As the falling leaves drift by our windows here in northeast Ohio, a new level of panic begins to simmer along with the pot of soup on the stove.
We call it winter coming.
And no more dreaded than this year.
Usually way up here just south of the Canadian border we start trying to make peace early on with the months-long tempest soon to blow in across the icy Great Lakes.
We start talking as soon as Halloween is over about cozying up with our favorite blankies. We imagine crochet projects, reading or writing poetry, catching up on Bronte and Baldwin and getting acquainted with our shadow side.
Only thing, COVID had us at been there, done that in April.
I've already learned two Buddhist chants, bought a ukulele, stitched 14 scarves and a blanket, drawn in my meditation coloring book, sung karaoke by phone, become comfortable wearing a mask and learned to live with my worst self.
What I'm craving more than anything now is face time.
With somebody's other than mine.
This was challenging enough, and yet more possible, in summer when at least we could be outside (masked and distanced) together, pretending we were at a garden party on the back deck _ almost like in the good old days, when Corona was just a beer.
Change the thermometer to read 10 instead of 80, and we seasoned Ohioans know that standing around with plates of spaghetti outside could create hard-bitten hypothermia in 12 minutes.
Which is why we go around in hiking boots and cross-country skis and talk a lot about layers.
Which is why I spent half this year's Christmas budget on six-foot-tall heat lamps and propane tanks for the back deck, which are back-ordered on Amazon.
I refuse to go down with the Zamboni just because I have to stay inside by myself for a few months, which is how I live my days, unless you count my son living in a separate part of the house who I see when he takes the dog out for potty breaks.
I grimace as I count down the days in October, even as I watch the door for these giant beacons that will save the day for outdoor socialization _ but which may take awhile to arrive, as they are the new toilet paper, along with fire pits, electric blankets and heated jackets.
In the meanwhile, I find quotes about winter, like this happy, albeit mostly not-applicable-for-2020 one.
"Winter is the time for comfort, for good food and warmth, for the touch of a friendly hand and for a talk beside the fire: it is the time for home," wrote the late poet Edith Sitwell.
There was also this from the apparently miserable French realist Gustave Flaubert.
"Are the days of winter sunshine just as sad for you, too? When it is misty, in the evenings, and I am out walking by myself, it seems to me that the rain is falling through my heart and causing it to crumble into ruins."
And this:
"Winter's coming. Winter's coming. Winter's coming." Portenders of doom, these words became a mantra for the dark fantasy show "Game of Thrones" and a metaphor for impending death, destruction and one especially long winter that lasted not just a few months, but a generation.
It's all in the perspective, which in my case has changed 18 times since COVID came, which is colored by the fact that I'm from the Deep South, which rendered a long enough adjustment when I moved here 25 years ago and thought I was going to suffocate those first couple of winters from cloud cover.
Winter PTSD dies hard.
But then so also do survival instincts.
I think of this past year and what we've already lived through that we didn't think we could, the spun gold that materialized out of a bag of survival tricks we didn't know we had.
I think, too, of the year 2005 when I belted out "I Will Survive" karaoke at my birthday party along with Gloria Gaynor and my three sisters who managed to get here despite coming from New Orleans that had been hit by Katrina, where our mother died in a freak accident four months before.
My sisters and I didn't think we'd survive that year either.
"What good is the warmth of summer without the cold of winter to give it sweetness?" wrote John Steinbeck in "Travels with Charley: In Search of America."
Human beings are resourceful, resilient beings, my thank-God-for-therapy therapist keeps telling me.
Assuming what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, bring it on, Ole Man.
I got propane.
