To Bake a Pie

Denial is not a place where I can live. I can imagine it wires it's way into your brain, protecting you, keeping you where you need to be so you can continue be-ing.

It only took writing two sentences before my own denial was staring me in the face - in a new tab - in this browser. I remember giving a book to someone and wanted to send a follow-up email and link to a TEDx by the author. That goes on the to-do list, not on the N-O-W list.

It's here, the first snowfall of the year. A huge, white, dump. In years past this meant ski passes, mountains, and adventures. But everything in my body is telling me to hibernate, bake pies, or go somewhere warmer.

Listening to Glennon Doyle's book all day yesterday had me in a trance. She's such a spectacular writer, able to bring nuance and craft to the mundane of everyday life, truly illuminate the kaleidoscope of her mind as she experiences emotion, breathe, struggle, and her own desires and inner battles. I love how she sends "the representative" out into the world, and how personified this representative is with her own language, attitude, and even delicate smiling. I love her perceptiveness when she writes about other characters in her life, such as her husband's therapist, and how even he expects her to smile with a re-assuring "everything is going to be okay." I love how she slips in slight user-centric comments for being a woman, such as when she pops into the mini-van and realizes it is too small for her.

I felt my own inner-monologue diving in and around my emotions, describing my pain last night, in the dark as I de-iced my car as the snowstorm lifted. Oddly, it was less about the storm itself, and, as usually with depression, it was my mind being pulled into the past. Going down the stairs in the snow, my pup Margo was over joyous as can be, bouncing up and down and in and out of only 6 inches, her whole twelve-pound body delighted, smiling, free. Jordan was like that with the snow. He'd be on his phone in bed, checking the snow report before I could even realize and ask for the millionth time for him to get off and see me. I'd wake up, already, annoyed. Walking down the steps to my car, I remember him all geared up, already holding his yellow ticket of excitement with his pass, enthused on all accounts to share and connect with the world that it was time for mountain madness. I walked over to my car. My plan all day had been to bake this pie. I needed to bake this pie.

A few inches all over the Impreza, when you open the driver's side seat some of the snow naturally flutters down onto the black fabric, and when you sit, you can feel it's coolness on your left butt cheek and thigh. Turning the car on, the back windshield wiper is frozen stuck, and the front ones just rub monotonously on the ice. It makes more sense to turn the heat way up, grab the brush and scraper, and do the dirty work. My black gloves still on, I step back out into the winter wonderland, close the door, and feel my first pain of emotion. Matt. Four years ago in front of Matt's house, I remember clambering into this very car in the early morning, and he ran around it dancing, brushing off the snow and ice. "How lucky I am?" I was thinking to myself. It was such a strong sense of pride and protection, to be safe and warm in the car while he was so macho de-icing our vehicle to go god knows where. It was the same with Jordan, whose Milwaukee blooded body would have allowed him to do this glove-less should he have wanted. I rubbed the scraper against the grass with the full force from my elbows, my shoulders, my back, and just one chip of ice, one square inch, came off. It would take him minutes, circling one window at a time, to slowly remove the cold. I kept scraping, nothing. Sadness crept in.