blisters and snow

A quiet Christmas day in Chicago, the snowiest since 1997. At noon, we took a walk to perform a good deed and visit a cat whose owners skipped town for three weeks. Except for the main thoroughfares, the side streets were still fairly pristine. Not much traffic and few pedestrians. “Twinkle snow, powdery snow” but same grey Chicago underneath. Gusts of wind sprayed our faces with showers of tiny ice needles.

We took the long way back so we could walk down Logan Boulevard and look at the trees: the gnarly branched catalpas, the squat apple trees, the arrow straight lindens glistening in the steel colored sky in all their fractal nakedness.

I phoned Texas. My mother couldn’t talk. Her mouth is full of blisters from the chemotherapy she started over a week ago to treat the secondary cancer in her liver. She had a few good days and her spirits were up, then the side effects. In the past three days she has refused the phone. Today I insisted. I said, “You can’t talk, but you can hear.” She struggled to mumble back something. I said, “I’m thinking of you and I send you all my love.” Then I felt guilty for forcing “all my love” on her. Her fragility only accentuates my clumsiness.

In the afternoon I baked a beautiful, perfectly textured, molasses-soaked, ginger upside-down pear cake. If you have three hours to spare, you, too, can enjoy this simple pleasure (Leslie Mackie’s Macrina Bakery & Café Cookbook).

Today, I try to string together disparate thoughts of snow, caramelized pears, and mouth sores. Pandora generates a Proustian concoction of haunting themes: Debussy’s Claire de Lune, Albéniz’ Mallorca, Chopin’s Prelude No. 4. Amid the snow blankets of memory, I hear her at the piano. Every night, after putting us to bed and finishing the days’ chores, my mother knuckled down. She also tried to practice during the day, but with five boisterous children these sessions often turned into harangues. As the years went by, she gradually stopped playing. Now, the neuropathy has damaged her hands for good.

We got three more inches of snow over night. The day is sepulchral grey.