Impressed

He leaves early in the morning for school.  It’s dark and icy outside, and inside for that matter. This morning I remembered how impressive it is that he can just get out of bed, right when his alarm rings. Impressive because I cannot do that and isn’t that what makes something impressive to each of us? It is impressive when someone does something that we struggle ourselves to do, like getting out of bed. Even at 8:00 this morning, I couldn’t pull myself up out of the gray sheets. I snoozed my alarm, every ten minutes, for an entire hour. I surfaced just before 9, with class at 9:30am. Walking out of our back door, I collided with the frozen air, like a truck going full speed into a brick wall. I don’t like that image. Just know that it was cold. I walked to school quickly. I could feel a slow spreading of frozen flesh that seemed to start at the top of my ears and spread downward until even my earlobe was past feeling, just cold and stiff like stone.  And why don’t people shovel their sidewalks? The walk down to school was treacherous as I had to cross sheets of solid ice on sidewalks, bumpy solid ice that slid me off balance and into the road where I decided to stay, because I could walk there, uninhibited by snow and ice, just cars. I’m always cold and wary of winter. The ice on the sidewalks is treacherous, the cold air is akin to a brick wall, and when he gets out of bed early in the morning, I’m cold and alone in the dark. I get to school and want to complain—complain and whine about the cold and the ice on the sidewalks, but then I see that everyone else walked to school too. In that moment, I’m impressed with their ability to do something that I cannot do myself. I cannot walk in the cold, in the ice, in the bone crunching and crippling air without complaint.