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Monday, February 05, 2018

Me and my shadows


It was rainy and gray here on Groundhogs Day, so no shadow to frighten the groundhogs. So maybe Punxsutawney Phil should move to the Pacific Northwest. If he lived here chances are he'd never see his shadow and we could get on with spring.

Though spring here just means more rain.

Being that it is cloudy and rainy here a great deal of the time, you don't see your shadow a lot. Though I suppose technically everything is in the shadow of the clouds, so we are walking around in a shadow all the time.

At least that's the way I feel at times.


It was rainy most of the weekend, too. Still I took my daughter to the beach to look for sea glass. It was beautiful in a gray, gloomy, pacific northwest sort of way. And it was a beach only in the sense that it was by the water.  The tide was coming in so we only had a narrow strip of sand and rocks to walk along. Still no shadows.

On Sunday we took the kids to a roller skating rink in Everett. It was a bit surreal. They did the Hokey Pokey almost as soon as we got there. That was followed by the Chicken Dance Polka. I felt like I'd been transported back 50 years to Skateland in Idaho. If they'd played The Unicorn Song by the Irish Rovers I would have freaked.

Truth be told, my kids sat out the Hokey Pokey. They didn't take part in the skate races, either. My daughter was mortified when they called for girls and women to come out on the skate deck for races and I started singing, "All the single ladies, all the single ladies..." by Beyoncé. And then "All the single guys, all the single guys..." when the called for the boys and men to get on deck for races.

The song was stuck in my head for the rest of the day. It popped up when we stopped at our local WinCo to buy groceries. If you aren't familiar with a WinCo, it's a warehouse like grocery store that seems to attract a less sophisticated clientele than a Costco. It reminded me of these bleak warehouse markets my parents used to drag me to when I was a kid and how very bored I was as we stocked up on basics.

My kids followed us around with  a dazed look as we pushed a mega shopping cart around the aisles dodging other shoppers with carts laden with packages of 50 toilet paper rolls and lunch meat. It, like the Hokey Pokey at the skating rink, was just too much like my childhood in Idaho.

Then it occurred to me that memories are like shadows of the past. And me having seen so many in a single weekend meant we'd very likely have six more weeks of winter.

Now that's a long way to go for a groundhogs day analogy.




1 comment:

Helen Baggott said...

Collecting sea glass is the best hobby. When your daughter's older, introduce her to Anita Shreve's writing.