Their saucer sleds are orange and green.
“The gween one is mine,” my two-year-old claimed as we pulled the vehicles from the shed on an icy morning in America.
The five-year-old jumped right on, riding the orange one down the driveway and into the street.
“Daddy, I can go in the street because there’s no cars today,” he said.
Bad weather makes rules elastic.
Last night we opened a two-person tent in the living room and slept in sleeping bags because, well, why the hell not? He’s had more hot chocolate in 48 hours than he’s had all winter, following the very same logic.
It’s not just kids. Yesterday morning I walked into Home Depot at 9 a.m. and saw a line of anxious adults. A new shipment of generators had just arrived, and employees worked with great speed to cut the stretch wrap and free the $829-plus-tax engines.
“You might use it two times a year,” a worker told a man who seemed to be second-guessing his decision. “That’s cheaper than a hotel.”
Shifty is the line between rational and rationalizing.
I wondered whether I should join them and add a $1,000 generator to my credit card, which still carries some extra Christmas weight, and decided against it. As the sleet tap-dances on my roof while I write this, I wonder if I’ll regret it.
I got home yesterday with batteries and some weather-stripping. But the world doesn’t pause just because the weather does.
Perhaps you encountered the same duality: Soon a different sort of headlines rolled in, telling me that at roughly the same hour I was at Home Depot, federal officers in Minneapolis fired upward of 10 shots at a 37-year-old ICU nurse. Officials shoveled explanations too quickly to be convincing. Many viewed the videos and saw something much darker on the horizon. Even The Wall Street Journal, after conducting a frame-by-frame analysis, ran a headline that said, “Videos Contradict U.S. Accounts of Minneapolis Shooting by Federal Agents.”
I returned to the threat of nasty weather, which made more sense.
A cloud sprinkles a snowflake toward earth. On its way down it encounters higher temperatures and fundamentally changes in shape and form, then slips into another layer of sub-freezing temperatures in its final descent, leaving a mixed-up mess for those of us bound to the ground by gravity.
This city is a fine place to live through such moments. No longer transient, Charlotte stopped for the ice, and its people became groups of neighbors and neighborhoods. My group text messages today have been all, “Still have power in Windsor Park!” or “Sledding in Ballantyne!”
The weather works that way. It threatens us in advance and sends us scrambling to big box stores. But then, when it arrives, it becomes simpler and shared.
In my neighborhood yesterday, just before the storm, a church held a memorial service for a cat named Winston. About 30 people arrived to share stories about their encounters with him. Winston was an outside cat, adopted by a little girl this past spring, who became a gift to anyone with a front door. On quiet Sunday mornings we’d hear a meow and know who it was.
A couple of weekends ago, Winston was crossing a street and a car hit him. His family rushed him to the emergency vet, but couldn’t save him. They were devastated. But over the next few days, people kept his memory alive with stories. Kids at a daycare where he once roamed paid tribute to him.
“Even though he belonged to us and had his home under our roof,” Winston’s obituary reads, “he found belonging and a home with everyone he came across — a shared gift, a collective responsibility, a small soul who carried something much larger.”
I thought about Winston today at the neighborhood park, while more headlines from afar rolled in and kids from the neighborhood sped down hills. He’d have loved the world in front of him.
We took our saucer sleds.
One orange, one green.
The green sled stayed tucked under our younger one’s arm. After a while, I offered to carry it for him and he said, “No, it’s mine.”
The orange sled went to work, skidding down a sleet-covered hill. After a while, it cracked, and I asked if our oldest if he wanted to quit and go home, and he said “No, not yet.”
The orange sled is beat to hell now. Green’s in perfect shape.