Another Cold January Morning

It was another cold January morning when Joanna walked outside to the woodshed. Before grabbing an armful of firewood from the pile, Joanna scanned the trees that surrounded the large open yard. They looked so pretty at this early morning hour with the thin layer of flaky snow balancing on the tops of the branches. A trio of cardinals flew off upon being spotted by the bundled up human. Only the sound of their flapping wings, echoing into the denser tree area, disturbed the muffled silence the dusting of snow had provided.

Beyond the treeline, she could see that the pond had thin pieces of ice chunks near the middle and some slushiness near the edges. It gave her pause remembering how it used to ice up completely when she was younger and how, for her and the other neighborhood children, it used to be their own personal skating rink.

Joanna was in her late forties now and living back at the small red house in the rural town. This was her third, and likely permanent, return to the home she had grown up in. The first time she came back as a newly divorced mother of a small toddler. Her parents welcomed and encouraged her back to assist in caring for her young son.

The second time she returned it was because her mother suffered a fall and could no longer take care of her invalid father properly. She thought she would only stay a few weeks, long enough to convince her mother to accept a home health care worker that her insurance plan would have covered. But her mother stubbornly refused to have anyone but family care for her beloved husband of 35 years and Joanna, along with her son Eric, stayed for almost a year.

Before and after the fall, Joanna recalled how matter-of-factly her mother handled the day to day effort involved in being a full time caregiver. Despite arthritis and a growing collection of pharmaceutical bottles of her own, she never complained about arranging her husband's appointments or sorting his pills into the weekly organizer. She never saw her cry under the weight of the burdens that were thrust upon her or feel sorry for herself in any way.

Her father had been set up next to the main living area in a room that used to be his office. When Joanna was small she would play in front of his desk as he took phone calls from clients. The insurance agent had an office in the city but he was able to work from home part of the week thanks to his many rural clients. To Joanna, it seemed that he liked his job very much. He wasn’t talking just to clients, they were his friends and neighbors. There were laughs and anecdotes about people they knew in common and her father never seemed stressed or burdened by the ringing of the work phone.

Her parents never seemed overwhelmed. They always gave the appearance of holding everything together. Of course, her father had a job that paid enough to support their family along with modest investments, vacations, and a pension. Her mother devoted all of her time to her family without having to juggle a career that came with childcare adjustments, unexpected overtime, and occasional threatened layoffs. She didn’t have to schedule an endless list of supervised after school activities along with drop-offs and pick-ups with a father that lived three cities away and had a new wife who added an additional layer of drama.

Joanna was still able to work as a nurse while she was on hiatus from the hospital she normally worked at. She took on a few home care cases at the same time she helped out her parents and was grateful for the flexibility her profession allowed in this situation. But her patients were never like the clients her father spoke on the phone with. They were friendly enough, but there was never that comfortable familiarity that her father seemed to enjoy.

It was hard to imagine that room had ever been an office/playroom with the big hospital bed in there now. It seemed as if the smells associated with hospitals and nursing homes arrived along with the bed, transforming the space forever. Thanks to the trays of pills, a big pile of linens, and a table that contained reachable items, the room had turned into a completely different entity in much the same way her father had changed into a fragile, complaining man after his strokes.

At the time, Eric told her he hated living “out in the middle of nowhere”. He was 12 then and resented being moved out of a school where he had many friends and from a city where there was much to do. Joanna tried to steer him towards the woods that she loved so much when she was his age. There was some momentary interest in playing hockey on the frozen pond that January but with no other pre-teens in the vicinity to bat the puck around with, he quickly retreated to playing video games in his room.

There were frequent disparaging words about her enchanted forest paradise from her bored offspring. He hated rural living and frequently threatened to move out to his father’s. He kept asking when they could move back and complained about every little thing he could complain about.

Joanna had some resentment at the time, not just because he didn’t help out and added more stress to her stressful situation but also for not recognizing the wonderful world out by the pond. Although she’d give anything to have that sullen child back now, at the time she wondered where all his negativity had come from. Sure, things had changed suddenly but the opportunity to live near the woods should have been one of the bright spots in that scenario, at least to Joanna’s thinking.

When she was his age she spent so much of her time outdoors. She enjoyed listening to the chatterings of the small creatures who inhabited the wooded area. There were interesting insects, and strangely shaped plants. Animals were nesting in the trees and there were hundreds of bird calls to be identified and cataloged.

In the summer she and her friends would search for tadpoles and turtles along the edge of the large pond. In the winter they skated on top of it. Her neighborhood friends played games of hide and seek there and built snowmen and forts.

As she made her way back to the house with the logs balancing in her arms, she remembered how they had traipsed through the trees and dreamed up what their futures would be like. They were so hopeful then.

When they sat on the fallen tree, lacing up their ice skates for the pond, they talked about jet packs and robots. They wanted homes like Barbie’s Dreamhouse and a sizable wardrobe like hers as well. Sofia assured the friends that space travel to the moon was going to be commonplace, like getting on an airplane. She would be a pilot, for both, she said. Caren wanted to travel the world. Sofia encouraged her to join her at pilot/astronaut school.

Joanna glanced at her smartwatch. She’d been daydreaming for quite a while out in the cold thinking about the friends she swore she’d know forever. But looking at the smartwatch caused her reverie to continue. It reminded Joanna of Charlene, another one of the ice skating club. Charlene was ahead of her time, dreaming of having a multifunctional wrist device, like the kind Dick Tracy had in the comics, to watch television on. Little did she know, her invention idea would come true, somewhat. She hadn’t factored in that the screen was too tiny to realistically watch anything at length and you’d need earbuds or headphones for any kind of sound quality. Leave it to adult practicality to bring down the excited conjurings of an imaginative child, thought Joanna with a smirk.

She’d lost touch with Charlene, her brother George too. George was the only boy in their age group who lived along the road around the pond. He wanted to be a scientist. Joanna hoped the two of them were well.

Joanna knew, vaguely, that Charlene was a pharmacist now, living somewhere in the southeast. Was she in Florida or the Carolinas? She couldn’t remember. Did she dream of becoming a pharmacist when she was child? Joanna didn’t recall but, really, did any child? Perhaps they should; it was a good, stable profession. Another smile came to Joanna as she considered that children though differently about things like that.

And there was Caren, pretty Caren with her red hair and those ribbons on her dresses. She married a controlling man right out of high school who isolated her from any of her friends, even the ones she’d chased tadpoles with during the days when she wore ribbons on dresses. Was she still with that guy? Was she happy?

Joanna went inside and put a few logs into the wood burning stove. She went to the kitchen to make breakfast for Eric.

After cooking a serving of oatmeal, Joanna put it in the blender to puree it and then swirled in a spoonful of blueberry jam. She carried it into the hospital room that had once been an office and sat down next to Eric. She looked in his eyes while she tried to feed him the fortified cereal, as always, trying to find a sign of recognition.

There was a hint of irony in the fact that of all of her friends from the old neighborhood, she was most likely the only one who was actually working in the profession she’d projected in the days when the ice was strong enough to skate over.

“I guess I'm living the dream, as they say,” she said out loud, though it was somewhat directed at Eric.

He smiled at her as she put another spoonful of oatmeal near his lips. Ever since the accident, he smiled at her all the time. It was one nice thing you could say about his traumatic brain injury.

Aside from that, there were the medical bills from his drunk driving accident. There were constant phone calls trying to arrange full-time care, trying to get her son into a better rehab facility. Because he’d been using her car that day, she had problems with her car insurance company. There were legal problems with the state and the family of his then-girlfriend who was also injured in the accident that cold January morning two years ago.

Things weren’t all that bad, of course. They could always be worse. Having this familiar house that was already set up for an invalid patient had been a blessing. Her neighbors were friendly. She still had a flexible job. Her son smiled at her all the time and there was some hope he would get better.

Joanna looked wistfully outside, through the window in room that used to be an office in the small red house. If you tried hard enough, you could see the water with the broken thin sheets of clear ice floating on top. You could remember what the pond used to look like when it iced over and the ice was thick enough to support the little bodies of child ice skaters. You could remember the dreams of an exciting future world where they would finally be free of their parents and could pursue everything the world had to offer. You could remember the promise of the future and that it would be good.