Strange Season

WHEN I WAS six or seven, I dug a deep hole into the snowdrift in my grandma’s front yard. Bundled up in a too-small navy snowsuit that pinched my crotch, I was out there alone, and that’s the way I liked it. I could make up stories. I could say swear words. Shit, shit, shit, I chanted as I dug, daring one of the adults inside to hear me. I dug and dug with small mittened hands. I dug from the top down, two-handed, flinging snow behind me like a dog in sand. I dug because I was weird and my sisters hated me and the sun was out. I dug because I had nothing else to do on a Sunday in February but disappear into a silent, white hole. I dug because I loved the cold and the way I could survive in it already. So skinny my doctor thought I was anemic, yet so fierce I could withstand winter’s harsh slap across my face for hours and hours. On ice skates. On skis. On anything. I felt at home in the cold and snow, learning early on to love the way winter cleaned and covered and silenced the world, to love its icy grip.

In the past two weeks, my sons’ school has been canceled five times. It has been very cold. There has been a lot of snow. My chickens’ eggs crack and freeze the moment they hit the ground. Ice dams threaten our roof. It’s another February in Minnesota, and much of the Midwest is colder than the northern Arctic, some cities reaching temperatures of fifty below. Seventeen people have died. The city has declared a snow emergency, and no one can park in the streets. After each school closing announcement, my two boys bounce around the house screaming in ecstasy like they won a box of fucking puppies and I can’t get any work done. Laundry piles up. I have to wear the small underwear that cuts into me, leaving an angry red line across my stomach.

A humpback whale is discovered in the Amazon rainforest, dead.

I sit at my computer editing dialogue an hour before dress rehearsal, and I hear my older son say to his brother, . He’s mad because I won’t play cribbage with him. I’m theater. A small theater in a small suburb of Minneapolis that we founded together twelve years ago. A passion project that we began on a whim after leaving New York with our new baby. At first it was exciting. Now it pays the bills. I look out my kitchen window where snow falls and falls, blanketing my street flake by white flake, burying cars and trees and fire hydrants, forcing small birds to huddle inside pine trees. Piles and piles of heavy wonderland for all of us to move through.