Preparing For Winter

We had a very dry summer, followed by a somewhat dry autumn; the leaves lacked their usual brilliant color, but under the circumstances, they did exactly what they were supposed to do – warn us that “it” was coming again.

“It” is the cold and the snow and all the little things which hurry along under their skirts, and these have to do mainly with warmth and safety. If you’ve lived here long enough, you don’t think that much about doing: A day arrives, there is the barely audible “click” in your brain, and everything changes.

The garage is organized so that an automobile will actually be able to fit inside it. This is made possible by moving herbicides to the warm basement of the house so that they will be “safe,” and useable again next Spring when you move them back to the garage so that you can find them again in the autumn to put back in the basement. Unless they have reached their “use by date,” in which case you throw them out recycle them appropriately.

Back in the corner of the garage, the snow tires have sat since the Spring. Now is the time to get them into the back of the car to take them to the tire place where a husky lad will put them on the car and place the “summer tires” in the back of the car. This gives you an early season opportunity to hurt your back or at least say that you hurt your back. What brings relief to your back is to find someone else to do the snow blowing or shoveling. Money is likely involved, but this is a good investment – in fact, among the best.

The same goes for removing the fallen leaves from the yard. Find somebody who will do it for you. Write the check. Complain for no more than three days about the cost, and give daily thanks for the fact that you have chosen to provide employment in our difficult economy and no longer choose to do it yourself.

I have some driveway markers, basically green poles on a spring which help keep people on the driveway. They are an attractive dark green color until you try to find the base in the grassy ground – also dark green. If you wait until the grass is no longer dark green, the ground may be too hard to dig the hole for any new markers. There will come a point when you leave the markers in the garage next to the tires and await perfect installation conditions which never seem to arrive.

The winter clothes which may have been properly stored in the basement (or may not have if summer cold weather arrived as the clothes were finding their own way down a couple of floors). If the latter situation applies, be sure to check the laundry and other nearby locations. Once the clothes are returned to their winter locations, check them for wear, newly observed design and styling flaws, and then put them in the place where they probably should be all the time anyway.

Shovels, ice chippers, bags of sand, and similar tools of the season need to be placed by the front door, and when this happens you are reminded to turn off the outside faucets. In order to do this, one frequently has to step over the winter clothes which were not put away, so one must be careful.

Winter requires an array of footwear for warmth and safety. When I was a kid, we had black galoshes with metal buckles. Ugly and cold, but at least they kept your feet dry. Nowadays you can choose between ugly insulated boots, boots with felt insulation, so big you have to walk like a giant in them, slip-on boots with hearty soles, thingies with sharp points that slip over boots for walking on ice. Beyond that, there are walking sleds (“Sparks, as they call them in Scandinavia), walking poles, cross country skiis, snow shoes.

Others who live here believe that engines are essential in the winter – snowmobiles and similar contrivances. Many of us believe that these provide too much pleasure in the winter and are creatures of the devil, environmentally wasteful, and so, in a word, purposeless. I’m sorry to report that these machines and their brethren seem to be a very popular way of dealing with early darkness and perennial cold and snow – there is almost always the so.

The furnace needs to be checked and tuned, supplies of cocoa and whisky to be aggregated (part of blizzard prevention), extra blankets put on or near the beds, the battery powered radio located in case of power failure), the safety supplies for the car (blankets, ice scrapers (several for different kinds of ice and as back-up), sleeping bag, small shovel, bag of sand, coffee can for individual relief. Inside the house those of us without a lot of hair look around the nightcap to be found, second only in importance to blankets and duvets. Hot water bottles are also a good investment. Not only are they warm, but if you are surprised by them, you can learn the difference between first and second degree burns.

Lastly, the winter vocabulary returns to active use. This is aided by a lot of preparatory discussion having to do changes in the weather – looks like snow, could be unpleasant tomorrow, have to change the oil in the car, better tell the cat, bring in the brass monkeys – all that discussion which is really the way we warn each other and assure each other that we are prepared and prepared to endure it together.

Our vocabularies change, too, so that windchill, black ice, turning into a skid, braking distance, blue wax, kitty litter (a sand substitute), and a whole host of curse words not required the rest of the year arrive as though freshly minted. Other words used during this time are Florida, Mexico, Vegas, California, the Caribbean, Hawaii, even Iowa.

But of course, we never are completely prepared for winter, not even for the gray day when the first white flakes descend from the sky, land, linger for just an instant before the last heat of the ground melts them. That experience is as old as we are, but new and simple and beautiful each autumn.

And then, alas, experience starts to accumulate and linger on our roads and sidewalks, and steps. Outwardly we continue to complain, but secretly we just look forward to crawling into our beds, snuggling under the covers with a good book, surrounded by the quiet of a winter’s night and being grateful just for being warm.

How I Found Courage

A couple of days before Thanksgiving, I sat down and wrote a screed, and I am thankful I didn’t put it up on the site. It was off the mark, a bit sour, and not what I intended. What follows comes closer to the mark.

Each year I find I am thankful for yet another “something” which has come into my life, and this year what tops the list is a place called “Courage Center.”

For the last several years my right hip has started to deteriorate, and the discomfort has moved from sporadic to continual to continuous, and the situation finally got to the point where I’m scheduled for a replacement hip early in the New Year.

I tried everything I could think of to delay the surgery – glucosamine/chondroitin, riding a bike followed by riding a semi-recumbent bike, active stretching and strengthening, physical therapy, anti-inflammatories – including the now infamous VIOXX.

On the recommendation of a physical therapist from Baltimore whom I met by chance on a walk in London (a story for another time), I bought some meditation tapes and found them far more helpful than I ever would have imagined..new age music and all.

Then one day, I was talking to my stockbroker, and she listened to the hip update and then recommended I go out to a place called Courage Center for some work in their therapy pool. I figured it beat slaughtering a chicken and slathering the warm fat on my hip, so in a “what the hell” mood which failed to disguise the true level of my desperation, I made an appointment for an evaluation.

I met one of their physical therapists in the reception area, and on the hike down to the room where she was going to assess my state of hip, I felt like carrion being watched by a hungry eagle. By the time we arrived, she had it pretty well sorted out but confirmed it with the usual pushing and pulling and aches and pains.

Then we got in the pool, and I learned about the advantages of 91 degree (Fahrenheit) water, of working out in an environment of nearly zero gravity, and discovering exercises which would help my hip and prepare me for the day when I would have a new hip which would be an improvement over what I’ve got now.

Truth to tell, I got in my car after that first session, and I didn’t know whether to laugh - almost angrily - at my not having learned about the place far earlier than I did or to cry at my never having felt so good after a workout with the hip in its sad state.

I had always thought that the Courage Center was for people with disabilities, serious physical problems; yes, and, it turned out, I was one of them. My disability was pretty modest compared to some of the people helped by the staff at Courage Center, but that didn’t matter.

So for several weeks Kathy trained me to do a water program which would help me, and then I was allowed to come work out on my own. Every morning when I get up and head for the pool, I have exactly the same set of feelings I had when I was a hockey playing kid and it was time to go to the rink – anticipation bordering on excitement, and the urge to tear out of the house and go get in the pool.

As a result of our efforts, I shall probably be better prepared to cope with the surgery and the period immediately thereafter, and I know I’ll count the days until I can get back in the pool.

In the meantime, I’m getting to know some of the others working out in the pool, to appreciate what they’ve overcome with assistance and hard work, and to ease myself into the ad hoc community which ebbs and flows in the pool each workout.

I may be a latecomer to this remarkable place, but I shall always be deeply thankful for the facilities, services, and staff of Courage Center, yet another reason why I'm glad I live in Minnesota.