I’m Scared. Hold Me.

From a certain angle, if I position myself just right, my living room is a warm and glowing postcard of a place at this time of year. The Christmas tree in the corner, the doorways draped in pine boughs, groupings of jovial Santas here and there – so pretty!

But if I’m not positioned just right – hey, who put that load of laundry over there?

Dagnab it! Why isn’t anyone folding my laundry?!

This does not work with the decor. I’m either going to have to go to another room, close my eyes, or fold my laundry.

Hmm.

Minus the holidays, I've always thought of winter as a foreboding place. The cold, the dark, the bare trees. With the need for electric lights the minute you wake up, the moment you get home from work, I’m thinking deep forest, I’m thinking Gretel’s outside avoiding her lousy stepmother, I’m thinking faces in the trees.

Thank you, Brothers Grimm.

My Grandma told me about a distant relative of hers, around the turn of the century, who went nuts in the middle of the winter – February, she thought it was – and chased his wife around the cabin with an axe.

Winter in North Dakota will do that to a person.

Luckily, though, he didn’t catch her; and they had supper at their usual time.

No point in an attempted axe murder ruining a good meal.

Of course, neither I nor anyone I know lives in an old Germanic forest or a one-room cabin in the middle of nowhere. But that doesn’t make my pile of folding-needy laundry any less scary.

O, what a silly, silly person I am. Seriously, am I comparing cabin fever and my sense that full-blown Old World forests sprout in the dark just outside my windows with my need to talk someone into folding my clean laundry?

Yes.

Yes, I am.

This post brought to you by the Department to Distract Myself from the Cold-Dark Outdoors Department.