Week 6

1:19 pm Sunday the 16th

There is a wave, the anchorman said on Channel 11 News (“the bad news,” he called it; the anchor lady next to him, dressed in a purple dress with abstract white and black lines crisscrossing around her chest, says, “Yes, give us the bad news first”; I don’t remember them giving the ‘good’ news afterwards). There is a wave, he said, of snow for those of you who can’t stand snow—but it’s just fluff, about an inch, don’t worry—”

The snow consists of large flakes, so large I can see the lines of the crisscrossing frozen water. They all look the same to me, even as I sat in my car earlier, trying to take a picture of how large they are. I brush the large cottony blobs of broken snowflake arms and tinier broken pieces crushed into tiny balls like dotted ice cream, the Dippin Dots kind they used to only sell at  amusement parks.

The snow falls on my paper, creating blobs of water that soaks into the paper, blob stains now that when my pen goes over, creates a watercolor effect of black bleeding.

My feet are cold again (I can feel the cold radiating off of my crappy boots), and I notice that all is quiet besides the cars that go by—so quiet I think of the squirrels, small-sized rodents that everyday, despite my refusal and stubbornness, remind me more and more of my lady rats.

When I visited an old college roommate who lives in Elk county, a tourist trap now she made it seem like for those who like the idea of getting away to place with no service, we went to an Elk center, into a room full of animal skulls and bones. There I saw a squirrel skull, large yet looking tiny and delicate and thin of bone—but the teeth. I stared at the teeth, stained orange-yellow just like my rats; I remember them fondly lifting their heads up, noses first to sniff for food, and I’d see their teeth, exposed since their lips don’t close all the way, two large incisors orange. Since rodent teeth are constantly growing, rats and squirrels and other rodents must keep gnawing—wood, nuts, bark, antlers, anything—to maintain them properly.

I think of my old roommate now, how she loved the rats and would baby-talk them and feed them—I think of how Mark, when building his new living room coffee table from an old restaurant table top and large, thick beams of Home Depot wood (“Did you see that Jesus was here?” he said when I walked in one morning to see the beams resting on the couch), how he built his table and then took the net from his old RV and made a hammock for the rats under the table, then putting in a water bottle and a tea cup to store food in.

My mind races here in the cold where it feels like nothing is going on, yet I am hypersensitive to my surroundings. The cars race, tires mushing through the slush, down the hill, and my car is running, humming, and Mark is shoveling snow from behind my tires (nearly everyday this week I have gotten stuck in my parking spot). He asks me where this black electrical tape patching a piece has come from.

“I don’t know,” I say.

“Your uncle? It wasn’t here yesterday.”

“I don’t know.”

I think again of the squirrels, my cold feet, and I wonder where these rodents are in this cold. Where do they go? Do they each designate a tree hole or a good clump of branches? Are they warm where they are? How warm? Do they huddle together even if they can’t stand each other? Do they sleep all day?

I’d like to sleep all day, wrapped in fur. I look at my rats sometimes and see them bundled together, nearly all day every day, sleeping the day away—every so often one will break from the pack and sit curled at the top level, simply there to get away from the others.

Mark is holding onto his shovel, dragging it behind him as he goes up to the abandoned house and looks through the first floor side window.

“Can you see in there?” he asks. “Have you seen in there yet?”

“Yes,” I say, partially telling the truth. I have looked up to the second story recently and saw it looks like someone left a refrigerator door open. And another night on my way from my car to his place, I thought I saw snow foot prints coming from the front door. But not going in.

“It doesn’t look that bad,” he said. “It looks like they were halfway through a remodel. See? The wall in the kitchen is blown out (mine would probably look nice if that was done). Looks like someone might of given up, or maybe my landlord did buy the place and start remodeling it and just lied to me.”

He walks away, saying all of these things it seems like at once, then stands next to me.

“I think it would be nice to find a place and fix it up, get a mortgage, and not have to pay rent.”

“Well,” I say, never letting my pen pause on the page, trying to write everything he says down. “If your landlord ever bought the place, you can see if he’ll let you move into the place and have you fix everything for a couple month’s rent free.”

“Yeah, maybe.”

We decide, since my family has come out for the weekend, to drive his car instead to meet them. Everything is quiet except for Mark as he drags the shovel behind me to create a path in the snow for me.