I'd had a bad week. A special education teacher gets occasional visits from the paperwork fairy--an unparalleled demon in the spirit world--and this week had been the worst of the year. On top of that, I had spent most of Saturday at a useful if inconvenient professional conference. So on Sunday when I opened my door to accomplish yet some more errands and saw the world transformed by a thin glaze of perfectly skatable ice, I was initially a little irritated. I attempted to shuffle down my alley to the bus stop, only to watch the bus whiz by as if nothing was wrong. Only in Minnesota. I and the other three people brave enough to be waddling towards their destination sighed, turned around, and trekked back home.
Home--where I decided it was a good time to throw out those five pizza boxes that had accumulated in my trash closet. And maybe watch an episode of "The Office," or two. Listen to the new Girl Talk album, all 71 minutes, while dozing on my couch and thinking about those feelings I dared not express to anyone else, of confusion and shame, intimacy or longing or maybe loneliness, all of those kinds of feelings suited for grey-white skies and early dusks.
When I finally ventured back outside around eleven or noon, I watched a couple help each other down their front steps, a punk-rocky looking twenty-something desperately clinging to her hipster boyfriend as if they had suddenly become eighty-five, their bodies having grown unaccustomed to the act of lifting and setting down feet. When they reached the bottom, they smiled at me watching and proceeded to play on the ice, grinning childishly as they waved their feet back and forth before starting out to wherever it was they were going. A young woman in long black trenchcoat and red snowball cap glided down the sidewalk, her little dog somehow managing to scamper along beside her. Another girl skidded to a stop at the corner I was standing.
"This is scary," she said softly, as if gossiping. "I was standing up at the top of the hill and watched like six car accidents."
We both giggled about people whose days, or more, had been ruined by the effects of overnight freezing rain, a shared perversity. All of our days had sort of been ruined anyway. Things had not gone according to our carefully or not-so-carefully laid plans, and as always with natural occurrences, the consequences for the innocent varied by that line between vaguely unpleasant to horrifying. After laughing, I felt a little guilty. I wanted to tell the girl so, but she went on across the street, the one place warm enough to walk. And, reminded again that we are not completely masters of our universe or our fates (take note, California), we humans continue to make do, in the most absurd and possibly deadliest of worlds and circumstances.
