Waiting and remembering

View of frozen river from our patio door.


It looks like we are living on arctic tundra today. Minus 28 Celsius with the wind.

Ah yes. Post-christmas melancholy. I always feel the let down. December is such a warm time of year, even with all the annoying xmas commercials and how many times can you hear Santa Claus is Coming to Town before you want to stab yourself in the ears, but...it's such a nice build-up to a fun holiday. And then. January. Winter. Lights come down, smiles on people's faces turn upside down. Decorations get packed up and ho ho ho turns to ho hum blech.

Wait a sec though monsterteeth, don't you have something coming up to make January a little more interesting? Well, yes I do actually. I haven't forgotten, believe me. I am officially in a position to give birth at any time now. Who knows when. I feel it becoming more imminent though. It's like waiting for a kettle to boil. Waiting for a big, fat, moody kettle to boil. And while you're waiting, the kettle makes you feel like you have to pee and poop a lot and get on all fours because the kettle is making your back hurt and somehow, the kettle also makes you want to become hysterical like a maniac out of the blue and the tiniest emotion feels a million times more significant as you wait for the kettle to decide when it's going to freakin' boil.

So who's the kettle? Is the baby the kettle or are you the kettle, you ask? Well, right now, we're all sort of in it together. There is a full moon on dec 31st. Perhaps that will be the boiling point. All this talk of boiling is making we want a cup of tea. Oh, and to give birth. Have I mentioned I feel ready?

T has put on a cd of pipe organ music that makes me feel like I should be rubbing lemon oil in church pews or polishing the stations of the cross. I'm trying to decide when to strip the tree of it's jewelry and cast it from our home. That's the brutal part of having a real tree. I have half a mind to just keep it up all winter. That's how I think of it anyway, a tree to celebrate winter. When I cast my eye out on the "arctic" landscape and then balance it with a glance at the decorated tree, it reminds me of the beauty of winter. Winter is beautiful, it's just that it triggers such a strong animal instinct of relenting and hibernating. Being sort of couch bound, doesn't help, I would imagine, to fight the hibernation instinct. I would really dig being able to head out for some skating or a winter walk...I'm not complaining though, not really. It's pretty cozy and relaxed in here and my lack of mobility is for a good cause.

I have been thinking of California a lot though. For some reason, those 4 months stand out in my memory more vividly than anything else. Sometimes, a flood of those memories will come in waves for a few days. The same goes for T. We have intricate sight, sound and especially smell memories of so much from that time: The decaying orange smell from the orange farm next to our building, the smell of the cherry blossom trees in Japantown and the cocktail of sake and sparkling fruit juice we used to get at our favourite sushi place Kazoo, the electronic ding of the light rail, the smell of the dishwasher in our apartment when it was done running, the chlorine of the outdoor hot tub, the disinfectant in the elevators, the rental car's new car smell, the cold morning air being warmed by the mid morning sun smell while running on the nature trail...I could go on and on and on. What lucky people we were to live that experience. To be honest, I still feel pretty lucky to be living my current life also. A gal doesn't need to be in California to gather a cache of good memories. Still, it was a particularly strong impacting experience.

I don't think my blog from that time did the best job of reflecting it. I focused too much on the creative struggle I was having. That's often the case with me though. I seem to experience the past more vividly than the present. I could probably write a better blog about it now.

Well, I've tried to remedy that with the past 9 months of this experience. We'll see what it all seems like when I look back on it in a few months from now. It's hard to actually believe I will really have a son by then; A real live human being! Right now it's seems purely speculative. Winter will pass though, spring will come, the ground will thaw and plants will grow and life goes on, even as we speak.