Days Longer and Shorter

As we move out of winter, the days are starting to get longer. It has been a hard winter, but I can't say I am ready for spring just yet.

The extra sunshine is lovely, but it also means that Little Guy is starting to wake up earlier. He has always been one of those children that wakes at daybreak. We have blackout shades in his room and yet still it seems like his body knows when the sun is starting to come up. Today he woke at 5:45 and it was still just dark enough that I could send him back to bed for a few more minutes, but that will end soon too.

Every writer has an ideal time of day to write. I wish I was one of those evening people or the ones up until all hours, but I'm not. My best work happens before noon, but the mid morning hours are usually busy with the family, so to capture it, I have to get up before everyone else.

As spring approaches, the early waking means that there will be less of my best morning creativity. The days will get longer until finally it is summer when both kids are home and it seems I never get any decent work done. Though the turning point for daylight happens in late June, I never notice it until July, and even then, it will take much longer for me to make the shift. Hot, stagnant, marked by dull lack of progress, dog days indeed. By August I will barely be writing.

Now I am looking back on the time I've lost, the dark January mornings that I didn't get up. One day my children will be old enough to get out of bed on their own. Or they'll finally hit the phase where I am dragging them out of bed. Until then, I'll be looking forward to fall, and even now as the snow is still melting, I find myself thoroughly excited about next winter.

Desert

My writing class assignment this week is to write a transformation story, so I am writing a short story called Desert about a woman turning into sand. She feels isolated and alone and in the end is very happy to become sand. Happy stuff.

I've had the desert on my mind a great deal lately. As I peek (or should I say torture myself) at the the weather reports from Phoenix, warm and sunny for days on end, I am so amazed at the contrast in my life between this year and last. For the most part, I am okay with the winter weather, but wow, what a winter this is turning out to be.

Boston so buried in snow that it is hard to get around. The streets are narrow, the parking lots crowded with plowed snow. We've been chipping away at the sheets of ice constantly forming over the steps outside of our front door. On one side of our front yard, the snow bank collapsed into the sidewalk so the pile is more than five feet tall, and will now be that way until late March.

It could be isolating - desert like - to be stranded in all of this, but my friends here are a hearty bunch of gals. They throw on snow boots and bring over wine late at night. They drive across town, even in the "wintery mix" (two words I have come to dislike more than the term nor'easter), to have coffee. They know when I am alone and make sure that I am not.

So it turns out that the woman turning to sand is not me. And what I am writing is fiction.

Think warm thoughts

It is already snowing buckets again. Six to eight inches today and another twelve expected tomorrow. Yes, Hubs is out of town, but then you already knew that right?

Don't know if this is the power of positive thinking or not, but today after a harrowing trip to Trader Joes for tater tots and brownie mix (two essentials for being snowed in with the kiddos), Little Guy came in and immediately stripped off his pants in favor of shark swim trunks.

I'm feelin' it.

Happy Holidays?

This week the temperature has been in the mid-fifties during the day and in the high forties at night, just like Thanksgiving in Georgia or Christmas in Arizona. I have a strange urge to pop a turkey in the oven.

This will be our first winter in Boston and we've been trying to be proper New Englanders about the weather. That means no complaining (early on anyway, I hear in March all bets are off), and no turning on the heat this early. Or so we thought. After a quick poll of the neighborhood, turns out everyone turned on the heat two days ago. Why didn't we get the memo?

We have radiators and it only took a few minutes to take the chill out of the air. I love radiator heat. Love it so much I could hug it. Except I can't hug it, of course, because ouch. But seriously, radiant heat is toasty. I am sure there are some practical reasons why everyone has gotten rid of it. Like those horrible glare-ish light bulbs we all have to switch to by 2014 (and I might be hoarding the old bulbs, but that's another post), forced air heat is probably more efficient somehow, but the old fashioned way just feels nicer. And as a bonus, the pipes heat up the basement.

I took a peek at the forecast and it looks like it isn't going to warm up again. Until March. Or April. Maybe I'll pretend it's one long ongoing holiday season.

Cookie anyone?