Come with me, dance, my dear
Winter’s so cold this year
You are so warm
My wintertime love to be
From “Wintertime Love” by Jim Morrison, John Paul Densmore, Robert A. Krieger, and Raymond D. Manzerek
Snowcrete
A few days after the snow, I walked to the co-op for milk and dinner ingredients and I took a picture of a more than six-foot high pile of plowed snow on a corner across the street from the co-op, posted it on Facebook and asked people to guess how long it would take to melt. Guesses ranged from early February to early April. I promised to track it and announce whose guess was closest. Well, we’ll never find out because as one of my friends predicted, the snow was removed with a front-loader a few days later. There’s no shortage of other piles, including a glacier-like twelve-foot tall and at least eighty-foot long mass that’s been dumped in the parking lot of a closed hospital near my house.
It’s been over a week since the snow fell, but removal has been a challenge because of the thick ice layer on top. People have been shattering it and using the pieces to build igloos, replicas of Stonehenge, or abstract sculptures in their yards. Streets are clear (though some don’t have as many lanes as usual) and sidewalks are mostly clear as well, but the parts that were never shoveled are covered with what everyone is calling “snowcrete” and this makes it a challenge to walk anywhere. It’s unlikely to get easier any time soon because we’ve been having an unusually long cold snap. The temperature hasn’t risen above freezing in a week and a half (though it might tomorrow). It has been sunny, so there are tiny rivulets of meltwater at the edges of things in the afternoons, but there hasn’t been any significant melting. The public schools were out all last week and are still closed. Beth says she’s glad we don’t have kids in the school system anymore because I would be losing my mind and she’s 100% right.
After we finished shoveling the sidewalk and the path from the front door to the sidewalk, we undertook new shoveling projects. All three of us worked on making new paths out of the house—front door to the driveway and back door to the driveway. We share the driveway with our next-door neighbors (UNO’s people) and Beth, Noah, Rose, Seydou and two of their teenage sons spent several days shoveling the driveway. Usually, we either wait for the driveway to melt or hire that job out, but the mostly Latino men who come by offering those services were not much in evidence last week. Why do you think that might be? To be clear, I am not complaining about having to do this job ourselves but thinking with sadness about our neighbors who are afraid to leave their houses. Beth has been trying to get involved with volunteers who are making grocery deliveries to immigrant households, but she hasn’t been able to get connected yet.
The snowy weather spurred a lot of baking. In addition to the pumpkin brownies, Beth made chocolate chunk-almond biscotti, and Noah made banana bread with pecans. And I don’t think either of them is done. Beth brought home chocolate chips when she went grocery shopping this weekend, “just in case” she felt like baking again and Noah ordered rye flour for muffins.
Goodbyes
Friday night Beth’s staff took her out for a goodbye dinner at Busboys and Poets. She said it was fun and good to see them. Noah and I were on our own that evening, so we ordered pizza and watched Life of Chuck. I’d been reluctant to watch it with Beth because she doesn’t like violent films and I didn’t know how the apocalypse scenes would be portrayed. Well, it was about as gentle a portrayal of an apocalypse as you could hope for and the film is really very beautiful and life-affirming for a movie with so much death in it.
The next day Beth and I attended a memorial service for our friend and neighbor Chris, who died unexpectedly in late November a couple weeks shy of her sixtieth birthday. Chris worked for the AFL-CIO, so she and Beth met through work. Then about ten years ago, she and her wife Melissa and their two girls Zoe and Skyler moved to Takoma Park just around the corner and two houses down from us. We went to their New Year’s Eve parties several times. We don’t throw parties, so we reciprocated with hand-me-downs for the girls, baked goods, and garden produce. I would often run into Chris outside her house when starting out on my morning walk and this would almost always turn into stopping to chat, mostly about politics and our kids. Less than a week before she died, she messaged me asking about good places in the area to hike because she’d been ill recently, but she was anticipating recovering and wanted to hike, perhaps with Beth, once she was better and Beth had retired. The two of them had discussed kayaking together, too. Well, those outings will never happen now.
The service was at the Washington Ethical Society. The building has no parking lot, and a lot of street parking spaces were still covered in snow, so we weren’t sure if we should drive, take our chances on public transportation, or take a Lyft. We drove and we did find a space a couple blocks away. We had to climb over some drifts, so I was glad I decided to wear boots rather than shoes (and that I hadn’t bought new shoes for the occasion as I considered). I’d also wondered if I’d be underdressed in a grey turtleneck, black cardigan, and black pants but when we arrived and I saw the crowd I felt I’d intuited the standard for largely middle-aged lesbian sad event attire accurately.
The hall was packed. We got seats, but it ended up being standing room only in the back of the room. There were several speakers, arranged chronologically, telling stories about Chris from different phases in her life—her childhood on a gladiola farm in Ohio, her madcap twenties in D.C. (some relayed by a former girlfriend), and so on, ending with Melissa, who told a story about how they got married “for the first time” in Oregon in 2003 during a brief period when that was legal and how when the marriage was cancelled after a referendum, they got a refund check from the state. It was darkly funny but also served to remind us how far we have come in recent years. There were pictures of Chris and loved ones at different ages projected on a screen and then people from the audience went up to mikes set up around the room to tell more stories. Labor colleagues, a fellow soccer coach, and one of the girls on a team Chris had coached spoke affectionately of her.
Chris was big-hearted and passionate about social justice. She helped create some of the online communication tools labor and other progressive activists, including those in Minneapolis, are using to co-ordinate actions. She was a devoted wife and mother, a lover of card games, and an avid birdwatcher and outdoorswoman. (I realized at the ceremony that even though I sent her a long list of parks where Beth and I have hiked, I probably didn’t suggest any she didn’t already know, but she was kind enough not to tell me that.)
When we got home from the ceremony, we found Noah chopping vegetables for a stir-fry, and I lent him a hand. As I chopped cabbage, carrots, and mushrooms, I put on Prince because I was remembering that when Prince died, Chris and Mel hosted an impromptu Prince dance party in their yard. It reminded me how they turned sadness into appreciation and joy. Like the dancers in the Doors song, Chris excelled at finding warmth in the cold.