Winter contentment

 

It's funny, but I'm regretting the passing of winter. For me, it's become a very comfortable season.  It compels confinement. In the past, that would have been frustrating for me, I'd want to be up and doing, out and about.  But recently I relish the relief of having an excuse to not do anything.  Oh, there are chores and things that have to be done around the house and with family, but they are things I enjoy doing or at least don't mind, and just about everything can be put off if the weather is inclement.

So life slows down and the long evenings of welcome quiet are something I look forward to. After the little that needs to be done is done, I sit in my favorite chair in front of the fireplace and read or knit -- my Lord, yes, I've taken up knitting and crocheting; I never would have imagined! 

This is a family that reads.  I've seen to that, or, rather, my parents did, making reading part of us kids' daily life, as their parents did for them, and as I now do for my children.  El jefe also came from a family of readers, so we dovetail in that as in so many other things. El jefe also enjoys reading aloud so he's the designated bedtime story reader. 

He's like my dad that way, but unlike the popster, who would read us books and short stories he always intended to read but somehow never got around to -- Moby Dick, Arundel, Northwest Passage, The Sea Wolf (I had nightmares about that one), Blue Hotel, The Lottery, The Tell-Tale Heart, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge....sweet dreams and nighty-night, kids; actually, my brothers loved the scary stuff, me not so much, 'though I did like Hawthorne's Twice Told Tales -- 

Anyway, el jefe reads them children's stories: Thumbelena and other stories by Hans Christian Andersen and Hansel and Gretel and the Brothers Grimm tales and also more grown-up tales such as Jack London's The Hobo and the Fairy, Kate Douglas Wiggin's Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, A.A. Milne's Winnie the Pooh, Stephen Vincent Benét's The Devil and Daniel Webster, Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House in the Big Woods, Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows, L.M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables, Frances Hodgkin Burnett's The Secret Garden, Anna Sewell's Black Beauty, Jerome K. Jerome's The Passing of Third Floor Back, Ring Lardner's Alibi Ike, Booth Tarkington's The Terrible Shyness of Orvie Stone, Edgar Allan Poe's The Black Cat. Also such novels as Peter Pan, The Virginian, Swiss Family Robinson, Heidi, Treasure Island, Riders of the Purple Sage, Alice in Wonderland, Charlotte's Web, Childhood's End, The Light in the Forest, The Hundred Dresses, Idylls of the King (okay that's poetry), Under Two Flags, The Maltese Falcon, The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, The Four Feathers, Tom Sawyer, The Light That Failed, Wild Animals I Have Known (semi-factual), The Lonesome Gods, Huckleberry Finn, Pasó Por Aquí, The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Screwtape Letters, The Hobbit.... They never know what he will read them on any given night.  His practice is to read them a poem before beginning his book reading, usually a classic from the 19th century -- The boy stood on the burning deck, Whence all but he had fled; The flame that lit the battle's wreck, Shone round him o'er the dead.....  Oh, dear.

He doesn't just read, he acts out the characters, giving them different voices, from squeaky to gruff, depending.  He rushes excitedly through the sentences or pauses dramatically, as the story unfolds, sometimes looking up from the page and turning his gaze from one child to the other and they look back with awe, expectancy or impatience -- yes, well, what happens? -- as the story line dictates. Sometimes his readings are so good and the novel so engaging that as I happen to pass by I stop to listen, too, slipping quietly into the room so as not to disturb. Sometimes my mother slips in to listen, as well.

What's that? TV? Cell phones? The internet?  None of that in my house! (Except internet for school work and other research under supervision.)

Otherwise, while el jefe is terrifying  entertaining the children, I sit watching the fire in the fireplace, thinking nothing much at all.  Sometimes I go over to a window and stand looking out at the winter landscape, watch the early sunset, see a late crow fly across the western glow, or maybe an early owl. One by one, the stars and planets appear and a chill draft curls up around the window, making me shiver, so I retreat to the fireplace and stand in front of it warming up, then make a cup of tea, settle into my chair, pick up my knitting and begin clacking the needles or go back to my book and open it to where I left off, the cat climbs into my lap, the fire hisses, and all's right with the world.