palace of winds

It started snowing again last night, and I walked to my garage this morning in a dreamy whirl of big fluffy white flakes. What I like to think of as snowglobe snow. And I’m so ready for winter to be over, to not be worrying a little about getting my car stuck again, to not come into work white-fingered with snow in my shoes, but I can’t not be happy in the face of snowglobe snow. Everything feels big and clear and beautiful.

But it all got smaller and wetter as I drove west, and the big happy has quietly been draining away. Now I’m just feeling a little melancholy and strangely fragile. It’s a feeling I’m not supposed to be having this week; I think it may be a symptom of my body fighting off some little bug in the quiet, unacknowledged way it has. We work well together that way — I refuse to acknowledge the beginning niggling signs of coming down with something, and my body viciously squishes it out of existence, and then I do not come down with anything. So right now I am just brewing some peppermint tea because it is winter and I feel like it, and not to help the bit of ache in my throat. Which may, after all, be from the strange untimely crying urge anyway.

Speaking of moods like clockwork, I’m thinking of going off the birth control. It’s damned convenient, but I’m just not sure it’s worth it. I think I’ve only stayed on it this long because there’s a small, stupid part of me still a little afraid about what happened last spring. And because I’m stubborn and mood-denying.

I’ve picked Appetites back up recently, which is probably also part of the mood. It’s such a good book but it’s sort of barged straight into the conflux of all my issues and is doing all sorts of light-flicking and pot-stirring and other-metaphoring. I keep trying to have honest self-confrontations but my self keeps changing, which makes it sort of impossible.

I’ve also been poking back through the archives of dooce, a blog I read bits of in weird irregular fits, usually once a year or so. And there was one entry where she was talking about scratching her daughter’s back, and remembering her mother scratching her back, and her secret fear as a child that her mother would one day tire of it, and her secret fear now that her daughter will one day tire of having it done to her, and I think mostly right now I’m just missing having someone to scratch my back.