still wonderful job, and four classes away from student teaching.  I am working in a K-8 school for a few hours a week as I continue to process of "putting my money where my mouth is."  If things go as planned (cough) in a couple of years I will end my formal work life teaching in a school.  I will make a reluctant good-bye to my Yale colleagues and the work itself, and drew on everything I've known, been, studied, and attempted, and failed at to help some yet unmet children over the massive turnstile that is American inequality.  And then I'll quit that, too, and officially be retired.

I am finally thinking of life-after-work.  Don't want to travel.  Don't want to golf.  Ain't got no grandkids.  And a dream house is just another house that needs to be cleaned.  All I want, I confessed to a couple of friends, is to live long enough to use up my stash of material.

This is what it's like (at least for me) to round the corner to Official Old Age.  As usual, my physical body preceded my mind.  It's so damaged that even throwing off a duvet in the morning to get up to pee counts as exercise.  If a fire broke out in the morning I would be toast.  Just can't move that fast after having been horizontal for hours.  Oh well.  I'm still here.  And still committed to ameliorating what I've done to my body, and what my body has done to me.  That's a good sign -- it means that I intend to be vital longer.  But, if I've learned anything as I've aged, it is that to increase the odds of vitality one has to work (hard) at it.  It means that every day a significant amount of time is devoted to exercise -- for cardiovascular health, for strength, and for the cursed case of plantar fasciitis which began in my right foot and now includes my left.  (Pause for profanity.  Were I a quadriped it would be in all four feet, for sure.)  I am to get as used to those rituals as an insulin-dependent diabetic is to the needle.  Not that old age is a chronic disease, but as far as I'm concerned it must be engaged like one.  Daily effort; constant vigilance.

Between the last time I posted and today have been plenty of trials and tribulations, shoes dropped and so on.  At the turn of the New Year I took stock and although I hate to be made a liar by making resolutions on January 1st, I did it anyway.

This is the journey back.  Day at a, meal at a, task at a time.

Gone Quilting ...

A few random thoughts:

Wayne Barrett died yesterday,

Please, a certain strand of liberals, take off the hairshirts.  You don't owe those crackers an apology.

My head will explode if I hear or read one more superficial pundit talk about "the working class" as if it is only white guys who drive F-350s.

Read the history of the conservative movement's long march to power after Goldwater got crushed in 1964; and the Tea Party's ascendance to power.  If you are on your way to a state or national capital to protest in the streets, don't leave town without dropping by a politician's office.

My white husband never believes it's about race; it's always about race in these United States of America.

I can't go on.  We go on.

Dance with the Revolution What Brung Ya

This will be (mercifully) brief, because I have lots to do before leaving town on Monday.  A few thoughts:

1.  Trump's election was a revolution.  A set of ever-wobbling cultural and political norms were tossed off the balcony.  The enforced piety and moral probity required of high office-seekers in the USA has been diminished.  It may be forever possible now to have let your freak flag fly and still become President.

2.  Go ahead and grieve, but refrain from engaging in a flurry of activity as if the world will end on January 17, 2017.  Take more time to do the things you love doing, not the things you should do.

3.  Understand that while the person occupying the office (and the attendant departments under their control) can do great harm, the office changes the person.  In ways few of us understand or will imagine.

4.  And lastly, to quote my older brother, "Keep your head down and your pad low."

Ciao, bella.

Remember to Forget

That phrase came to me a few days ago; what it means I'm not sure other than part of the art of living, and living with another specifically is elective forgetting.  Not all enemies and antagonists must last forever.  In other words, a husband is a man you haven't shivved.  Yet.  (It's a joke, calm down, calm down.  If you don't believe me, call him.  He's sitting by the phone waiting to hear from The One who will make America Great Again.)

I feel I owe Someone Something this morning because GodKnows™ this post won't write itself.  And in that way it resembles almost anything else in my life except the certainly of mortal decay.  Anyway, it is spring and the itch I've felt for weeks to throw my crutches away and walk unaided into the light will now be indulged.  I, like much of the natural world, am molting.  Had to drop the latest math class because I was never going to get more than a C- and an aneurysm in the process.  And now don't yet know how to finish what I started.

Cuthbert, in his manly wisdom, being kind says to me, "Well, now you can focus on something you do well."  Translation:  I.  Told.  You.  So.  (Believe when I tell you that remarks like the above are what pass for compassion in our marriage.)  He's got a point -- a wiser woman than I would have pursued the social sciences, or the arts.  And as excited as I am by them, the many subjects that fall under those classifications are not ones I want to teach.  At least not occupationally.  I wants to teach Math (or Maths as our friends across the pond say).  And I'm not entirely convinced that it is impossible for a woman who hasn't always eaten her spinach (and is now paying for it).

And there is the matter of the job.  I work for a world class university and, at least in the stratum I occupy, because of that I have extraordinary employee benefits.  When you've reached the stage of life where you actually study those Social Security statements that come in the mail, benefits such as retirement savings and health insurance matter.  Perhaps too much but they do.  I've had a glimpse of the ardors of old age, the burden it is on your children, and frankly, I wouldn't blame Daughter No. 1 if she puts a pillow over my head and Daughter No. 2 serves as lookout.  (As long as they don't talk while they're doing it.  I hate to miss a good conversation and my hearing's shit anyway.)  The job itself and the goodies it provides will be hard to abandon.  The running joke in my house is that Cuthbert so loves the University's health facilities that he'll be pushing my wheelchair to the office when I'm 99 years old just so we'll still be covered. And right now, that's as good a life plan as any.

For now.

Grandma's in the House!!!

Were I really really rich I would hire a tow truck to follow me everywhere.  And during those times when I've been sitting too long, the driver would insert the meat hook in my belt loop and hoist my ass into a standing position.  I, who have a surfeit of dignity and vanity, would dust myself off and get on with the business of being an ancient college student.  Aah, yes, it's Fall, I'm in school and also on one of my perennial self-improvement missions.

You know how these things start.  You go shopping and find yourself in a dressing room about to be reflected by half a hexagon of mirrors and out of your mouth comes the immortal words:  Is that MY behind?!?!?!?@**@#&#*@!!?!

The only thing to do, to paraphrase Shakespeare, is to get thee to a gym.  So, I have.  When these fits of fitness come over me I'm lucky enough to have a class schedule to have time to work out when most of the student body doesn't want to or can't -- mid-morning.  Not so this semester.  Twice a week around 5 o'clock I share the fitness center with half the football team, and 20 year old girls bench pressing 100 lbs.  My solution is to take my glasses off, put my blinders on and think of England as I limp from machine to machine setting the pins at no more than 30 lbs. of weight to resist.

As least the boys are nice to me, although a complicated mixture of pity and snot-shooting scorn has to be gotten under control before they ask:  You usin' that?  And I look at them as if to say, You think I come in here to pick up guyz?  Can't you see the pain I'm in?  But, instead I simply say,  Yeah.  But, this'll be over real soon.  And the deal is done.

As you can imagine during every step I walk to get to the fitness center I'm running a thousand excuses not to go.  (Can you tell I'm taking a programming class?)  But, I must, because if there's anything I'm sure of it is that life goes on until it doesn't.

Happy Fall, y'all.

I've Been Across the River

It has been almost 6 weeks since I've been here.  Even for me that's a surprising absence.  This time I can't blame it on mathematics -- I'm in school, yes, but taking an educational foundations course, not a come-to-Jesus math course.  So, that's not it.  But what is, is that I am now working for somebody else (part-time) and I haven't figured out the line between impolitic and sometimes profane discourse (this blog) and my job responsibilities.  This will be the first of many attempts in real time to do so.

As I said before, I turned 60 this year.  It's been glorious and I may well celebrate it for the entire 365 days I'll be this age.  Husband, son-in-law and daughter conspired to throw a party in Brooklyn that was Absolutely Fabulous™ what with friends long- and short-term, great food, dancing, my own personal 60 crown with feathers and glittery pipecleaners, and a kick-ass pair of false eyelashes which I'm conspiring to wear again.

I returned to Planet New Haven to resume a life of studying American education, and enjoying a wonderful job that is both a continuation and an extension of some of the public health work I've done here as a citizen-activist.  Both in school and at work I am overwhelmed (in the best sense) by what I'm learning.  I feel myself to be fortunate indeed.

Of course, in times like these, I barely write.  So, once again I'me struggling with the paradox of being stimulated by so much that is new and being energy- and time-delimited from trying to turn it into fiction.  At best, and as far as I'm concerned it's a nourishing best, I will write some for my course, "The Child in the American Culture".  The title seems innocuous, and godknows, American education courses get dinged all the time for being content-lite, but I'm getting a lot out of this one.  The professor is a kooky pro and students, as they will, mistake her kookiness for a tolerance of mediocrity.  But she's sly:  she'll let a student get as much or as little out of the class as they want.  She asked us after a few classes how we wanted to conduct the remainder of the course.  Currently, we have a dense chapter a week to read and then a student has to present on the assigned chapter; and we've been given a few independent research assignments.  She wanted to know what else we wanted to do, and as she polled I kept hearing:  I find the textbook (American Education by Joel Spring) hard to understand so I'd like to discuss it in class ...

Now.  I gotta tell you that 1) even state school tuition's expensive and I am always conscious of paying for this 3 hours, once per week course that starts at 7:30 in the evening and  2) the textbook is hard to get through because in a typical chapter the author can cover decades of  Supreme Court decisions that altered American education, educational theory and contemporary movements in education, and an analysis of the impact of No Child Left Behind on say, bilingual education.  In all fairness to the other students, a majority of whom are in their early to mid-20's, the book's not easy and the hour is late.  But, goddamn.  The people in this room are, for better or worse, going to shape generations of American minds, and if there's one thing I know about learning it is if you can't demonstrate that you've learned something, you can't teach it.

So, when she rolled around to me, I was bloody, but I was quick.  I simply said that I was about 25 - 30 years older than most of the other students in this class and frankly, I don't know how much value I'll get out of classroom discussion (although I did say that I could be surprised), and that some of what Spring writes about I've lived, that many of the Court's decisions I read as contemporaneous accounts, I've raised kids, I'm a writer and I'm used to writing and so, in addition to in-class discussion, I vote for having to do a research paper.  Or, as I put it to friends:  Oh hell no I'm not paying to show up for 3 hours at night to hear some 20 year old talk about their feelings (largely because they're so incurious and ahistorical that although they are probably going to teach in public school they've never heard about Brown v. Topeka Board of Education, or Dred Scott, or how Loudon County Virginia closed it's public schools for years as opposed to desegregate, or the genesis of charter schools and magnet schools in Connecticut).

And so the course is a hybrid of class discussion as before, and a research paper where the first draft is to be shared with a partner to critique (a suggestion of yours truly) before the final version is written.  People, a little rigor here, please?

One friend said to me that the others will appreciate what I did later.  Don't know; don't care.  This is the minimum I demand of myself.

Tomorrow I leave for New Orleans (pronounced Nawlins) for a national meeting.  I haven't been there in 35 years since I graduated from college.  Loathed the place back then -- much of what I learned about the enduring trauma of racial oppression I learned in Louisiana -- and will probably see very little of it this time what with being consumed by presentations and meetings.  Didn't gloat when Katrina happened, it made a profoundly unjust culture exponentially worse, but am not sentimental about the place or its cultural roots or its food.  But, as in the case of my 20 something classmates, I may be surprised.  One can hope.

So, until the next intermittent dispatch, au revoir.

A Letter to My Faithful Readers

... and to the porn sites which account for 90% of my traffic.  It has been 3 months and change since I last posted.  I stopped blogging for practical reasons:  my life was organized around the care of a dying friend.  I had no desire to write about "it" then, and I am reluctant to write about it now.  The irony is that many of us (in my generation) sculpted ourselves into fiction writers by confessing, mining the travails of our own lives and convincing ourselves that it represented the anxieties of the age.  Had I that need still there would be plenty of entries here, but I don't so there aren't.

It's spring.  Like many in the northeast I had my doubts that it would ever arrive.  I've been awarded for my patience with a front yard that is filling out with strawberries, echinacea, hydrangeas, day lilies, ferns, daisies, oxalis, clover, mint, sage and more than a few spectacular flowering weeds.  During the winter I would sit in my dining room willing the plants into existence, wondering if last year's volunteer squash would take over by late summer, imagining what color the hydrangea blossoms would be.  Now I happily bury the stools of the feral cats that use our yard as their litter box, pull and slice the roots off of weeds so that they can be composted.  And think.

I've been dreaming lately.  A few nights ago I had one where I was practically stalking the Math department's advisor to figure out what my next class should be.  (You don't have to go to far back into last fall's entries the discern the magnitude of my bitchin' and moanin' about how hard my coursework is.)  Nobody in my family believes that I will or should return to school.  (I didn't enroll the spring semester.)  That, too, is an old story.  But, I have spent a lot of time with people who have been delimited by physical illness, mental illness, addiction, and poverty.  One of the enduring effects of any of those conditions is the the lowering of expectations.  Of being defined by what one can't do as opposed to what one can.  And once you've bought that definition of yourself, you've taken over the maintenance of your oppression.  Then it's game, set, match for the oppressor.  Math is my instrument; public school students and adult learners are my audience.  To have the math to work with them I have to do more coursework.  It's as simple as that.

And last night I dreamed that I was in prison, but mysteriously released on furlough.  I spent it at a bar with a friend talking and drinking coffee, surrounded by totebags of paperwork and clothing.  I knew that I had to return to prison.  My friend, who had been imprisoned but was now paroled left to catch the subway.  I packed my bags, and then at the last minute decided I wasn't going back.  Fuck it, I said to myself, I'm an old lady.  Whadda they going to do to me?

Which is the attitude I've been taking now that I'm bike riding again, occasionally without a helmet after a (clears throat) 40 year interregnum.  Cuthbert and even strangers counsel me to do otherwise.  Of course they're right.  I know all too well what can happen and godknows this city has more than its share of reckless and unlicensed drivers.  But, oh freedom, and all of that.  It feels so good to fly down the street and split the air.

Perhaps these latest dreams about about the poles of Freedom and Obligation.  And the dance between the two as I enter my 60th year.  Don't know; may never know.  The sun's up; weeds await me.
 

It's Hard to be Poor, Part I

Lately there have been a few news stories about Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty now that it have reached its 50th milestone.  Until the moment I decided to write that sentence, it had never dawned on me that its advent coincides with Black History Month.  The convergence may be wholly accidental but it underscores something I've observed for a long time, that poverty and African-American-ness are used interchangeably as synonyms.

But, instead of exploring that today -- don't have the chops for a long, spit-hurling screed -- I'll tell two stories.  One involves me; the other, a friend:

I was in New York a few days ago.  As is true of my recent visits they are brief, specific and about business.  The day wasn't bitter cold but cold enough, so I was bundled up with my ersatz hunter's cap, mile-long scarf, big-collared winter jacket, and old Timberlands.  Perfect for the weather and normal for me.  As far as I was concerned, I didn't look any different that day than usual.  I should also mention that if it's not overcast I wear shades outdoors year-round; you can't see me seeing you.  That day, for whatever reason(s), people broke through my barriers -- the shades, the bundling -- and talked to me.  I was walking through the long station that is Courthouse Square.  Years ago you'd leave Grand Central on the 7 heading east, cross the East River, get a paper transfer, walk down a rickety steel and wood staircase, turn a corner and then present your transfer at the turnstiles for the G train.  It was a pain in the ass to execute and if you didn't do it often, you'd wind up wandering up and down the street looking for the subway entrance.  Some time (probably after I left the city) it all got connected and now you can transfer, under protection of a glass pavilion, between the 7 and the G which connect Manhattan, Queens and North Brooklyn.

I was heading back to Grand Central, glad that the meeting had gone well and was brief.  While marvelling (once again) about the ease of transfer, I was thinking that I could catch one of many trains before rush hour, so wasn't in any particular hurry.  Perhaps I was in a good mood, perhaps pleased with myself.  Either way I was free and heading home.  Next thing I know a skinny kid in a hoodie covered by a light jacket asks me if I can get him something to eat.

And I say, as I have in the past, would you like me to buy you a meal?  And he nods yes and I crook my head to indicate that I'll follow him and up the escalator, outside the station, around the corner, and across the street (underneath the BQE) we go.  Not a word.  We stop at the corner.  There's a bodega in front of us and a diner to our right.  He enters the bodega and goes through the store, returning to the counter with a can of iced tea.  I thought you wanted something to eat?  I didn't see where.  I'm struck by his candor and lack of greed.  This kid -- maybe 14 -- is hungry.  Hungry.  Grey from malnutrition and cold.  You don't hang out in a heatless pavilion in February begging for food if you don't have to.  We go outside.  I point to the diner.  There?  I point.  He's ambivalent.  He either can't see it because he needs glasses, or he doesn't want to go there because he has never in his life sat down and ordered from a menu, or he can't read.  Or all three.

The intersection before us gathers like Five Points.  We cross two streets to another bodega.  Almost every corner store worth its salt has a deli counter.  Why the first one we went into didn't is a mystery.  But this one does and he orders a Philly cheese steak.  I stand aside as he luxuriates in the power of having and exercising choice.  The clerk bags the sandwich and offers it to me because I'm the one with the wallet open.  I turn to the boy; for a moment the clerk is confused, but I wait for him to figure it out.  The boy steps up and the clerk gives him his food.  The boy thanks me and because of necessity and because when you're poor you learn to abdicate your dignity quickly and often he asks, in front of everyone, the important ask, the one for train fare to get home.  Oh.  Sure.  I say, handing him a few bills.  Then I leave.

If I'd Wanted Heat I Would-A Moved to Myrtle Beach

It is August the 5th and I'm sitting here in my sweatshirt.  Now, this is the kind of summer I'm talkin' about!  I can wear shoes without fainting, and my head has ceased to be one big sinus cavity and now I can think about something else besides pining for last winter's snow apocalypse.  I'll be honest and repetitive -- I detest hot weather.  A few weeks ago I was working out stunned by the amount of sweat pouring down my face.  I knew it wasn't because I'd loaded up more weights; it was simply the ambient atmosphere.  Were I living 150 years ago in Myrtle Beach™ instead of strength-training scientifically I'd probably be horseshoed over picking cotton.  Or not, because by my age I'd be dead dead dead.  I don't have the imagination (or the stomach) to think what life was like then.  I only have the gratitude for living now in an era where my biggest problem is a slow DSL connection on rainy days.

My father was one of nine siblings.  We went down to celebrate the 80th birthday of the last remaining child of Bessie and George.  Otherwise funerals were our only family reunions.  My parents were from Georgetown, SC (as is probably 1/5 of the African-American population in this town), and I lived there with my beloved maternal grandmother, Mamie, for a minute between bouts of staggering depression.  My memories are punctuated by gaps of four years, the intervals between visits.  That's not enough time to know a place, but it is enough to have disorganized and unsorted images that may or may not make sense.  When I moved there at 19 the experience of Georgetown was different.  I was different -- a difficult, tactiturn college dropout from up north.  A child only a grandmother could love; to the others I was either a curiosity, an object of pity or incontrovertible evidence of the gods' rebuke of my parent's ambitions.

Back then, the early 1970's, the place was real.  The social order of centuries was just barely giving way.  My grandmother and her contemporaries were still alive radiating a quiet pride in what they'd accomplished under apartheid -- beautiful well-kept homes, good livings, children who went to college.  The small downtown was still a real downtown, not the theme park for bored golfers, foodies and boaters it has since become.  Georgetown and its environs stank when the paper mill operated.  It was awful -- an almost hostile amalgamation of farts, cornered skunk and sulphur.  There was a synagogue 2 blocks down the street from home.  (I had walked by that building dozens of times, but only realized what it was the last time I was there for my mother's funeral.  After I'd read some about the history of Jews in the American South only then could I see evidence of their presence.)  And undisguised poverty.

And now, with most of the older generation dead and the strip malling, well, there's very little there there for me.  I don't mind so much; my attachments were the people, not the homes.  But still, it's become harder to distinguish Georgetown from suburban Connecticut.  Dunkin Donuts.  Walmart.  AutoZone.  Starbucks.  Sprint.  And Myrtle Beach?  The arable land, the wealth of the Confederacy turned into golf courses and town houses and Columbia, MD-like new communities sprung whole from the real estate developer's mind.

So I visited my Aunt Johanna, she the last of the Pawley's Island Browns.  And we took Lilli to the Holy Cross Faith Memorial Episcopal Church graveyard where my mother and her kin are buried (and where my mother would not recognize the church building or the congregation that now worships there).  And frolicked in the ocean for a day and shared the beach with the new south.

As My Grandmother Used to Say ...

... well, suh! (aka will wonders never cease) when there was a wholly unanticipated turn of events that made life work out for the better.  And before le deluge d'hiver of the past few days, were Grandma Mamie alive she would have exclaimed twice -- once when the Pope of New Haven announced his resignation and the other when the Pope of the Rest of Youse announced his.

Well, I'm back.  No novel stories to tell about the blizzard.  We were relatively unscathed -- we have a driveway; we had food, heat, DVDs, fiction and copies of the New York Times dating back to 1967, electrical power and a block full of motorheads who like nothing better than using their snowblowers for hours on end.  So, what the hell.  If ever there was a time to sit back and enjoy it, that was the time.  And if you don't count the prospect of having to eat some long forgotten glass noodles crammed in the back of the cabinet (in case of culinary emergency) because there was no getting to a market as a tragedy, it was practically a no foul, no harm event .  Husband No. 1 and I both, ehem, work from home, so it wasn't like the enforced togetherness led to homicidal thoughts, and good weather and bad we always argue about who has to take out the garbage, recycling and compost so why let 3 feet of snow change that dynamic, n'est-ce pas? 
 
I leave you with this:  while it is beginnings that give our lives joy, it is endings which give our life meaning.