And Suddenly It Was December

The new heat pump is working splendidly, which is a very good thing, given the teeth-chattering temperatures we’ve had this week. I’m grateful it wasn’t this cold and windy while the fellows were here installing everything. I think I neglected to mention that the gentleman who owns the HVAC company brought his father along for the second half of the festivities. He inherited the business from his dad. While they worked, I chatted with the father, an amiable man with a quick smile and penetrating blue eyes. Turns out that he actually installed the original furnace in our basement. He described doing the work all those years ago, and spoke of the changes he had seen in his line of work over the years, of his eventual retirement and passing the torch to his firstborn.  I enjoyed the familial connection to our old farmhouse and to the equipment that keeps it comfortable.

***

This past Saturday, we did a bit of shopping. And for the first time since all the mandates started dropping down on us, I didn’t put a mask on. Up until now, I have worn the mask not out of a belief in the horrifyingly deadly disease, but rather out of a desire to avoid having to choke the living dogcrap out of some do-gooder who might get up in my uncovered face.  Inspired by William James Tychonievich, I decided to “make the bastards ask [me] every single time” to don a mask instead of just meekly putting one on before entering a public place. I had one with me, but it remained in my pocket. I was aware of the Glare o’ the Karens, but I just stared back with a slight smile on my face. No one said a word. Went into three separate stores, and no one asked me to wear a mask. It was a good feeling. A milestone of sorts.

***

Jinx passed his own milestone this week. We had our first snow Monday night, and the temperatures on Tuesday never got above freezing….all this with 30 mph winds. So we decided while we were away from home Tuesday to let Jinx stay in the house. I blocked off certain rooms so that he could have the run of the office and the kitchen — both of which have hard surface floors and no rugs — and placed his bed in the office, along with a peanut butter-filled Kong to keep him occupied.

I was more than a little narvish throughout the day, imaging what scenes of destruction might be awaiting us when we arrived home. All that worry was energy wasted, because when we returned to the house, nothing was out of place. No bladders had been voided, no window treatments had been chewed into tatters, no chair legs had been gnawed down. All we found was a sleepy spotted lad who was wiggling all over with delight at the reunion. I believe he was a little puzzled at why he got a piece of cheese and why I was exclaiming over him in a mezzo-soprano voice. I suspect he may have been a bit embarrassed.

Afterwards, he got to chouse a couple of cows in a nearby field. The romp was somewhat abbreviated by the larger cows decision to turn and offer battle to her tormenter. Jinx looked over at me and pretended that I had ordered him to come to me. He turned tail and beat feet to me, then barked back at the bovines to ensure that they were properly warned.

***

I attempted to comfort a weeping man today, speaking quietly to him as tears cut down his wrinkled cheek and disappeared into his cotton-white beard. His wife had died last week in a nursing home, the day after their sixtieth anniversary. The couple had not seen each other or touched each other since the Covid lockdown started. He was never able to stroke his wife’s hair or hold her hand again, and she never again heard his voice except on the phone. The despair in his eyes as he asked me how God could allow something so wrong to come to pass…it was a searing expression, one from which I winced, because I had no answers for him, and precious little comfort.

***

Sunday afternoon, I stood on the back deck before the grill, turning bratwursts over the flames and peering through the smoke-veil at the woods behind the house. I had the feeling — more and more frequent these days — of standing outside myself and watching me as I move through my days. And not just a feeling of watching myself, but a strong, high sense of anticipation, a humming intuition that something is coming.

I can’t recall if I ever mentioned it here on this blog, but my family could attest that in the months prior to the Covidgeddon, I said repeatedly that I felt as if something were about to occur…some significant event. And when I watched the Wuhan craziness erupt, trailed by cities being burned by criminal vermin while police stood aside and politicians openly egged them on, followed by the most nakedly crooked election outside of a banana republic take place right in from of my eyes, I knew that I had been right back in January and February.

And now, cold and implacable, there sits in my middle parts another strong feeling of something coming. But this time, the word that sifts into my mind while I linger between wakefulness and sleep is cataclysm. I sincerely hope I’m wrong, but I feel that some great and terrible thing is about to happen, some sort of wiping of the slate, some manner of disaster that will make the past nine months look like recess at a kindergarten. The land’s cup of iniquity is very full, and I do not think the machinations of men can drain it preemptively.

***

Tonight, when Jinx and I went for our walk, I bundled up with extra layers and a watch cap, grateful that the wind had died down. At the top of a rise, I stopped and listened. I could hear Jinx’s paws crunching frost and snow in the grass, and I could hear my own breath, which was the only man-made sound in the living area. In the west, someone had taken a salmon-colored crayon and ran it across the far dark ridges. My young dog stood next to me, taking my gloved fingers lightly in his teeth and looking up at me as if to beckon me back to the rooms of warmth and love and good smells and soft resting places. We walked back to the house together, and the moon flooded the frozen ground with its cold light, patient as a silver coin in the pocket of a gambler, content with its place in the contrasting inky heavens that hold it. Thanksgiving is past on the calendar, but it it ever within me. Even when I feel that I am watching myself, that warm engine of gratitude runs on inside me, reminding me of what I have, and of what I could lose, and of what I have already lost.

It is an unquiet world, and it is not yet finished with me. I cannot answer the deep questions of a grieving widower, and I cannot tell the future by the shuffling of my deck of interior Tarot cards. But I can be aware, and I can be grateful. Tonight I am both. And outside, the small things sleep their quiet sleep in the cold, cold air and in the cold, cold ground.

~ S.K. Orr