Fri 2 // Cozy: Some of us live on the Tundra, while others live where the tumbleweeds roll. Either way, we still have to nest when December rolls around. What keeps you cozy through the wintertime?
I am a bit behind because my gentle siamese boy, Bartleby, had to have all of his teeth taken out and while doing that his jaw separated and had to be wired together. You can’t tell really tell about the wire, but he’s in a lot of pain, and on meds that make him really high. In between eating watered down baby food, he thinks he can fly, so I have to be with him at all times this next week. It’s going to take a few months for him to be healed, but the infection has been taken out of his poor  mouth. This is the 4th and final time he’ll ever get his teeth done, because my poor boy doesn’t have any left.
Right now he’s sitting quietly at the foot of the bed. Mr. Man and Em are in the kitchen cleaning up the damage I caused while getting her potluck dish ready for her theater groups “working party.”
Well then, to the meat of it. We just left the land of humidity, floods, ice storms and 4-foot snowdrifts (Fayetteville, AR) for the damp but verdant
Pacific NorthWest. In Fayetteville, in the winter I would bake lots of things (except this last year because we even had frequent showings in the winter and unless you can clean up what you are cooking or baking with sometimes 15-minute warnings, there was no cooking or baking. Also, I’m better at cooking winter food. I haven’t quite figured out summer food. You’d think after all that time in Arkansas  (born and raised there, moved to San Francisco, the Chicago, then back again)I’d just know, but nope. I know about grilling, potato salad, and lots of iced tea.
I love making Thanksgiving food and Christmas food. I like basking in the warm glow of carbohydrates and falling asleep in a book. Mostly in the winter there it was hibernation. You don’t see as many folk because the roads are slick and it gets dark early. After the epic New Years parties of our 20s and early 30s, we don’t really do that New Year’s anymore, though we did go to First Night/Last Night  most of the time. And the Lights of the Ozarks  where you can give yourself diabetes with deep fried oreos or snickers bars (which Mr. Man and Em tried and gave up halfway through. I knew better). Truth to tell, the last 4? 5? years there we were becoming disenchanted with my hometown, so more often than not, it was reading, movies, homework and knock you out food.
What will we do here? Well, I’m giving the community involvement another try. It didn’t work so well for me in Fayetteville, partly me partly the culture that many years gone had made strange to me. So far there have been  clothing drives, food drives. Trying to get in a bit as a theater mom but haven’t quite yet. I’ve taken a class and will do more I think. And…I don’t know. More baking is involved though. It’s different having a teenager with her own stuff to do. Building snowmen is something she’d be more likely to do with her friends now (does it snow here?). We are all still close and eat together nearly every night–but she’s becoming more and more independent.
How do we keep cosy in the winter in our new town and our new to us home? I don’t really know, but I’m about to find out! There is SO much. to do here! And it is stuff I like .
I feel like this was a ‘meh’ post, but I am determined to see Reverb 16 through.
