… cold, and alone.

1. “October is gone… ,” I write, and a year passes, and then three more months. We used to drive Girl to work at the horse barn at seven-thirty every Saturday morning, but now she drives herself. T and I sleep until Boy wakes us and demands breakfast.

It takes two tries for Girl to pass the driving test. She comes back to the old courthouse the first time looking shell-shocked, and the examiner (Highway Patrol Sergeant Joette Friday) tersely informs us that Girl has not mastered the controls and needs more practice. Girl resents this intensely, and denies all the way home that such a thing could be possible. The denial is more telling than the presence or lack of skills. But at her age, the mental growth is as rapid and startling as the physical growth of younger children. She eventually stops pouting and returns a couple of months later to pass the test, nailing everything except parallel parking.

There has been only one little mishap so far – side-swiping a trash barrel partially obscured by a tree at the end of the driveway. (“How was I supposed to remember that it was trash day!?”) We get adhesive and glue the unbroken glass back in the mirror on the door, which gives me a chance to deliver my “You can never be too careful” lecture. “Anything can happen in an instant. Your grandfather didn’t expect to snag the trigger of his shotgun when he was crossing that fence, and he shouldn’t have been using an old gun with a worn safety. The result was that they couldn’t hold an open-casket funeral. You can’t be expected to remember that it’s trash day, but you can look more carefully when you go around a blind corner.”

She reacts as expected – she says nothing. What could she say after being told such a thing?

She is not irresponsible, but she still has the idea that the car is unlimited freedom, even if she does not intend to travel out of the township. She starts driving to school after the holidays, and she drives to the barn after school to ride her horse and put him in the stall for the night. He is now being boarded at a barn where she has to do her own feeding and mucking. She doesn’t mind at all, because it gives her somewhere to go on her own. T also shows surprising confidence in Girl’s driving by relying on her to pick up Boy after school so he doesn’t have to spend all afternoon with the ruffians in the afternoon-care program.

Girl’s ability to drive like an adult, without thinking about it too much, is given an unexpected demonstration. On one afternoon she finds her horse out in the large pasture and is thrown onto her head when she tries to mount him for the ride up the hill to the barn. When she comes to, she finds him again, puts him in his stall, feeds and waters him, gets Boy from school, goes home, and then calls T to complain of a severe headache. She remembers nothing of what she has done after mounting the horse the first time.

The CAT scan shows no internal bleeding, and the concussion is labeled moderate. Of course, she can’t ride the horse for a couple of weeks (she readily renews her commitment to always wear her riding helmet), but she resumes driving after a few days. I don’t know if she connects the incident to my little lecture, but it does make an impression on her.

A warm fall passes into a dry winter. Boy and I go on a Scout campout on one of the few cold, wet weekends of December. He does fine, but one of my tent poles snaps and the rain causes a small river to run through the tent. Fortunately, the parents and older Scouts decide to cancel the before the second night of the trip. The older Scouts have nothing to prove, and are willing to take the free pass. The tents hang in the pole barn for the better part of a month before they are dry.

We suffer through winter colds, with T getting three rounds of coughing and congestion. Boy coughs through the holidays and on into January. I croak when I talk, and answering the phone requires two or three ring’s worth of throat clearing before the receiver is picked up. The seasonable temperatures and missing snowstorms are a ruse. The winter has gone into hiding by relocating in our sinuses. It may come out, and there will be snow and ice. It may stay embedded, and we will cough until the grass is green.

I make progress in the battle of the laundry. Early in the year I banish laundry baskets with clean clothes from the bedroom to the TV room in the basement. This eliminates the disorganized pile of laundry upstairs, but it does not reduce the overall volume. There are two short couches in the TV room, and eventually they fill up. T and the children happily dig through the pile for garments each morning (I sort my own and put them away as I take them out of the dryer), but there is no longer any place to sit and watch TV. Advanced weaponry is needed.

It comes in the form of the Laundry Master 5000, a gleaming chromed steel utility rack with five shelves and wheels. It reaches to the ceiling and nearly blocks off the end of the room, but it holds fifteen full baskets of laundry. I sort them a few weeks later so that the kids’ are on the lowest shelf, and discover that T has four thousand black socks. It’s no wonder they’ve been hard to wrangle.

T does not think highly of the Laundry Master 5000 when she encounters it, because it reminds her of the utility carts in the hospital. I guess she doesn’t think of her clothes as supplies to be stored in the same way as bedpans and catheter tubing. It would be nice if we had enough closets upstairs to keep it all out of sight, but we don’t. It’s the machine or the floor.

It works great for a few weeks. The floor stays clear, and everyone happily digs through their own baskets as the need arises. I wash the clothes, dry them, and load the rack – until I see that it’s full, with four more baskets still waiting stacked on the dryer. The assault has overwhelmed the first tower, but there’s more basement left and I’m not giving up. The Laundry Master 5000 Dash 2 will be assembled this weekend.

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2.
So don’t look at me sideways
don’t even look me straight on
don’t look at my hands in my pockets, baby
I ain’t done anything wrong.

I never said nothing – Liz Phair, “Never Said”

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3. We go on another Scout campout in January – the Klondike Derby, where the boys drag sleds around a course between stations. It turns out to be the coldest night of the winter so far, below freezing with a stiff breeze. Boy sleeps in his Carhartts, and in the morning he complains only of cold feet. I sleep in my clothes, with a blanket wrapped around the bag and heat packs tucked inside a second pair of socks. My feet are warm, but the blanket and the wool cap on my head barely keep the rest of the heat in. I wake frequently and shiver. As the tent shakes in the breeze and cold air filters in, I find myself facing a fear of the cold that is much deeper than I had realized. It would be so easy to die of exposure if the bag was opened for just a few minutes. I forget that the car is only a hundred yards away, with its heater and solid doors. I forget that I am not alone in the campground – an existentialist’s error. The Scouts are supposed to prove that they are tough enough and well-prepared enough to get through the night, and I have taken on the challengeof doing it too. I didn’t expect so much of the challenge to be in my own mind.