With no end in sight, I can’t do this for another year. Something has to change. I can’t control any of my chaos, but I can control the size of my ass.
Years go by and I’m here still waiting,
Withering where some snowman was.
—TORI AMOS
JANUARY HAS ALWAYS been my favorite month. No one expects much of January, and there’s an excuse to hibernate and retreat. I love the isolation and retreat that are easily offered excuses from routine activities. In particular, January 2008 is an extremely cold and snowy month. Which says a lot considering January in the North Country is nothing short of arctic in a typical year.
I lose track of the other days of the week in that month, but I remember with accuracy that the kids do not have a single Wednesday of school in January and into the first weeks of February too. Either we’re snowed in, or the temperatures don’t rise above negative twenty and the school buses are deemed inoperable.
Wednesdays are meeting days. Steering committees, community leader pontificating sessions, family issues tracker meetings, blah-blah. I relish the legitimate excuse to hole up in our house and immerse myself in watching Caillou and Napoleon Dynamite with the kids. Our full schedules weigh on us; both the battalion families and my family are overscheduled. We need respite from the carnival of activities we’ve created to keep everyone moving forward and not allow them to dwell and stew and perseverate about the fact that we still have three seasons to go. Spring is months off. Then summer and another fall and possibly another snowfall before the men return. We don’t want anyone thinking too hard about that. Busy is better. I crave the tiny reprieve from my hamster wheel, though.
Deep into winter, my neighbor and partner in crime, Mira, asks me if I want to train to run the Army Ten-Miler race in Washington, D.C., in October. She assumes I’ll immediately say “no way,” as I’m not a runner. Unless it’s to be first in line for dessert or a cocktail. This is January 2008, and I am the heaviest and most out of shape I have ever been. Nothing fits. Stress makes some people gaunt; it makes me fat. I accept Mira’s offer, and it catches her off guard. No more pints of Ben & Jerry’s go to bed with me each night—pints that I force myself to finish because I don’t feel like trudging downstairs to put them away. Gradually learning to run gives me a focus beyond my marriage, which has been ignored by the weight of both of our roles. Running is loathsome, but I won’t let it beat me, in the way that so many other things in life are beating me. No one runs outside with the snow, and the gym is just another venue for perfumed turds to pontificate. But in the gym, I keep my eyes down and focus. The treadmill is my salvation from chaos. No small talk. No minutia. I need one turd-free zone, even if I have to be rudely antisocial.
It’s easy to throw in my headphones and lose myself in the maximum volume allowed by my iPod.
Anyone perfect must be lying, anything easy has its cost.
Anyone plain can be lovely, anyone loved can be lost.
NOW EVEN THE men from Bare Naked Ladies seem to be singing to me. Something about this point in my life feels strangely as if so many of my favorite songs are directed right at me. Speaking to me. Telling me to do something, but what? Run. That must be it. Because it’s all I can control right now and for the foreseeable future.
Running on the treadmill floods my mind with memories. The memories that are like the guest room in our house. The room we do not speak of, is what I call it. It is full of piles of shit that don’t fit neatly elsewhere in the house. I stuff it into the guest room and keep the door closed. Out of sight, out of mind. Heaven forbid I have a visitor and have to deal with that room.
The dead of winter offers a fabulous excuse for why I won’t run outdoors. I can’t pace myself on the road; I sprint and get winded. On the treadmill, I can set the pace and stop thinking about what’s around the corner and let my guard down.
I lose almost thirty pounds by the time the race arrives ten months later. Although I eat far less, I still pop the cork on many wine bottles, sometimes alone and sometimes with the perfumed turds. It feels good to not be alone in this, although, in private, we each fight our own demons.
Running for the first time in years, I can’t help but think about Sackets Harbor and the winter and spring Jack spent in Somalia in 1993. Feeling myself pant for breath took me back there, back to teaching those cheesy aerobics classes in the old barracks gym right on the old Madison Barracks. When I look out the window from my treadmill, my eyes fall on a heavy blanket of thick snow, just like in Sackets. Only these buildings on post are new, nothing like Sackets with its towering barracks from over a hundred years ago. The buildings that saw everything and refused to give up to time and storms. The snow only made the buildings look that much stronger and sturdier. As if they were rundown and weary, yet deeply unaffected by the winter’s fist. Stubborn and determined. I wonder if some of that rubbed off on me over the years.
The winter Jack was gone to Somalia, the snow was so deep and the temperatures so low that I only left the house for a few reasons. To walk to the mailbox hoping for letters from Jack, which would come about every two weeks and would arrive in a rubber band of ten to fifteen letters at a time. Just like in some old Lifetime movie. A stack of letters covered with grime and smears from his life in Somalia, carried through the perfect white snow on the other side of the globe to our frigid little apartment. The letters held together with a simple rubber band. I always saved the rubber bands, even though I knew the mailroom dude on this end put them on and it wasn’t like they had real sentimental value. Just sentimental by association. But I kept them just the same. Maybe I went a little bonkers with all the solitude of that winter.
Every day, I bundled up to walk our dog Justice, a Bouvier des Flandres, around the polo field and to dump my little bag of daily trash in the dumpster by the tennis courts. These were the pre-UGG days in the North Country, so what boots did I wear? I can’t even remember. Justice loved the snow, the deeper the better. Some days we were brave enough to trust the ice-covered bay and skid around the edges, right behind the abandoned buildings. I worked a few days a week teaching aerobics in one of the rundown buildings that had been converted into a gritty and very barren gym. I always walked to work; the gym was just across the polo field, on the water.
The little family-run grocery store was right next to the mailroom, so I rarely had reason to dig out my peppy black sports car from under the pile of snow left by the morning plow.
Sackets Harbor has a booming downtown scene now; back then, I think one restaurant stayed open all winter, the Harbor Master. A couple fledgling boutiques, but that was it. I rarely went downtown anyway. Everything I needed was right there in the old barracks. A sleepy and introspective period in my life, but I loved walking around the barracks and getting lost in my imagination of what it must have looked like just two or six generations earlier. Those buildings had eyes, personalities. I was barely twenty-two years old and felt like I’d been dumped in The Shining on some days, but it was our first home as a couple and full of defining memories. I couldn’t wait to start my life with Jack; in those days, I didn’t go ahead and start without him like I do now. In those days, deployment lengths weren’t predetermined (though they were shorter), so wives and families were held in perpetual limbo. The soldiers could be home next week, or next summer. We just had to wait it out, surrender control. Whenever I look at pictures of the old barracks, I can’t help but go right back to that time in my mind, and how something as simple as a place stayed with me and sustained me for so long—long after we left Sackets in our rearview mirror.