There is Nothing We Can Do

An Ode to January

The hum of our decades-old refrigerator is loud enough to wake the dead. Or at least, our neurotic doodle who barks at its door and snaps at the aura around it. I stepped directly into a puddle pooling out from underneath our second-hand dishwasher this morning on my way to the fancy coffee maker I still don’t know how to turn on. How is it still January? Our front yard is a hub of backpack-clad little humans, waiting at different intervals for the yellow school buses chalked with road salt from 6:30- 8:30 am, and then again from 2:30-4:00 pm. My text thread is full of the neighborhood moms giving updates on their charges with the flu.

There is nothing we can do.

We are all ducking under covers reading spicy tomes about dragons while wiping the slush from the bottoms of our snow boots and dripping noses.

The school called again to remind us to keep our children home if they are unwell. Then they called back to remind us that if our children miss any more school the state will have to get involved. I drive around town at all hours of the day picking up excuse letters from the doctors who told me:

There is nothing they could do.

Fluids, rest, and the Fab 5 are all that will save us now.

The shelves are lighter where the eggs used to live. Headlines love to toss around titles like “Global Food Shortage” to send the masses running to stock their deep freezers full of chicken they will never eat. Americans, on average, consume 2.3 billion chicken nuggets a year. A YEAR. It is more palatable for us to turn living things into unrecognizable blogs of breading full of fat and skin and sinew than to look a chicken in the eye and justify a deep freezer of his compatriots. I wish I didn’t think about that as often as I do.

The pipes in this old house keep freezing. Even though we keep the cabinet doors open. Even though we drip the faucets overnight at a maddening water torture pace. Even though I wrap them beneath sinks in warm towels and turn the electric heater and the pellet stove on. Even though I breathe hot breath onto the joints and sing to them. Even though I sacrifice what little warmth I have in my hands to hold them.

There is nothing we can do.

The sun will set at 5:12 today. Nearly a full hour of daylight more than last month. It will grow and stretch like a cat; the golden light bathing my kitchen table, coloring it like the inside of a candle. The light is returning. We can’t stop it by force of will or our mountain of tissues or our broken shovel handles or our empty coffers from running the heat too often this month. The light is returning in fits and starts and it is an ember now but it will expand into a landscape we thought we will recognize when we see it, but had forgotten all about. Seed packets will begin lining the shelves by the checkout counters and we will remember what it felt like when the earth wasn’t frozen beneath boots but soil beneath fingernails. It smelled like life. The light is returning and we will shake our stiff limbs and squint because we will not be quite ready yet for the race of daylight-

But there is nothing we can do.