I remember playing outside in that cold with friends on most Saturdays. There were sliding hills, of course, but there were also enormous drifts in every yard to exploit. We'd tunnel into them and then sit inside, pretending we were in caves or that we were Indians or Inuit, sheltering during a winter hunting expedition. I remember me and my friends bringing candles, throw rugs, dolls and matches along to better enjoy our pretend.
After we'd furnished our "igloo," we'd light the candles and apply the flame to the wall and ceiling of until it dripped. The melt would speedily refreeze, but after a great deal of this careful work, we achieved a shiny frozen shell that might endure, during a truly bad winter, well into March. Mittens beaded with frozen pellets of snow, toes aching from the cold penetrating our boots, we'd enter child's fantasy land. I have no idea how we endured outside as long as we did, before the inevitable surrender and numb escape indoors for warmth and hot chocolate. Those physical experiences, even so long ago, helped me to imagine some pivotal scenes in "Fly Away Snow Goose."
There are many birthdays for me to celebrate in January--of the living and the dead. Two cousins were born in this month, but also two of grand-girls, the youngest of whom just turned twenty-one! They are all Capricorns, like my mother, whose birthday was also in this month. (How many families, I wonder, have this aggregation of birthdays in a single month?)
In the days when my Muse was visiting, I also celebrated the birthdays of two Dead White Men during the month. Alexander Hamilton's birthday is January 11, either in 1755 or 1757, as historians argue over the date. Paper records kept in tropical Nevis have not always survived.
Perhaps Hamilton himself muddied the waters on the date, wanting, rather like Mozart, to keep his hard-won status as a prodigy for as long as possible. Born in the West Indies into a family in constant financial distress, with the appellation "bastard" attached to his name, it was of monumental importance to Alexander that every possible strategy to assist his climb the social ladder be employed.
I never had birthday parties for Hammie, although I'd loved him the longest of all my dead white man crushes. Here I am in Nevis back when it barely had an airport, and the electricity only ran between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. My mother took us there--intrepid travelers that we were--back in the mid-1950's. Here's a happy January picture of me on the lava sand beach near where the Hamilton home was once supposed to have been.
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