The first blast of the polar vortex is closing schools again and is predicted to drop into double-digit below zero temperatures. When the vortex made its first visit last weekend, it made me nostalgic for digging my mother’s sidewalks out from under several feet of snow and laying on the cleared pavement amazed at how the bared branches on the empty trees looked much like the clusters of capillaries and synapses in biology textbooks. It reminded me of Chicago winters waiting for the #66 Chicago Avenue bus, the #72 North Avenue bus, or red line el from Rogers Park sometimes all the way to the end of the line on 95th Street on the South Side.
The regimen for preparing to go outside required many layers. "The hawk” is the nickname for the winds around this time of the year in Chicago (dubbed #Chiberia on twitter). "The hawk" lands and swoops sharply around corners only to icily slice across bare cheeks, edges of ears or uncovered fingertips. In some cases, it is quite similar to this.
Sometimes, it included multiple layers of shirts, socks, and even moisturizers. On below-zero days, this often included smoothing my face with Vaseline to keep skin from cracking or massaging it into my hands to prevent the peeling and dusty silt that ashes hands and elbows.
As another wave of below-zero weather is forcing so many people indoors in the Midwest and on the East Coast, I find myself thinking of how warmth occupies so much more than how people insulate themselves from ice, hypothermia, cracked, chapped skin, and frostbite.
This roughing up courtesy of negative degrees, ice, and battering winds had me thinking of its complete opposite. This morning, I held my professor’s one-month-old son against my shoulder, where his head found a comfortable lean on my neck while the family and I ate eggs, toast, and home fries. The infant breath soft and steady. I thought about how I held my brothers this way when they were small once. Imagined how my mother and father once held me in much the same way, and if a newborn is lucky, they experience this without ever remembering it.
The moment of placing a warm plate of salmon croquettes, sweet cornbread with cinnamon and honey, and black-eyed peas in an oven-toasted kitchen and sharing food and conversation reminds me of how I first saw croquettes made. My father’s huge hands slowly and delicately picking the small white cylinders and fine white barbs of bone from canned salmon in order to make something tender and savory.
Shared mugs of hot apple cider, green tea, or Irish coffee with friends, or the simple acts of hands held or arms wrapped around another person are the revisited subjects of poems again and again over time, but this act of creating warmth and vulnerability are the same qualities that draw me to a variety of poems.
Is creating layers of insulation so different from building meaning, nuances, or even a certain level of boldness in a poem? One is a matter of physically surviving. The other is a matter of language that can also humanize, protect, or build complexity. As the temperature plunges tonight, I hope that you can add layers to growing, new poems. At the same time, donations to homeless shelters and homemade soups and warm baked goods might just as well build intimacy and provide sustenance, much like the sought-after poems that readers return to time and again.