Snow doggie

Beenie wanted to make a snow doggie instead of a snow man. We went out today around noon to check out the havoc the blizzard of ought’nine wrought on charm city. Wow. Watching it come down yesterday was like being in a boat, watching waves of snow and glitter wash over the once greenish landscape. Now the ground is white, all white, with a few bare branches of dried out summer plant skeletons poking out here and there. Really, there is no more ground, only marshmallow fluff. Really cold marshmallow fluff. It took about forty-five minutes just to get the girls dressed warmly enough to spend twenty minutes tromping around in the 2.5 foot plus snow drifts. Mimi got stuck and had to be rescued as she swept the sparkling white powder from post shovel mountains to the cleaned off sidewalk in front of the house. Beenie lost a boot. Both had their socks wrapped around their frozen little red hands, which I replaced twice for each of them during that fun foray into the outdoors. Or, rather, out to the outdoors.

I’ve had a few Jack Torrance moments during this forced internment. All domestic duties and no breaks makes mommy want to jump into a glacier made of vodka. The cruelest part of this being I’m still getting over a two week scourge, which the girls have had, too, and my husband. And I don’t drink when I’m sick, or ever anymore, apparently. We’re all sort of half-coughing all the time, Mimi still gets up at least once a night hacking up a toddler lung, and the girls haven’t been to school since last Monday, a week ago, which means I have had NO BREAKS. Husband working all kinds of overtime toward a February deadline. And now we’re trapped in the house. This situation could break a weaker person, a person who hasn’t already been dealing with years of servitude to two three year olds, someone who isn’t used to being inside for days or weeks at a time. But I am seasoned — once I had twin babies to take care of, we stayed in the house for months after their September birth. Winter, infants… why bother? I had alcohol then, sure, but now I have people I can sometimes reason with. I’d make that trade any day. Infants don’t sleep. Not at the same time, when there are two of them. All they do is eat. And poop. They cry, too, lots, and they doze.

I ignored two art grant/opportunity deadlines in the past few weeks. Fuck ’em. I am not in the mood for rejection. I’d rather just paint an hour a month like I do now and relish each brushstroke, turpentine fume, cadmium and cobalt. I need to finish some more artwork before I delve back into the grants world again. Not that I got any money when I was producing work, mind you.

The snow cleans up Baltimore real purty-like.