Not frozen into position

Donny was wondering last night if he ought to get on the roof and try to get the snow off before the rain that was predicted. I said, “Why? Because the rain makes the snow heavier?” He looked at me like I was dense for just a second and then said, “Can you imagine all that snow turned to ice? It could collapse the roof.” He didn’t get on the roof and I went to bed early again, in my clothes, first to play with Henry because, if we did it once, we have to do it the same way again, and then stayed for being too sweetly heavily groggily comfortable to get back up.

I can’t tell, this morning, what’s going on on the roof, but the hand rail going down the back stairs is more than glazed with ice. It’s got a thick layer. The snow on the ground sparkles and looks compact and heavy. My old guy had a young one out to his house last week chopping icicles. He has a friend for every job. He thinks ahead. That’s not a trait we have much of around here.

I’ve got two things sort of running through my consciousness this morning: an appreciation of my own languor and my appreciation for the old guy and the traits he had that were so like Dad’s. Dad didn’t have as much of the thinking ahead, although he did a little, but he had the friends for every job.

When I had to give my old guy a ride in my car the other day I said I wanted to go out and clean it up a little first and he laughed and told me how he’d gotten a ride in the icicle kid’s car and how the passenger door wouldn’t open and so he had to climb over the driver’s seat and all the pop cans on the floor. That’s the kind of friends my dad had too. Young guys with beat up cars and old farmer guys with know-how and beat up but sturdy equipment – plows and tractors and the like. With the both of them there’s this sort of independence and vulnerability that runs hand-in-hand and I wish I could say what makes it so endearing and what it is exactly that makes you feel it, because, like with Dad, you know it’s not just you. It’s almost like a sort of loyalty that gets birthed from it so that the friendships are many and they’re strong and healthy.

I was talking to one of my own friends the other day and she was saying how disagreement has never made her disloyal – she’s not going to abandon anybody because they disagree. She was saying it with this surprise that anyone would think that way and yet it’s been a kind of theme I’ve seen. If you disagree your loyalty is questioned…which in a way is like a questioning of your character that makes you feel kind of lousy. “Don’t you know me?”

Maybe it’s all running through my mind because I feel as if I’ve been disloyal to the old guy. I have this yen in me to be dedicated to whatever I’m doing and yet there’s always been a feel of tension between what I’d like to do and what I can do…acceptance of my limits.

That’s the hidden joy in going to sleep with my clothes on (something I’ve done twice in a week after not having done it twice in the last ten years). I’m kind of proud of it – as if finally – I’m not frozen into this position of the way I “should” do things.