So Much for the Winter Projects

March 15, 2015

The Boston Globe

This is what I would do come winter, I promised myself last fall: I would take advantage of every snow day. I would be productive and proactive and not sit around like a slug and sigh and curse the weather and eat everything in sight.

I would embrace cold and snow and ice and enforced isolation. I would turn all these negatives into positives (Rah-rah, Eckhart Tolle!) and do all the things I think about doing but never get to. I would clean out the cellar. (Human beings should be required to move every 10 years because when you've lived in the same house for a long, long time, it can begin to resemble Grey Gardens.) I would also, I vowed, clean out closets, organize photos, sort them and scan them, and make albums for my kids and their kids.

Creating a website was on my to-do list as well as sorting through old columns, articles, greeting cards and letters, which are in piles and storage boxes in my home office, not labeled, not even dated, taking over the small space. (I'm sorry, Barbara Hemphill, who 20 years ago tried so hard to get me organized.) And, I vowed, that on cold, snowy nights I would sit back and read all the thick, wonderful books that seduce me in bookstores, which I buy and take home and add to a pile that is perilously close to toppling and killing someone.

Winter would be the drill sergeant needed to whip me into shape.

But it didn't work out this way.

I was on the other side of the world when the first snowflakes fell. I missed the starting gun. That's what I keep telling myself. But, really, had I been home for that first storm, would I have raced straight to the basement, trash bags in hand, and begun excavating? Would I have dragged all the photos from their hiding places all over the house and begun sorting them?

Not a chance.

The fact is, stuck inside, snow so deep and still so deep I cannot see out my office window, I did what everyone else was doing. I harrumphed and groaned, though my daughters insisted I had no right to harrumph and groan because I'd been away, hadn't I? I'd missed the worst of it.

But they were wrong. The worst was yet to come. All through February and into March, the snow and the temperature kept falling and falling and falling, burying not just the cellar windows but most of the ground-floor windows, too, and the fence, the deck, the cars, as well as every bit of ambition I ever had.

So instead of organizing photos, I binge-watched "Downton Abbey." And instead of sorting through notebooks and files, I turned my back on them, sat in my office on the computer and fanatically clicked on the weather for the latest updates, then Facebook to read anything and everything about how everyone else was faring, then clicked on sectional couches, just because.

And instead of curling up with a book every night, I cooked, then ate — pasta in cream sauces and red sauces and lemon sauces. Chicken parmesan. Stews. Soups. Banana bread with walnuts and chocolate chips. Brownies with walnuts and chocolate chips. Pancakes with walnuts and chocolate chips.

Now the snow is melting. And my clothes don't fit. And all those snow-day projects? They're still on the "to do" list.

I was not productive and proactive. I did sit around like a slug and sigh and curse the weather. I did eat everything in sight.

But the snow is melting! And this one little sentence trumps all that.