One thing this rotten winter has given me back is the desire to read again.  For weeks about the only reading I could do was the Kingston paper and the weekend New York Times - the Times took me all week.  Anyway, the other day I picked up a book because of a review I had read in NY Times on it.  The review was on a book of short stories and referenced an earlier edition of short stories Birds of America and I thought I have that book somewhere.  I remembered taking it to Cape Cod with a whole pile of books that I just never got to.  Anyway, I found it and am enjoying the stories and her writing.  I just finished one about a woman taking a trip to Ireland with her mother to kiss the Blarney Stone - something Chrissy and I did 30 years ago.  What a risky thing to do, climb spooky, curving stones stairs up to the top of the castle, all opened, no roof, then lean backwards, clinging to two iron rods and kissing a stone, after hundreds of others before us.  The local boys told Chrissy  and me "don't worry, we clean it off every night for the tourists" and we knew they didn't use water.

I stopped reading at night quite a while ago, and as I have told you Timmy and I listen to audio books  at night.  Something about being read to is very relaxing and takes one back to childhood memories of snuggling close to Bucky while she read to me about Curious George.  We are currently listening to Lemony Snicket's stories  of the Baudelaire orphans.  Before this we had listened to the Hunger Games and the last one gave me bad dreams.  So we went back to something more innocent and although the orphans go from bad to worse, it makes me laugh out loud sometimes.  The Wide Window had Aunt Josephine in it, and she was afraid of everything.  Don't touch the door knob, it might shatter and cut you, Don't stand near the refrigerator, it might fall over and crush you.  Bucky was like this too, nothing was safe, everything had a hidden danger, so I would nod in agreement, giggle, and take another sip of fundador. 

So that's the way the days have been passing, back with my nose in a book, and the sorrowful, wretched life of the orphans to put me asleep.

Bucky called February "death Month", but I am thinking of a lot of bad words to put in front of February besides death.  The other day the weather man said that 20 degrees is the "new 40 degrees" - this because our thermometer goes from below zero to ten, or in the teens, never above the beautiful 32 degree mark.  And more snow coming tomorrow.

Not that snowy Februarys are new to me.  In 1969 when Paul was in the hospital with a broken leg, it snowed so much our road was closed off.  They had to bring in a back loader and dig it out, little by little.  And then there was the year it snowed so much, I went nuts and put up a sign on the porch window, next to the Valentine decoration, saying "We need more snow".  My neighbor Mary Alice still talks about that.  Or the February it snowed so much I booked a four day cruise for myself and girls.  We had a great time, got back to Miami and were told that it had snowed for four straight days in New York and all the airports were closed.  The airport finally opened, but as we landed in Stewart it was lit up with plows clearing the runway.  Maria mistook this for ambulances and yelled "we're gonna crash", but we made it home all right.

Snow rage is the new term - people yelling at the plows as they go by and push snow into their newly shoveled driveway.  One man actually attacked the plow with his shovel.  Another brought out a rifle and ordered the plow to go away.  I'm not that bad, not yet, anyway.

I remember hearing of an incident in Texas where a wife killed her husband by throwing a watermelon out of the window onto his head.  She was cleared of any punishment because the weather had been over 100 degrees for several weeks, and she used that as her justification.  "I couldn't take the weather or him any longer."  Well, I think days and days of near zero weather can do the same thing.

Timmy is a picky eater.  I don't mean he's hard to please, I mean he picks out the best things in the dinner so that the leftovers are always missing some essential item.  For example:  meatball soup without any meatballs, kielbasa and sauerkraut with no kielbasa.  The other day I made eggplant appetizer with eggplant, celery, onions, tomatoes and best of all - chopped up black olives.  The black olives are my favorite part of the dish.  Sure enough, the leftovers looked different - no black olives left.

Next Sunday is Super Bowl Sunday, the day when more home violence occurs than any other day of the year. This they blame on a combination of alcohol, heightened feelings about the teams, and the violence seen and approved of on television by millions of people.    I have a feeling, unless it warms up significantly, the hot lines will be full of calls this year. 

I fell yesterday in our driveway, slipped on the ice and went down hard on my left side.  I got up and seemed ok, but it sent a lot of memories of 17 years ago spinning in my head.  I had been in a car accident on January 8 broken pelvis in three places, big contusion on the top of my head, and bruised all over.  I ended up in Albany Medical, and three vivid memories flooded me.

Mean Nurse:  It was a rough night, I had an intestinal problem and had probably rung for the nurse at least 4 times.  I couldn't move, so that meant a call for a nurse with a bed pan.  After the last request she put away the bed pan, went to the window and threw it wide open.  I was high up, 5 or 7 stories anyway, and for a moment I thought she was going to throw me out.  But she tucked the blankets all around me tightly, and said "Now go to sleep".  I wasn't upset, it was quite pleasant to feel the cold air on my face and be so warm and snug.  And I fell asleep,

The Hospital is on Fire:  One night I awoke to the loud sound of a fire alarm, and the smell of smoke.  Then someone quietly shut my bedroom door snugly.  What was this?  I was wide awake when I heard the sirens and saw, one, then two, then three fire trucks  roar under my window.  Oh, God, I thought, we're on fire.  I reached for the phone, my first impulse was to call home and tell them I loved them and goodbye.  I dialed Ria's number and it rang, busy, busy.  Who could she be talking to at this hour?  Then I remembered the computer, when the computer was on, the phone was busy.  Anyway, the alarm silenced, there was no uproar, no panic voices, so I again reached for the buzzer and rang the nurse's station.  "Are we ok?" I asked.  Why? - the nurse seemed surprised,  "Oh, the alarm, someone burnt toast in the kitchen and the fire company has to come and check it out if the smoke alarm goes off".  So that was that - and thank God I didn't get Ria, she would have been as nuts as me.

Dead Bodies and Scooch:  One night after midnight they woke me up and said I had to go to X-ray.  Why I asked, the doctor had never mentioned this.  Anyway, I had to go, it took two nurses to lift the sheet I was on and at the count of three, oompa me to the stretcher.  An aide pushed me into an elevator and we went down, down into a dark hall.  There were two other stretchers in the dimly lit hall, both holding body bags and I begged to know where I was.  The x-ray technician said "in the cellar, next to the morgue.  Anyway, he rolled me next to the table and told me to get on.  I can't move I told him, and he looked at me and tiredly said "scooch".  I don't know how to scooch, I said, and he wiggled his body to show me how to do it.  It took a lot of scooching to get on the table, but I was motivated to get the hell out of there and back into my bed, so I did it, and after a few minutes I scooched back on the stretcher.  By that time, the aide had come back for me, and I closed my eyes so not to see my friends in the hallway.

So today, I am very careful - not more falls for me, no hospital beds, no scooching.  Is there such a word?

When I wrapped the mustard seed necklace that Sabra had pointed out to me as a Christmas wish, I put it in what I thought was an empty jewelry box, with a thin later of cotton in the bottom.  Christmas morning in her house she said, "I don't think you meant to give me the necklace in that box" and she showed me what I had missed.  Written on the inside top was "Regina Lillia", and the date and time of her birth, and tucked under the cotton was her dried, tiny belly button.

Over the years, I have been collecting my grandchildren's belly buttons when possible.  Sometimes they were lost or fell off in the hospital, but I still have managed to save some, thus the strange occurrence at Christmas morning.  Ava's belly button is well marked, and in a plastic bag.  One is in a beautiful wooden box, but no name - I think that is one of Paul's boys.  Helene had sent me an article in the Smithsonian that it is a Japanese custom to save the belly button in a wooden box.  This is thought to bring good luck to the mother-child relationship.  The box though was too air tight, and the belly button is the strangest one.  Then there is one in a Magnesium vitamin bottle - no name, and some in plain small cardboard boxes.. I know they are all one of the grandchildren, I just don't know who goes to who.  Leave it to Maria to do it right.

I am not sure why I started this - I think it had something to do with Bucky's keeping Maria's 50 cent piece that I had taped over her belly button to make it go in.  Bucky found it in her house and kept it for good luck.  I had learned this trick of taping a 50 cent piece from Bucky.  It was commonly done  in her day to aid in getting a nice insie button.  When my mother had the twins the doctor told her to tape a quarter to each of the twin's belly buttons - half the price for two. 

I just looked up the custom on the internet (you can find anything on the internet) and sure enough, saving the umbilical cord piece was done in African cultures, Native American and most notably, the Japanese.  Now it's a Clay Hill Road tradition - and who knows, maybe I will be getting some more of these relics this year. 

Too cold to venture outside, blasts of artic air, so I sit in the window, pretending I am in Florida, watching the birds - I call them "my birds" because I feed them.  A red bellied woodpecker is on the deck, finding uneaten sunflower seeds that are stuck in the cracks of the deck.  He finds one, then flies to the deck, to open it and eat it.  In the summer I clean out these cracks with a dull kitchen knife, so it makes me smile to see him doing the job for me.  The kitchen timer goes off and I am reminded of probably the weirdest thing that happened last summer.

Every morning Timmy and I do the crossword puzzle, I make a copy so we each have our own to work on.  I started to notice every morning at 8:30 a quiet beep beep that went off.  "Do you hear that beep?" I asked Timmy.  "What beep?"  He couldn't hear it.  The next day I heard it again.  Again, he didn't hear it, claiming "you're losing it" and maybe I was.  I thought it came from the kitchen so I checked the cabinets for something, anything that would beep every morning at the same time.  I found an old calculator that was suspect, but nothing there.  The next morning I heard it again...ran into the kitchen and this time took everything out of the sewing cabinet and even Timmy checked his gym bag for anything with a timer set for 8:30am.  He still didn't hear it, but I was so adamant that he kind of believed me.  That night I told Sabra about the mysterious beep and she promised to come down the next morning and help us get to the bottom of this beep.

The next morning, there we sat, the three of us waiting for 8:30 and then---the beep.  She heard it too, and we all ran into the kitchen.  I opened the drawer with the meat thermometer in it - was that it?  But Sabra was staring at Timmy, and said "Tim, the beep is on you - what do you have in your pocket?", But he just pulled out his old wallet, that 25 years ago a co-worker had thrown into the garbage.  "Not that", said Sabra, and started to laugh.  "It's your watch".  He held it to his ear, and finally heard the beep, beep.  Mystery solved.

That afternoon he figured out how to unset the watch - a watch he had gotten from the free table at the gym, and the object that had baffled me for days. 

The last day of 2013, where does the time go?  As usual I want to wrap up the year relating some of my best memories.  (1)  Going to Henry's 1st grade class and talking about my "thread art". The kids were so cute, and so interested and I was thrilled that Henry picked me to be the spokesperson on his birthday week.  (2) The cicadas - from the first hint of them, the clay formations under the deck, until the exciting day they first started to appear on my neighbor's tree, I was hooked.  Sabra took a million pictures and made me a book for Christmas of them and of the tattoos that she and Laura got of the cute noisy bug now gone for a 17 year nap.  (3) Going to Niagara Falls with Paul and his family.  Being in the car with them for hours.  Zach lost his technical gadgets for bad behavior and he and I resorted to passing notes back and forth between the seats.  "Texting the old fashion way", he called it.  (4)  Cape Cod again, one of my favorite times.  This year a new cottage, small but cute and the owner Ron gave me a significant refund for not having a hot water heater for two days.  Getting money back while on a vacation is a rarity.  Maureen also taught me my new favorite bad word, a word she learned from a three year old.  (5)  Street painting with Laura, Sabra and family, Atticus and Regina, and Regina's painting on the front page of the local news.  Joel G, while making the usual announcements, made a point of saying that I was to be thanked for starting the festival....a nice recognition that made me feel good.  (6) Watching the Crazy Family Part II that Sabra made for all of us at Christmas.  Rachael as a baby, and then a little tipsy talking about Ariel, the Little Mermaid  in Cape Cod.  Glimpses of Maria and hearing her voice, all the family, wonderful.  (7) I'll just say FAMILY...they can drive you nuts, but where would you be without them?  Happy and Healthy New Year.