So Cold the Flashers Stayed Zipped

But if you try sometimes well you just might find

SO Cold!

How cold was it this week in my part of the world? So cold the flashers were describing themselves.So cold the posts of your earrings were turning your ears into something resembling two frozen apricots stuck to the side of your head. It was so cold it the fillings in your teeth stabbed you with an iron pain the second you opened your mouth. So cold the tiny hairs in your nose grew tiny icicles.I didn’t leave the house for a full 36 hours during the worst of it.I needed to buy milk. “Forget the milk,” David said. I needed to go to the Apple store and have one of those nice One-to-One sessions with my new Mac. “Forget the Apple store!” I told myself and rescheduled for next week.I needed to work out at the Y, which sits on a windy hilltop 100 yards from where I would have to park my car. “The heck with the Y for now," I also thought and went to the third floor and made myself get on that treadmill that Dave's pal Frank talked him into buying 15 years ago.Being inside did have a few good effects: I cleaned. I sorted stuff. I made and hung new curtains for the living room windows which up until now looked like a face with no eyebrows.See? This is Before: Pretty blah, right?And this is After: pop!Anyway ....We could only bear to stay downstairs until around 4pm when everything on that floor grows arctic. (It’s an old house, what can I say, with a three-story hall that carries the heat RIGHT out through the roof.)We ate supper every night on the bed and were under the covers by 7:00.It actually wasn’t a bad week, take it all around, and today they say the temperatures will moderate.Sigh. I hope so. Tell you the truth my ears are still kind of a funny color.But at least the spider webs over the windows are gone.And running on the treadmill was sort of OK but the truth is I can't wait to get back up on that window hilltop for Zumba's particular brand of torture

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