Part I: Local Woman Discovers Reason to Go On

I’m feeling particularly Scandinavian lately. Not the pretty, blue-eyed, let’s-take-our-clothes-off-and-sit-in-the-sauna Scandinavian either but the dark, brooding type sitting on an isolated farm off amongst the fjords, throwing knives into the floorboards and whistling eerie, minor-chorded dirges.

Why go on? The world is gray, cold and lifeless. I’ve not gone outside without winter boots on for four full months and there’s at least two months to go. A short-sleeved shirt is now tantamount to flashing one’s bare breasts at passing motorists: shocking, pale, familiar yet painfully naked; and I’m now down to shaving my legs once a month – whether I need it or not.

I dreamt the other night – and get this – of fruit hanging from trees.

Fruit! In trees! Ha ha ha!

I await spring, no longer confident of what it looks like but only sure that I’ve seen it before.

These have been my thoughts for several days now. I share them because I can’t be alone in this. Because if I don’t share them my next coping strategy is to take up competitive drinking.

Because, contrary to how I feel about any given moment, there is always hope; and this time, hope comes in the form of a single, knitted glove.

Let me explain.

Two months ago, both of my favorite gloves went missing. Rightie and Stinky, I called them.

Stinky, by the way, didn’t deserve his lot in life but by default became the glove with which I picked up litter. Winter litter doesn’t literally stink, of course, as it tends to be frozen, but “Stinky” became his name, primarily because “Garbage Glove” seemed disrespectful while Stinky seemed kind of home-y.

I digress.

Whatever I named them, they disappeared. O, how I cried. I looked. I called. I tried to envision them (if I were a glove, where would I be?)

And while I stopped short of posting “Have You Seen These Accessories?” fliers, both Rightie and Stinky left a glove-shaped hole in my wintery heart.

I loved those dang gloves.

Let us fast-forward then, from that terrible morning when I realized they were gone, to yesterday, because there, in the filthy snow-plowed ridge of snow in the street outside of the house, its once five-foot mass reduced by the slowly increasing temperatures to a glacier-like solemnity with its stratified ice-snow-salt-dirt tale of the season, was one, lone, outstretched finger of my left glove: one brown, frozen, defiant finger aimed squarely at the elements.

Was it the index finger, pointing toward the sky? Was it the middle finger, taunting and insolent, a wintry "up yours"? Was it perhaps, even, the thumb, a cosmic "everything's OK"?

Is it important?

My left glove in hand, I kicked around for the other.

I have yet to find it; but now, there is hope.

I thought you should know.

Stinky the Glove has been found.

Long live Stinky!


Stay tuned for tomorrow’s installment!