Angela's Ashes Comes to Old No. 9

Frank McCourt grew up the most wretched of  Limerick's wretched and for sure he and I have something in common - or we would if he hadn't gone and died on us  a few years back.This passage from Angela's Ashes says it all, now that  frozen pipes have  made us retreat to the second floor entirely: we're living in 'Italy here.'This is how it was for the McCourts back then (and with a fresh foot of snow coming in and no thaw in sight this is how it's going to be for us too (all but the part about the Pope):

"Two weeks after Christmas Malachy and I come home from school in a heavy rain and when we push in the door we find the kitchen empty. The table and chairs and trunk are gone and the fire is dead in the grate. The Pope is still there and that means we haven’t moved again. Dad would never move without the Pope. The kitchen floor is wet, little pools of water all around and the walls are twinkling with the damp."There’s a noise upstairs and when we go up we find Dad and Mam and the missing furniture. It’s nice and warm there with a fire blazing in the grate, Mam sitting in the bed and Dad reading The Irish Press and smoking cigarette by the fire. Mam tells us there was a terrible flood  that the rain came down the lane and poured in under our door. They tried to stop it with rags but they only turned sopping wet and let the rain in. People emptying their buckets made it worse and there was a sickening stink in the kitchen.  She thinks we should stay upstairs as long as there is rain. We’ll be warm through the winter months and then we can go downstairs in the springtime if there is any sign of dryness in the walls or on the floor. Dad says it’s like going away on our holiday to warm foreign place like Italy. That’s what we call the upstairs from now on. Malachy says the Pope is still on the wall downstairs and he’s going to be all cold and and couldn’t we bring him up? But Mam says No, he’s going to stay where e is because I don’t want him on the wall glaring at me in the bed, isn’t it enough that we dragged him from Brooklyn to Belfast to Dublin to Limerick?"

As I say we  don't have the long nose of the Pope in here with us - and our bed isn't quite as sad-looking as The McCourt bed below but still: things feel pretty droopy around here. Maybe we'll take up smoking too or anyway go buy a bunch of ice cream and get in our own little nest of a bed and eat it all straight from the carton like that pair in Grey Gardens.

ha ha