Life These Days: Under Snow

I’ve made it through February, and I feel like I require several days of spiritual rest to carry on through March, my life force having drained out of me.

Balancing life with dubious parenting decisions, I pulled the children from school so we could watch Ne Zha 2 in a totally empty theatre on a Thursday afternoon, everyone else clearly at work (or school). We are only tangentially connected to our Chinese heritage, and usually only on holidays that involve food, but we’re all doing the best we can with what we have (i.e. not much).

When we got there, my little duckies trailing behind me, I was scanned in, like a robot, and reminded once again of the fact that movie ticket stubs are no more. This is not a new revelation (try to keep up here, Liz), but every time I go to the movies, which is not very often, this sad fact is thrust upon me, and I think about how journal writers need to unite and flood Cineplex with letters and pleas and requests for these antiquated little stubs that we can tape into our journals. They are fun little souvenirs of an exciting afternoon with sensory overload and very expensive popcorn. But who is keeping a journal these days?

In any case, life goes on, no one interested in some Luddite raving maniacally about obsolete relics from the past. Certainly not someone paid minimum wage to stand there, scanning me in, like a robot.

Through the window, I watch a yellow No Frills bag dancing in the wind outside, fluttering in the prison of its own gravity. The kids slowly dismantle the furniture in the house in an effort to convince an adult to take them tobogdanning. I wouldn’t say it’s a threat (is it?), or like…extortion? But I will say Caleb, our 10-year-old, was sent out into the world to shovel the snow and he entered into the space time vacuum through the portal that his mother entered into some time ago, and he hasn’t been the same since. He is crushed by the sludge and slush of winter and eldest sonship, but I’m sure he will rise victorious once he digs himself out.

And so it is: the shortest and longest month of the year has finally inched its way to the finish line. I wonder what I'm doing with my life, and then it's time to pick the kids up from school, so the existential crisis is shelved for another day. We look forward to bright things and bright days ahead, good books piled up around me, boxes coming into the warehouse steadily and in spurts. Thanks for sticking with us.