She loved winter, snow, and ice

Last night was a little too December 2006 for me, only with snow.

Confession: I love snow. I do. I love snow, and winter, and storms, and ice, and the kind of freezing temperatures that call us to sit inside with hot drinks and good books. I could write hundreds of entries about my love affair with this time of year. However, I do not love power outages, or worrying about loved ones who are traveling on icy roads, or driving on icy roads myself. We were hit with a fairly impressive storm this week -- impressive for Seattle, that is -- and yesterday morning when I made my way to school the roads were already thick with ice and slush, with more snow continuing to fall. Unsurprisingly, the kids were released a couple of hours early. Temperatures continued to fall throughout the afternoon, and by dinnertime the wind was flinging snow and leaves and tiny evergreen branches against our windows.

Then, shortly after seven o'clock, just after we had finished with dinner, the power went out. I immediately told Matt that I didn't particularly care about anything else in the freezer, but by God, we were going to save my frozen breastmilk stash. I'm still haunted by the memory of pouring it all down the drain after the Great Windstorm of 2006, in which we lost power for three days. By the time I remembered my stash, it had thawed. And I cried. And I swore, AS GOD AS MY WITNESS, I WILL NEVER WASTE BREASTMILK AGAIN. After I had finished freaking out about that, I decided that there was no immediate need to panic, considering the temperature in the garage was well below freezing and the freezer hadn't been opened, so instead we busied ourselves lighting candles and digging out all the flashlights in the house.

Suzannah thought the whole thing was a grand adventure. She finished up her bath by lamplight and prepared to go "camping" in her room with one of our thick sleeping bags. We handed Isaac a flashlight to play with, and he was equally as thrilled -- best toy ever.

I was pretty much ready for bed by eight o'clock. Not only was there not much to do, but I was so anxious and tense -- but trying not to show it -- that my body kicked into sleepy survival mode. I kept peering out the windows; lights were out everywhere, but the sky was eerily bright from all the snow and I could see across our backyard and into our neighbor's. Little swirls of snow kept rising up out of the covered grass, and the tree branches were tossing violently in the gusty winds. Four years ago, we spent the first night of the power outage huddled in bed with six-month-old Suzannah, listening to the winds howling and praying that our huge tree wouldn't fall on our house. We spent the next two nights huddled in bed, bored to death and freezing and eating Sun Chips and Swedish Fish and watching Monty Python and the Search for the Holy Grail on Matt's laptop. We spent the afternoons making grilled cheese and soup on our camp stove in the backyard (Matt) and scrubbing the refrigerator (me). The memories are not altogether unpleasant, but the romance wore off quickly, and I wasn't looking forward to days without power again. Something told me it might be a bit more challenging with a four-year-old and a mobile baby.

I wasn't about to let Isaac sleep alone in his freezing room, so I zipped him into his fleece sleep sack and hunkered down in bed with him, saying a little prayer that he would actually sleep. I was just about to nurse him into sleepyland when the hallway lights came on and the heater roared to life.

But it was a pretty traumatic eighty-three minutes. Luckily, school was cancelled both for today and tomorrow, so I have time to recover.

In other news, during the month of November, I do this crazy thing where I write 50,000 words of very rough fiction, which I blame for my lack of writing here. Since 2003, I have participated in National Novel Writing Month; this is my sixth actual attempt. I finished in 2003, 2004, 2006, and 2008. In 2005, I gave up after 10,000 words because throwing up and sleeping took over my life (I was seven weeks pregnant with Suzannah on November first), and last year I skipped it with the excuse that I was just too pregnant and tired and wasn't sure I would make it to November 30 before I gave birth anyway. I skipped 2007 altogether, choosing instead to continue revising the novel I started the previous November, because I was pretty attached to my characters. I still haven't abandoned it, although it hasn't gotten much attention in the last two years. In 2008, I decided at the very last minute to participate again, despite telling myself that I was going to skip it because I didn't have anything to prove. I can write 50,000 words of crappy fiction in a month, and I actually do write at other times of the year, so I didn't need it! But I succumbed on November first anyway, and once I started, I had to finish, because I'm stubborn and weirdly competitive like that.

I had absolutely no intention of doing NaNoWriMo this year. None. I'm busy and I'm stressed and there are plenty of other, more reasonable things I could be doing with my time. But once again, I made the mistake of visiting the site on November first and skimming the message boards, and then I felt all nostalgic, and then I thought, well, I haven't written anything except journal entries for a long time -- it would be good writing practice. And maybe I felt the need to prove to myself that I could be a mother of two children and still write. Maybe not well, but writing is one thing I do that helps me keep breathing. And anyway, 2,000 words a day is not actually an unreasonable amount of writing for people who do it regularly. After all, the only way to write stuff is to write stuff.

Still, I spent most of the first Monday of the month hemming and hawing and having little outbursts about how ridiculous it all is, and I grew increasingly dramatic about it, announcing to my husband that I should just delete everything I'd ever written anyway, it all sucks, I can't write and be a mom and teach, and also THERE IS NO POINT TO ANYTHING IN THE UNIVERSE. At first, he just sighed patiently. By that evening, he was like, OH MY GOD, if you're going to do this all month we will ALL go crazy, so PLEASE JUST GO START WRITING.

So I did. And I'm doing it, mostly at night when the kids are in bed, and I have just over 40,000 words to show for it tonight, on the twenty-third day of November. But I'm pretty sure this is my last year.

Eleven months

Every night now, I nurse Isaac to sleep or to almost-sleep in my arms before I carry him into his room. His head goes down on my shoulder; he fits so perfectly against my neck. He sighs sleepily, heavily. He holds on now, my shirt in his little fists. Or he rests one hand on my left arm, the other hand on my chest.

I close the door behind us; he likes the room dark. I play the same CD for him every night. It's a different one than I used to play for Suzannah; each of my children have their own night music, songs that I associate with particular times in their lives. The songs hold an unbearable sweetness for me. I rock him in my arms, standing up, breathing in his sweet sleepy smell, kissing his warm head, kissing the back of his neck. A few times this last week, I've found myself tearing up -- because I want this moment to last forever, because someday I won't be able to hold him like this, because he sleeps better on his own now, because he's growing so fast, because I just want to keep and hold this, this this this. It is a strange and exhilarating blend of joy and grief.

I hold him for a long time. It's like slow dancing.

The same songs, every night.

Someday, somewhere beyond this moment, I know I will hear these songs again, and I already know how suddenly and deeply they will return me to these nights of holding my infant son in the dark, swaying with him as he snuggles against my shoulder. But for now, it's almost more than I can take to just lie him down, to let go.