Light and Salt

The windchill was -29 when I woke up this morning. When I was younger and I heard adults talking about the windchill, I thought they were saying "windshield," thought there was a scientific test done by measuring the force of the wind against the glass of a car.

Our Honda has no heat. A fact which is, of course, unremarkable in the summer and fall and spring but horrible in the winter. Today, miraculously, the car started but required scraping on both the outside of the windows as well as on the inside so that, by the time I began driving, I was covered in a dusting of frost. After I had driven three blocks, I could no longer see out of any of the windows because my breath had fogged them and everything outside was a ghost-like specter of itself. I thought about the small animals and school children I might kill and then pulled over to the side of the road, turned on the hazard lights, and got back out of the car to re-scrape. When I got back into the car I couldn't shut the hazard lights off, the button stuck or frozen or both, and so I drove home in tears, unable to see but blinking like a warning to everyone else.

I got home and threw the keys on the ground and told Daddy (well, yelled at Daddy) that we are going to get a new car right now. And he sighed and went out to disconnect the lights from the battery because the car was still in the driveway, blinking.

I sat on the couch in my down coat and hat and scarf and cried a little more because it's just that time of year, when everything tastes bitter no matter what you do. You sat facing me on my lap, holding a red convertible, smiling a little, gauging my reaction, then sobering, then reaching forward to touch a tear, something like a chemist, something like a therapist, your static-ey hair side-swept and plastered to your head like a toupee--by which I mean to say, you were a small bright spot, you were light and salt in a season that feels dark and tasteless. And I am grateful for that.