Cold Weather, Bad Books, Good Kids

Today is a day I would've emailed Auntie Vi about the weather--the sort of daily chit-chat I miss exchanging with her.

I. Mitten Weather

Daytime temps here are rocketing between 40 and 60ºF (4 to 15ºC).
Not quite freezing at night, but close.
I brought my big Boston fern inside the other day--it's grown a lot, summering on the shady north side. I expect it will now drop leaves like confetti... I don't have a good spot for it, both out of the sun and away from radiators. I hope it will hang on and revive next summer.

The fern came from the house where I cat-sat (cats George & Anna) for four months, two years ago. When I'd gone back to HouseMate's, it was clear that wasn't going to work, and I moved out within three weeks--to the wonderful Apt 320 where I am now.
One sign: she'd turned the dining room table into her computer desk... That was the passive-aggressive way she communicated.

I'd have moved out earlier if it hadn't been Covid-time--with everything shut down, it felt too awkward to make any changes. So I stayed almost three years (with several long house sitting gigs to break it up).
Hard as HouseMate was, we did share overall values, and it'd have been worse living all alone during Covid when there was NOWHERE to go to be around people--no libraries,  coffee shops, movie theaters... You remember!
I was working, but that was not relaxing.

I'm slow to get myself to make big physical changes like moving--or even something easy, like picking up my sunglasses that were ready three months ago but I just picked up yesterday. I have a pair of clip-ons that I love, but bink pointed out I'll want them when it snows and the sun bounces up off it. True. I can keep a pair in two bags, so I always have one.

I'm wearing mittens to bike to work in the morning--and trying to remember not leave them at work because it's warm biking home again.

Medieval people who had to spin thread and weave cloth would not throw out mittens. You may have seen the figures going round about how much a shirt was worth in the Middle Ages? [Here's one estimate--6 days' pay--now it's barely one hour's pay, depending.]

BELOW: Snowball fight! The rabbit hunter (top, right) wears mittens--but people are throwing snowballs with their bare hands.

^ The Month of January, c. 1400, possibly by Maestro Venceslao, Fresco, at Torre Aquila [Eagle Tower], Castello del Buonconsiglio in Trento, Italy

II. The Worst Book

Oh! I wanted to say--Mary Stewart's Nine Coaches Waiting is The Worst Book I've read in ages--a bad mishmash of Rebecca + Jane Eyre. Long, boring, and ludicrous--the heroine, Linda, falls for Raoul, the disturbed tall, dark, & handsome son of the manor, after one night out dancing, even though he attacks her sexually and mocks her for being upset:
"Don't be so Sabine, it was only a kiss."

If "I didn't rape you" is your defense, you might want to check your standards.

But Linda is a governess and she sees Raoul as a "lonely little boy", and the two head off to get married after . . . a week?
I don't know, I didn't read it closely, I leap-frogged to the end.
I don't predict happiness for the heroine, I predict bruises.

BUT... the reason I reread Nine Coaches was to try to reclaim/remember being the girl who'd liked it...
Did I accept the idea that a man's overpowering sexual attention was proof of love?
I think I sort of did, yes? (This was around 1974.) Or at least that his aggression was proof of your own attractiveness. Raoul says as much to Linda--when she asks why he loves her, he shows her herself in a mirror:
Tender meat!
(Also, she is an orphan, entirely alone in the world and with no money, but I didn't think of Linda as a victim--nor does she think of herself that way. She trusts Raoul!)

I was afraid of men when I was young--my own father being mildly violent (fear has the same quality whether the physical act is "mild" or not)--and testosterone-driven characters like Raoul couldn't have helped me be less afraid.
It took me years and years to see that a lot of men are more like golden retrievers than ravenous wolves.

I noticed in rereading, too, that there are no complex women characters in Cannery Row, which I'd read around the same time --eight grade, when I was thirteen... (I was a year younger than my classmates). Just good-hearted whores who understand it's in a man's nature to throw a punch...

Thank God for Jane Eyre!
I'd read it when I was even younger, maybe ten. At that age I didn't care much about Jane's romance with Rochester--I was more interested in Jane's growing up years at the dreadful boarding school Lowood and her friendship there with the noble Helen Burns, who dies at thirteen of... typhoid, is it?
No--tuberculosis (consumption, which killed several of Charlotte Bronte's siblings)--but the other girl students are dying from an outbreak of typhus fever.

Jane is guided all along by the clarity and nobility of Helen Burns, and thus she has the integrity to see through the ignobility of the morally... confused Rochester. (Until he gets his comeuppance, and then Jane can accept him.)

Makes sense that I've reread Jane Eyre many times but never went back to Mary Stewart's books or Cannery Row as an adult.

III. Getting Clear

Almost time to go to work.
I had a great time helping Dalton on Saturday, clearing out boxes and boxes of stuff Asst Man (AM) had stored--boxes behind, under, above boxes. She has tossed out crap (boxes of unattractive 8-oz. tea cups the kind that NEVER sell), and priced jumbled piles of good stuff (including some expensive electronics).
Zip, zip, zip.

I felt evil glee when AM came in on Saturday for the first time since he left two weeks ago, and he saw his old area transformed. Dalton had even pulled out the shelves (now half- empty) and swept and mopped under them.
(She's kind of a nut. "Type A", she says. On steroids. I love it.)

AM gawped.
He'd always blamed everyone else, so it was satisfactory, very, to see him realize that one person could do––in two weeks––what he'd never managed.
I said hello, but he did not engage.

Hm.
Perhaps powerful characters like Raoul are attractive (on paper!) because in real life most humans are not sure and strong--lots of people of any sex are pass-the-buck types. Nor noble either, like Helen Burns.*
(Though maybe if you die in childhood like her, you retain your integrity.)

 Aggressive, take-charge males in romance novels are secretly sensitive and just need a good woman's love to puppify them.
In real life, they're likely to be more like Trump and his minions.
__________________

*The nobility and clarity of the girl Helen Burns feels totally real to me. I always say I was my best self in fourth grade, when I was eight, turning nine in March.Last spring, a pediatrician said on TikTok that he loves all kids, but "the highest form of humanity are eight-year-old girls."
Of course! The Orphan Red girlettes are eight years old.

“Eight-year-old girls are magnanimous. They're sympathetic. They're empathetic. They're emotionally mature. They love to help. They love to give. They love to do for others. They’re accepting of everybody," he said.

[And my own eight-year-old self can personally can attest to this:]
"They always, they're the ones who see the sign for the lost cat and want to go find it!”

He loves the boys too:
“Eight year-old boys can ‘Ocean's Eleven’ almost any situation. If 8-year-old girls should be running Congress, 8-year-old boys should be running the Army Corps of Engineers.”

I do believe eight-year olds could have put New Orleans and all its lost pets back together again.