Pink Wink

January has never been in my black book but this year it tempted me. Don't get me wrong, I saw two good movies at the theater, rang in Chinese New Year with old friends that cook well, and ate Harmon's gelato with my aunt. I found an anthropologie blazer at the thrift store for $18 with the tags still on it and Everett gained two pounds of cute. Archer loves letter M because it is for Mom and RE was Student of the Week at her new school. Good things happen regularly, even daily. Life is so good. But January has been unusually...white. The colorful kaleidoscope of December whizzed by in the blink of an eye yet January stuck around for 78 days of blah. That's how it felt to me, anyway. The phrase that comes to mind is in the bleak midwinter. Longest. Month. Ever.

An inversion dripped like heavy molasses over the valley causing days of dingy gray suffocation. Then it snowed, snowed more, and snowed again. The few times I drove to New House the wind was howling and the drifts were huge. It was icy and foreign; perhaps I was on the moon. People worked on our house less than a week this month. At this rate we’ll have to extend our construction loan. Oh wait, we already did that. White.

It snowed every day I was supposed to buy groceries which led to many a brinner (breakfast dinner). I tried to compensate for the inversion with an excess of Kodiak protein pancakes cooked in bacon grease but no go. January has not felt like a carb celebration, even with empty cans of Reddi Whip lining my trash can. White.

As Greg would say, “I don’t love January but I like it as a friend.” I feel like all seven brides and the other seven brothers as I wait for the pass to melt. This pale, pasty mom has cabin fever. The singular day I went outside was yesterday: I taught Archer how to ice melt the driveway/catch icicle drips in his dollar store bucket. I’ve been inside cleaning white bathtubs, washing white sheets and white plates, scrubbing my white sink, and eating a lot of Sunchips (which don’t actually have Vitamin D in them). White.

Lowlight. Maybe this is what The Bangles were singing about in "Hazy Shade of Winter". Lucy only found a handful of sunshine streaks to nap in all month. My aunt flew out from sunny California to help me pick my paint colors and we had ten minutes of sun the whole weekend. The paint swatches were entitled “Variations on a Theme of White”. I painted nine foam boards with whites. It was exciting to pick my paint, but it was nonetheless more of the same: White.

Oh, for a beaker full of the warm south. –John Keats

Amen. I’d go tanning if I didn’t love my white skin so much.

Last night I fell asleep anxious because a babysitter was coming in the morning and my house looked “pre-Huggies box”. (J, you get me?) It’s code for MY HOUSE WAS TRASHED. No matter how hard I clean it never looks like a museum anymore, unless you mean Night at the Museum. And I sit on our freezing sofa next to the freezing window every midnight, pumping white breastmilk and surveying the damage with the whites of my stinging eyes, unable to do a thing. My time is limited like never before and it’s humbling. Honestly, five years ago I visited friends’ homes and glossed over their “my-kids-did-this-to-our-house” apologies. I may have cruelly quipped to myself It’s called a toy box, people or Teach your kids to clean one game up before they start another. Karma is real because two of my kids might be OCD and the other can't move yet I just found our jar of Nutella behind the sofa cushion and no matter how many bins I buy all the toys that belong in them are simultaneously ROFL at me. Or mocking me. I can’t quite tell.

Falling asleep to simple worries snowballed into supersized self-criticism. Which means I tossed all night and woke up saying, “It's still January? Duuuuude! I AM SO SICK OF THIS STINKING MONTH!”

Everett had six month shots for breakfast, I had half a shower and used half a can of dry shampoo, and my angel sitter arrived with the gift of precious alone time. At precisely 12:15 I was inside the temple walking in a white dress down a white hallway to a white room. Suddenly the sun beamed through a thin stained glass stripe and magenta rectangles hovered over the white carpet. I gasped. I really did. Then I looked around. No one else was freaking out. I slowed down, smiled, and rerouted, carefully stepping on each punch of chroma. I thought about those pink rectangles for the next two hours.

I'm inside the advancing light, my hands are hungry, the world beautiful. -Nazim Hikmet

You know, I always pray to learn something when I go to the temple. Today I learned the Lord has an infinite skill set for showing his love to an individual. He reached me with color in a place that is basically bleached. He knew I needed a pink wink after a month-long whiteout. 

Photo quote from North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell. Love the book and the movie, but the third disc is the "January" of the set...just skip it. Everyone dies or gets sick or leaves. Dang industrial revolution pollution!

(I did snap this photo one January afternoon when the kids and I drove to the top of Suncrest to explore. It was pretty phenomenal up there; blue skies, sparkling snow, still. Makes up for the magnified precipitation and gale force winds!)