I HATE WINTER
I hate winter.
I love the clothes, I love the food, I love, love a blazing fire. I love to watch a gently falling snow with big fat flakes from the comfort of my sofa snug in a blanket. So to soothe my soul I will find all the things I love about winter and relish them.
One is beef bourguignon, Julia's bouef bourguignon to be precise, served with big fat buttered egg noodles. Our daughter Emmy was curious after watching the movie " Julie & Julia" so one very cold, snowy Sunday last winter I bought all the ingredients, pulled out the CD and Emmy and I watched the movie once again (I’ve, by now, lost count of every time I’ve sat and laughed and cried through this film) and prepared our French soul food repast. Emmy declared the dinner one of her favorite meals and I remember that particular winter's afternoon and the time with my daughter as one of my favorite days.
The trick for enduring anything is finding some element or aspect of it which is pleasant or even desirable and then focusing on that rather than the gestalt of the thing.
Other things I like about Winter:
Steely grey skies shot with amber and rose at sunset.
Sipping warming Marriage Freres Marco Polo tea and munching a biscuit (English not Southern).
Playing a long game of Scrabble while watching the fire.
Snuggling under a warm blanket to "read" (euphemism for napping).
Never getting out of my pj's spending the day ironing napkins or organizing drawers with a marathon of house hunters international jumps from Amsterdam to St. Kitts on the TV
Spending a subfreezing day watching chick flicks, sipping wine with a tray of St. Andre and wheat thins.
I grew up in a small town on the border of Georgia and Tennessee. Snow here froze time, an inch on the ground and nothing moved. Now we’re living near the frozen tundra where the snow starts to fall in late October and doesn’t leave until well into March. I needed to find the pleasure in the winter. It’s taken me a year but I now have a list of things I can rely on to make sure I make it to another year of sparkling, crisp winter wonderland days.
AMAZING FINDS
Sometimes the thrill of the hunt is centered round pounding the hardwood floors of old mercantile buildings turned into multi-dealer bonanzas. Hidden among the Hummel figures and Beanie Babies is the bakelite chicken napkin ring with a paper tag marked fifty cents, an unknown treasure hidden in plan sight. Years ago in one of these antique treasure troves, buried under a collection of LIFE magazines and some machine made polyester quilts was a painted wooden console with a faded tag marked thirty-five dollars.
The shabby chic quality of the piece hadn’t been added to the regional popularity list so it sat unclaimed and unwanted. We laid down our thirty-one fifty (we always get 10%), packed the console into our u-haul and brought it back home.
Now, voila, transformation.
Lit by candlelight it is now the pedestal for our movie watching on those chilly Wisconsin winter nights. Underneath, it hides our printer, stereo, cable box, modem and CD collection with a drape made from a yard and a half of green burlap and a $5 extension rod, an easy solution to an easy life.
WORDS TO LIVE BY
Hearth (hart/h)
noun
Definition 1: The stone or brick floor of a fireplace often extending out into the room, the physical, the tangible, the center of a home that spreads its caressing hands of warmth throughout the house.
Definition 2: Home. Family. The place where love and family burn brightly.
Today’s word is hearth because it’s winter and the flames of our family fire is what we‘re wrapping ourselves up in to keep out the cold on these long January nights
GALLERY
Photo by Andrew Moore
Represented by Yancey Richardson Gallery
646 230-9610
