The Pros and Cons of Being a Recluse

On the up side, there is ample time to groom the cat. And there are all those books to be read. And the knitting. Here is my latest project (note the holiday pencil added for scale).

But then there is all that time to think. I know I'm shrinking into my little world of one when I wake up thinking about things that make me feel like pulling the pillow over my head and going back to sleep. Take this morning for instance. It's a lovely winter morning, birds are flittering in the tree in the backyard. The tree I can now see through my new sliding glass door. The polydactyl cat is eying the birds from the end of my bed. It's Wednesday and I don't have to go to work. . .until January. And yet.

And yet, I open up the day with thoughts about my mother. Why did she send me an e-note to" take a look" at her new family tree on Ancestry.com, if I'm not on it? Why, then, send me one of those mass-mailing holiday letters (the kind that tells all the people you don't care about what the people you do care about have been up to all year), again noting the family tree? And why does any of this surprise and bother me?

So I get up, brew coffee, ponder my options. Return to bed and wallow in the sad reminder that my mother seems vested in creating a reality in which I was never born. Or, return to bed and watch, through the new sliding glass door (yes, this is my favorite home improvement), my twelve-year-old border collie sneak about the yard eating poop.

Whatever the choice, going back to bed is the obvious first move. I crawl back under the covers, turn on the laptop and lo! Someone wants to friend me on Facebook. I have an e-vite to a holiday party. And a comment on my blog. And look, the border collie is rolling with blissful abandon on a turd. Life is full of magic after all. So, suck it Mom.

Here's my reality. Being happy in the winter requires me to redirect my thoughts constantly. It's like driving an old car with faulty alignment, the kind that wants to veer off the road into a ditch, so to keep straight you have to fight it. My brain is an old mis-aligned jalopy, especially in winter. And yet. . . I'm still on the road.