My mother, who lives in Florida, calls me about once every two weeks to fill me in on the weather.
“I see you’re freezing your butts off up there!”
“No, Mom,” I say, “No, it’s actually only about 20 here today, 20 and sunny, lovely.” Where she lives the climate stays somewhere between 78 and 82; 78, she puts on a sweater, 82 she turns on the AC. She thinks we are nuts for living here in February.
I say, “…bring it on!”
It’s more than just the weather that keeps me right to home this time of year. Our entire social climate takes on a whole new stimulation. I hope I won’t offend any of you off-islanders by saying this, but we are very different people when we get pared down to the remaining essence of us. That is, we make eye contact, we take long strolls together, we drink a heck of a lot of coffee, we balance it out later in the day with the beverage of our choice. We chill out. Or, I should say, the men chill out. The women get a little loony.
Most of my women friends and I are wedged in between the “empty nest syndrome” and the “pre-menopausal syndrome.” (It’s okay, you can say those sorts of things these days.) What that translates into is that we are basically out of control most of the time. Our hormones have us walking around in circles with one shoe on, and with more time to do that than ever before. Winter, with the children gone and the men underfoot, forces us to drastic action. We fill up our lives. Oh, do we ever fill up our lives! We take classes, start six or seven new hobbies, exercise like fiends, and start making all of our meals out of the Betty Crocker Dessert Cookbook.
As far as the classes go, it’s a pretty mixed bag. There are college courses, ITV and ATM and on-line, which many of us jump into despite a lurid hatred of all things computer. We really believe that at the age of 46 we can go back to school, six credits at a time, and earn a degree by the time we are 60. Why not? Those of us who finished college take courses for “enhancement.” Sue is taking a course called “The Fascination of the Dewey Decimal System.” Pat has a course she loves called “The History of Math,” broken down into three parts; “The Saga of Mathematics,” “The Romance of the Roman Numeral” and “Algebra, a Gentle Approach.” I just love the way she throws her head back like Scarlett O’Hara when she rattles those subtitles off.
The three of us decided the other day, over coffee, after a stroll, that since we were all college girls again we needed a sorority. Sue went right to the most important issue and started designing our sorority sweaters, admitting right off that “we at least still had cleavage.” Pat and I put our heads together to come up with a name and immediately came up with the Alpha-Alpha-Alphas. When we finished wiping up the coffee that had shot out of our noses, Sue demanded that she be made the Alpha (female dog) of the Alpha-Alpha-Alphas. We readily agreed. Maggie, taking the “Basics of Business” course, joined us to bring some maturity and sensibility to our group.
Right away, of course, there were other issues. We asked John, the only male taking classes, if he would throw us a fraternity party. He asked his wife, Johanna, for permission to turn the house into a frat house, and she said a flat-out “No!” Then GiGi, already a regular upstart, begins her annual Adult Ed course of “Women’s Woodworking and Chainsaw Sharpening” and says she wants to join the AAAs. Sue says, “No, Adult Ed doesn’t count.” So Gigi says, “Fine, we’ll be the Delta-Delta-Deltas.” I can already see some catfights brewing.
When we are not filling up our lives with higher education, we turn to kind deeds, politics and social action. We shift between activities: Meals on Wheels, volunteering on the ambulance, starting a girls’ book club. Through most of the Superbowl game we women shared our blossoming intellects by debating the presidential candidates and then by boycotting the halftime debauchery. (We then debated the Janet Jackson “episode.”) The men debated who had invited us in the first place.
For my feel-good endeavor, I started playing Scrabble with a sweet 89-year-old woman at the Eldercare. The truth is, I love Scrabble and my family will no longer play with me, not since I threatened to drive the sharpened pencil through the back of my son’s hand because he had taken MY spot with the triple-word-score. I figured that I could probably learn a lot by playing Scrabble with Helen who, I was sure, would have a great vocabulary and would know how to play by the rules.
The first game we played, I wrote our names with a line between them on the back of a paper napkin.
“You go first,” I say, magnanimously, “and I’ll keep score.”
“Oh,” she says, “I’ve never played the game when anyone has kept score…”
“No,” I say, “the game is ALL ABOUT keeping score.”
“Okay,” she says, tucking her tissue up her shirtsleeve. About halfway through the game, with Helen in a definite lead, she tries to plant a word just floating in the middle of the board! “Helen…” I say, “You must attach your word to another word.”
“No you don’t,” she says.
“Yes, you do,” I say.
“Well. If you say so,” she says. Helen won that game by one point and I merely ate the pencil.
Things are beginning to get a little frenetic with the scheduling end of all my various winter activities. I went for a stroll yesterday with Pat, laid out the 42 different things I was juggling in all my spare time, and asked if she thought I was overdoing it. “No!” she says, “No! You are just embracing LIFE!”
“Phew,” I said, “I thought I was starting to go off the deep end.”
My oldest son, who is headed out of here to a warm, southern climate, stopped by to drop off his houseplants for me to tend while he is away. As he walked by with his precious jade plant I noticed that it was crawling with aphids. I started ranting. “You can’t bring that thing in here! I don’t have time to nurse your aphid-crawling plants!” He said, “Come on, Mom, what are you doing that is so important?” I said, “You don’t understand the VELOCITY of my life right now.” He answered back, “Mom, if taking care of an aphid covered houseplant is going to push you over the edge, maybe you had better rearrange your priorities.”
What the heck do kids know? They can’t recognize when their moms are coming into their Power, embracing mid-Life, mid-winter, mid-ocean. Bring It On!