feldman

Severe winter weather in Michigan is an ice storm coating everything an inch thick, with downed trees and power lines aplenty. Severe winter weather in Michigan is a nor'easter out of the Yukon that will freeze-dry your face on the ten steps to your car so effectively that when your lips crack, the warm moisture of your own blood is soothing.

Severe winter weather in Connecticut is ten inches of snow overnight and gusts of 50 mph as you try to push your car up a gentle hill of shifting snowbanks. That's going to take some adjustment of thinking.

I'm also not used to the landscape--I come from a land plowed smooth by glaciers, and the craggy improbable hills with their tenacious bushy trees look like so many enlarged bonsai plantings amid stacked lego buildings. Lousy with old stone churches. Some of which have been repurposed into random businesses. There's more diversity than I expected, which is mainly due to our choice of venues, but the white people are way more caucasian here. Shallow cheeks with sharp cheekbones, narrow pointy noses with bridges like prows, long faces and limbs, to the point where I suspect 'Irish' is still a bit ethnic in some circles.

I bought a toilet seat at a hardware store that had the Zagat guide by the cashier for impulse purchase.

So things don't look right and I'm at loose ends. I did as well as I could this last term, living in my folks' attic with my four-year-old while we rebooted our life using dynamite and chutzpah, but now the dust is settling and I'm no longer under the gun of having too much to do and being spread too fucking thin. I've spent the last two weeks sleeping, doing dishes and unpacking. Catching up on dream sleep. Trying to process the struggles and the losses of the last four months. Failing.

I dreamt I was combing rocks out of my scalp, lodged in the skin like they sink into the tideline of a beach, pretty agates polished smooth.

I left Michigan in a flurry of car repairs, final exams and the last frayed bit of mental rope I had left. I found out later that if I'd watched the news the night before I left, I would have heard about the murder of a friend from work. Cold-blooded, heartbreaking, unfathomable. And people wonder why I'm a misanthrope.

I've got nothing right now. I should be looking at local schools. I ache to be writing. The house is still a mess and snowbanks have been plowed around the car, and I'm at the eastern edge of a timezone I used to be on the western edge of so dusk starts at four which is ridiculous. I'm ragged and spent and tucked into the couch under a cat.