While my friends back home shovel snow and burrow into their blankets, I debate between a raincoat and a wool sweater.  I might still have mittens somewhere in the bottom of the little cedar chest that a carpenter in Arkansas made for my son before his birth.  I rummaged for something else the other day and saw a couple of warm hats; not the pretty boiled wool kind, but stocking caps that I knitted in the land of cold and ice.  I ought to donate them.  I shoved them further down beneath the summer shawls and my baby brother’s afghan.

The days have already started to lengthen.  We had a week of rain.  If the universe smiles on us, we’ll hit that sweet spot between barely enough water to keep us out of a drought and hopeless bogs of mud for months.  I oiled my new Blundstone boots so I’m ready.

I bought those boots to use with the leg braces that turned out, so far, to be a monumental failure.  I asked the orthotist why she recommended the exact type that now sits like deadweight beneath my twenty-inches of hanging clothes.  She gave me a long-winded explanation that amounted to evasion.  With more probing, I finally concluded that she has no regard for my decades of hard work to stay on my feet.  She figured that I needed about a half yard of hard plastic to replace what she obviously considers to be useless calves.  Sorry, friend; but I’ll keep my own muscles, spasticity and all.   I didn’t say that, of course.  I demurred and said that I would talk with her at my next appointment.  

But the boots work for me, even though they are a size bigger than my customary choice.  It seems that my feet enjoy the extra room.  I tie the laces as snug as they will go and can still wiggle my toes.  I’ve only fallen once in the last month, and that wasn’t my fault, really — the curb by the office at which I work must be a few feet high.  My muscle memory kicked into gear and I landed on my bottom.  I struggled back to vertical and took a few timid steps into the street.  Suddenly, an SUV bore down on me, closing the gap from a block away in seconds.  I screamed and the driver screeched to a stop.  She rolled down her window and hollered, I didn’t see you, why aren’t you in the crosswalk, you idiot woman!  I told her to slow down, it’s a small town, and struggled into my car.  

She was right, of course.  I’ve been hit by a car as a pedestrian twice in my life. once without injury (in a crosswalk) and once resulting in a crushed right leg (not in a crosswalk).  I drove home still shaking from the encounter, wondering if the third time might have been a charm.  I laughed as I traveled across the Rio Vista Bridge, reflecting that the third time getting married didn’t do much for me.  Except, of course, for ruining Valentine’s Day; so, maybe not.

As I rounded the hairpin turn near my home, the sun eased itself into the bank of wispy clouds on the far horizon.  A few minutes later, I sat in my cooling car, thinking about my first winter in the west.  A loose line of cranes slipped through the sky.  In the tree above my neighbor’s house, an owl called to its mate, low, mournful, deliberate.  I stepped onto the slick of damp earth and drew a breath.  To the left, a blaze through the trees announced the impending darkness.  I spent a long minute watching the glow settle beneath the levee.  When night had gathered around me, I collected my thoughts and went inside.

It’s the twelfth day of the one-hundred and twenty-first month of My Year Without Complaining.  Life continues.