I fell asleep to the sound of two hoot owls last night—one close by, the other farther away. Were they establishing their territories or embracing supremacy over our sleeping suburb?
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| Wikipedia jok2000 |
Twenty-five degrees on the minus side today. Minus thirty overnight. We have January weather in January. Feels right. When I delivered mail, I loved walking in the cold with the snow like concrete under my cleats and the Manitoba sun brilliant between the sundogs. I seriously liked it better than a muggy plus-thirty day in July. The trick was to keep moving and to stoke that furnace. That’s when my love affair with porridge began and when my relationship with coffee . . . changed. Too many layers to take off and on for a quick trip to the washroom. Oh, and the layers, yes. They are key to embracing any kind of weather. Sort of like life. Layers are a veil of protection, like masks—metaphorical and medical.
My mom never forgave me for earning a living delivering mail . . . said she never survived Siberia so that her daughter could freeze here in Canada. So I keep writing about her hard life, hoping somehow to make it up to her . . . so she can still sort of be proud of me. The child in me yearns for her approval.
Tiberius, the cat, poked his head out into the cold this morning and growled at the blast of cold like it was some sort of invisible monster. Last week of January, I tell him. Enjoy it before it’s gone! Instead he hissed at me like it was all my fault and pattered back to the couch, snuggling into oblivion.
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