Mar. 12, 2006 - 18:07 MST

COCOONING

It's been snowing off and on for a day or two, cold and sometimes a cutting wind along with it. About normal for this time of year in this area.

Heather went out to Sunday School and Church this morning and stopped by the store on the way home. By the time she got home the snow was coming down thickly. We had no place we had to go - - - so we didn't.

When I would pass in and out of the big room it was quite noticable through the windows that the snow would continue for some time.

I spent time reading journals, answering e-mail and Googling around.

Tantalizing odors came wafting in from the kitchen and not long after that Heather called me to come set the table.

I came out to do so and it was like going back to my early childhood, boiled cauliflower, heated beets - buttered for me and with vinegar for her, and a rice with noodles and melt in your mouth chicken.

That was part of it, some of my favorite foods from childhood. But what put the sweet stuff on the cake was the whiteboard of foggy windows all steamed up from her cooking and washing clothes also. All of a sudden my baliwick was that small two room house that had one room to sleep or visit in and the other room with a big coal range, a dinette set and sideboard with a sink and sinkboard in one corner of that that I existed in many years ago.

It was a small place, but I loved it, with the bookshelves over the windows. Dad had his place by the window, his Governor Winthrop desk set at right angles to the dinette table, Mom sitting at the end of the table nearest the stove, and me sitting away from the windows where it was warmest.

I remember Sundays as twilight came along and our light was turned on, the frosted panes of glass making me feel protected from the hurts of the world somehow. Comfy and cozy it was for me. Dad stoking the fire now and then to keep it warm for us. Each of us doing something different, but being together as a family too.

Sometimes it would be games, sometimes Dad would read us poetry from his book, I think Longfellow -- the man who wrote Hiawatha, it was. His voice and delivery was perfect for reading poetry and I would sink into the environment he was relating. Those were the years that I became interested in stamp collecting as Dad had a collection of U.S. Revenue stamps. Many a night I would be soaking, drying or sorting stamps from Mission Mixtures, or perhaps putting stamps into my album, using stamp hinges. In that small, comfy snug house was my entire world of that time. Sometimes I would see Mom look my way and wink at me whild Dad would be absorbed in his paperwork. Seems as if she was always darning my socks, once in a while Dads but mostly mine. Think I had sandpaper toes they way I holed them so soon. I used to watch her do needlepoint and she would let me put in some stitches, but I gave that up when I saw that what I had done had to be pulled out and redone.

A teakettle on the stove would put out enough steam to keep the windows opaque and, long before I heard the word, I gloried in COCOONING . . . . . . . . . . .

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