Oh, Cold Snap!

Word on the street is we might get some snow this week. Worse, it might get down to twelve degrees. Twelve degrees. Which is probably fine if you live in a place that's supposed to be twelve degrees, because then you would have bear skins in your cave, and wolf and fox carcasses hanging up and extra Sinew and Sinew Skills, plus the secret of fire. We don't have any of those.

Here in our cave we can't get anything to stay lit and there's nothing but damp squirrels to stitch up.

The newspaper helpfully offered advice of what to have on hand for the coming cold snap. It wasn't a big list. I don't think they're even trying anymore. (They did make a joke about the stores running out of kale like last time, but that's not funny--that really happened.) It was pretty much peanut butter, toilet paper, and extra flashlight batteries. They need to add more items because putting the peanut butter right up next to the toilet paper like that is a little too vivid. And really, who needs to run to the store to stock up on toilet paper? If you don't have enough toilet paper on hand, it's its own emergency.

We're not going to the store to stock up on peanut butter because we are old-school and still have survival skills leftover from yesteryear. By that I don't mean anything as fancy as whatever my mom and her family did on the farm, where they had to drill through snowdrifts to get to the outhouse and shovel coal into the stove and whack random edible critters for dinner. North Dakota winters required a level of stamina we don't much see anymore. When my Uncle Cliff finally sold off his cows, I, a city girl, wondered aloud if he didn't kind of miss them. They were cute. He was a mild-mannered and pleasant man and his response was both louder and more vehement than I'd ever expected from him. The upshot was no, he did not kind of miss his cows. Sixty years of walloping their butts into the barn for milking every single, uh, blessed day, twice a day, in all kinds of weather was quite--as it turned out--enough. Thank you.

No, our skills are not of that caliber, and neither are we. However, if we're hungry, we will walk to the grocery store. This is because we are very good at walking and willing to do it, and also we live within three miles of several grocery stores. We live in a walkable place on purpose. We walk to the bigger store with backpacks and if it were not for the occasional kitty litter run or a sale on canned goods, we wouldn't drive at all.

Also, we'll be okay if the store's card readers are on the fritz. We have cash. On hand. Because we're boomers.

If the grocery store runs out of food we could be in a bit of trouble after a while, but it's nothing we anticipate. What we are supposed to do is be prepared with at least three weeks of provisions in case of the massive catastrophic earthquake they've been promising us, and no, we don't seem to have done anything about that. But we do live next to a person who is prepared and we've been very very nice to her over the years.

It's a plan.

Beating The Spread

Dave bought peanut butter last March and has been complaining about it ever since. It was a Costco purchase, though, so at least we had a whole lot of it. He soldiered through it, sandwich after sandwich, griping all the while. Presumably we could have thrown it out or given it away or made bird food out of it but none of that occurred to us, because we both have Acquired Great Depression Syndrome. It's different from our parents' original GDS. For instance, I have no problem squandering a hundred bucks on a dinner, but I'll unfold dried used Kleenex and use it again. There was probably a generation brought up in the '80s that tosses stuff away willy-nilly, but now we have a whole new generation that is frugal out of necessity, many members of which economize on laundering.

Anyway, Dave finally got through the peanut butter sometime in September and no sooner was the jar rinsed and in the recycling bin than we got a little postcard in the mail. It was a recall notice for peanut butter purchased in March. Because of salmonella. "I knew I had a touch of being violently ill for the last six months," Dave said. Everything makes sense in retrospect, which is where most of us live.

It is an interesting thing about human beings that we grow up accumulating quirks and addictions and coping mechanisms, and then we spend much of the rest of our lives trying to solve ourselves. Maybe we're not nuts; maybe we just got into some bad peanut butter. Our storyline changes throughout the years depending on prevailing villains, of which there is a constant supply. That's it, we say. That's why I'm this way. It's because of my mother. Or wheat. Even if we can't fix anything, it feels better to have constructed a rationale. And it's easier to come up with reasons for being an asshole, say, than to just quit being an asshole.

By the time we're fully grown adults, we have assembled a whole instruction kit to go with ourselves, and we socialize by reciting it to each other. We read each other our own captions. "Middle child and a vitamin D deficiency," we'll say, shaking hands, and our friend will reply "dude! Undiagnosed Lyme Disease and attachment anxiety. Beer?" and the party is on. No matter how bad things are, we always feel better with a good explanation. It will evolve over time, as new discoveries present themselves and make the rounds in the talk shows and the internet. Chronic fatigue gives way to fibromyalgia, which gets pushed aside by food allergies. By age forty, most of us have a serviceable working narrative. We've pinpointed our positions on the autism spectrum and have located dietary culprits and genetic predispositions, and any unsettled foibles can be addressed at our next doctor's visit, because we've jotted down a number of pharmaceutical wonders that just might be right for us.

It makes sense to try to puzzle out the things that trouble us, especially if it leads to a plan to fix things. Every now and then we even achieve a breakthrough. But sometimes our habit of introspection does us in. We reanimate our own anxiety until it's permanently coiled up and ready to strike. It spins and it spins. A person can have all kinds of good reasons to be fearful but the fear itself rarely helps anything. We might as well let it go if we can, because it all spins out of the same place, and there's no fixing it. Sometimes things run smooth and sometimes crunchy, but we've all got only so much peanut butter, and then we're going in the recycling bin.