One snowflake Bow Tie o’ the Day. Four snowflake Ties o’ the Day. Just snowflakes.
I have almost nothing to say about snowflakes except that I love watching them fall to earth– especially when I’m watching them through a picture window, as I’m sitting in a toasty house eating ice cream. Hills of ice cream are the only cold things I want to experience. The cold that snow needs in order to survive makes me cold. That’s all it does for me.
I certainly don’t enjoy winter sports, although I have tried most of them– just in case I liked one enough to suffer through the freezing part. There is no sport or activity of any kind that I enjoy participating in enough to play/do it in cold weather. I’ll watch winter sports and programs on TV, and I’ll smile at how grand the background snow looks, but that’s as close as I’ll get to being anywhere actually in it.
Dad felt the same as I do about cold weather. Whenever we watched M*A*S*H*, if it was an episode in which the characters were freezing, it gave Dad the shivers and made him cringe. Dad had to mention it every time one of those episodes played. But he liked the show enough to keep watching despite the story’s temperature.
Dad died in the first week of December, in 2007. It was cold, and there was snow on the ground. Dad would have liked to survey the winter scene from his picture window in his own home, in his own chair, while he read The Salt Lake Tribune and dozed off. And he would have enjoyed driving through the chilly landscape in his warm truck, characteristically on the lookout for coyotes. He wouldn’t be doing either of those things anymore.
Despite the gray cold, the Delta cemetery was a picturesque scene on the day we let Dad go to his nap in the ground. As his casket was lowered into the earth, I wished I’d been able to swaddle him in his favorite quilt Mom made for him. It was lavender. And it would have kept him warm.
Holiday Tie Tally: 10 Bow Ties. 19 Neckties. So far.