When I finally called her to tell her about the heater, however, all she said was that this was going to be on our expense. I responded that I knew it was in fact her job as a landlady to fix the heating on her expense. She became all snappy, we hung up, and I turned to my husband.

“I can’t believe she just said that,” I said to him. “We try everything to make as little trouble as possible, even though this place needs fixing in so many places, and all she does is tell us we have to pay for it ourselves.”

I got all worked up about her not acknowledging our niceness, about her turning what had been her “best tenants ever“ into just another bunch of stupid idiots in only one second.

Then I took a deep breath. And I remembered a story my hubs had told me a couple of days earlier. He had talked to our landlady, and she had been all shaken up because one of her son’s friends had been found dead on the street, frozen to death. Her younger son apparently had lived with the guy, an alcohol addict, and his sister for a while. They had tried to help the brother, had offered him free lodging and assistance in becoming dry, but he’d rejected all of it, until one day he didn’t come back home anymore. He had lived on the street when this hard, hard winter hit. He was found only two streets away.

After another deep breath, I did the only thing I could think of: I called my landlady again, and apologized. We spoke about the tragic death, she began to cry, told me she had helped the sister choose a suit for her brother to wear in the coffin, and that she had given her money to transfer him back home to Poland. We talked about how close real poverty is to us, although we mostly choose to ignore it.

It was cleansing, like a deep breath. When we hung up, we both were happier than before.

I’ve been in the Houston area for about ten years now. So help me, I love the crazy hot summers and don’t mind that “winter” is very short. I am incredibly cold-natured, so this is a good spot for me.

That is, until I moved into my current house. Our 1920s boarding house turned duplex is perhaps the most poorly insulated dwelling on the planet. The double-paned windows might as well be non-existent because the glass acts as some sort of odd conductor of cold. We live on the first floor, where the pier-and-beam foundation lets in drafts I’ve not felt anywhere else.

To top it off, we have no central heat. We have one window unit in the living room that allegedly has a heating function. Otherwise, it’s space heaters, which are not meant to heat entire rooms. Don’t worry, we have two fireplaces—that are both boarded up and non-functional.

Last night when we got home, our bedroom was 41 degrees. Inside the house. It was 35 degrees outside. This is the second winter in a row that it’s snowed in Houston, a city that snows almost never. I’m pretty sure global warming has conspired against us. It doesn’t really matter, though, because for about three months it will be cold in here, regardless of the temperature outside.

So here’s how we survive:

·       One hour prior to going to bed, we turn the electric blanket to high, the ceiling fan on low (circulating backwards), and the space heater to high.
·       Upon sleep, the electric blanket goes to 7, fleece pajamas and possibly socks are employed, and arms remain under the covers.
·       The morning is the worst, because the rest of the house is what my husband calls a barren tundra. Because I work at home until at least noon, I do my work under the electric blanket. He, on the other hand, has to get up. First, he turns on the one window unit with heat. Then he closes the bathroom door and turns on the space heater in there. Then he goes to the couch, turns on another electric blanket and space heater, and wears a snuggie to eat breakfast. Yes, a snuggie. If you’re judging us for owning and routinely using a snuggie, we’re too cold to care.
·       At night when I work late at my desk in the dining room, I have one heater pointed directly at my feet and another at my back. I also drink hot chocolate and periodically do short bursts of exercises to keep warm.

You would think Wyoming winters would have prepared me for this, but not so. We are experiencing very cold temperatures now, even in February in Houston. My latest solution for fighting the cold? Wearing fingerless gloves while typing. True story.

This particular lesson had come from a nasty breakup on the staff of the university’s newspaper that forced a change in the schedule of copy editors. As one of the copy chiefs, I had disagreed with any changes until one night, when all work on the desk skidded, crumbled and flumped to a standstill after the him in the story looked at the her with an emotion she interpreted as hatred. Both spent the rest of the evening sobbing in their respective bathrooms. Work did not go well. I had been summoned to his office to shed some light on the debacle.

That little bit of wisdom he gave me about love has stuck with me, and I usually have to haul it out, dust it off and tack it up on my mental wall during and after all relationships. And, of course, never more than during the month of February.

Being in the service industry, there’s no avoiding Valentine’s Day, and it lasts the entire month. That’s the only interesting thing besides massive quantities of snow and cold weather happening in February in Colorado. So after a freezing, miserable January, we’re all happy to move on to February, even with the excessive amounts of hearts and love in the air.

My entire night staff is single. I had recently, unexpectedly and unwillingly been returned to the singles pool, so the mood was grim as we discussed the holiday month. A black cloud descended onto the waitress station. The stories of breakups, cheating, fights, missed communication and bungled planning piled up. Finally, a dishwasher unloading clean glasses broke the thick crust of our collective bad mood.

“That’s such bullshit,” he said, standing up and drying his hands on his apron. “I’m going to get those little cartoon cardboard cards with the stupid sayings and the ‘To’ and ‘From’ on them and matching envelopes, and I’m going to fill them with those little word hearts and Red Hots, so you all better be ready to receive ‘em. I’m thinking Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.”
“It’s only as bad as you’re going to make it,” he said, heading off to the kitchen.

Stunned that we failed to suck him into our black hole of Valentine’s Day-infused misery, we actually shut up for a few minutes, and the cloud dissipated somewhat. Stories of grade-school Valentine’s Days, when things were fun and silly, when the number of candies in your envelope told how much you were liked, and everyone got a Valentine came out. Things came back into perspective.

I got to thinking about how many people have done things for me in this past year to show how they love me in their own (sometimes peculiar) ways, sans candy, cards and hot pink envelopes. People in my life are actually pretty demonstrative. It hit me that I’m the bad Valentine in most cases, with bad behavior including unreturned phone calls, forgotten thank-you notes, missed occasions and lack of even simple words of gratitude.

I don’t really deserve flowers.

My old professor was right: I don’t have any say so in how the people in my life love me, or how they express it, or even if it will be expressed, but I do have every choice in how I express my love for them. It won’t be in cartoon form, and probably not flowers, hearts or candies either, but in my own way, I’ll be spreading around some sunshine and warmth and yes, fine, even some love this month. I’ll be working on my Valentine skills.

It’s a cold month, our February, and to do anything less would be, quite frankly, bullshit.

I’ve just begun writing my critical thesis, one of the requirements of my Master of Fine Arts degree. I began to lose sleep over it before the semester even started, because the idea of having to come up with enough intelligent ideas to fill 35 pages scared the hell out of me.  I’d lie in bed writing my thesis statement over and over again.  It never seemed quite right.
When the semester finally did start, I stopped trying to get to bed before midnight. Sure, I was tired from chasing elementary school kids around all day, but working an eight hour day left only the night time hours to work on my dreaded thesis.  So I plugged away, researching my topic, reading every book I could get my hands on and trying to construct an outline for the first time in my life.

For the first time in my life, I overwhelmed myself with schoolwork.  It’s not that I never tried hard in school, I did, I just never let myself worry too much about it.  There were numerous sleepless nights during my undergraduate career at the University of Kansas, but they were always followed by a few days of doing nothing but sleep and watching TV.  This time I not only lacked free time to recover from sleepless nights, I had driven myself crazy with anxiety.  Sleep was not an option.

Luckily, I have an amazing support team.  My MFA classmates have continuously reached out and reminded me why I am putting myself through such hell.  My family helps out with anything they can in order to ease some of my worries, such as watching my dog for me while I spend the day at the library.

On the day of my first deadline, I woke up at 4:00 a.m.   I had a major panic attack that everything I had worked on for the first month of my semester was completely wrong.  I considered calling in sick to work and spending the day redoing everything.  Somehow, I managed to convince myself to click send and away went my first packet of work.

I wish I could say that I slept eight hours that night, but I didn’t.  I still have a lot of work ahead of me, but I finally realized that night, that I could do it.  The next morning, I woke up feeling refreshed, even if I had only gotten five hours of sleep.

For now, I’m okay with the fact that I’m going to have to give up sleep for a while.  It’ll all be worth it in June, when I have a finished thesis and another semester of graduate school completed. And I know just how I will celebrate.

The city is trenching a road right through this open expanse of desert. I loved this wild island of land for the way it once stretched out and gave space between “civilization” in one area and “civilization” in another, the last bastion of nature left in a concrete and asphalt sea. The road ran several miles north and south, and down the middle of it is a normally dry riverbed that after heavy rains fills with puddles of water at the bottom, reflecting the blue sky and white brightly-edged clouds that swell into torrents as flash floods bring in the life’s blood to this oasis.

You can see tracks of animals along the roadside leading down to the waters edge — coyote, havilina, rabbit and even bird in the soft, red mud. With this new road, people will find their way easier but nature will once again be rerouted to a smaller space further away until we need to replace that space with purchased ground, plants and animals of our choosing. I am disappointed to see this growth; it is inevitable but saddening to see another island of nature gobbled up by the insatiable appetite of human growth.

This morning the clouds pile up on the horizon, looking like a new set of mountain ranges. They have stiff, sharp peaks like properly whipped cream. They are tinged in soft blues, grey lavender and even a bit of pink. The sun is struggling for elevation above the mountains to the east, its golden light attempting to herald in the new day of promise from beyond the mountain range that we will one day be more respectful and value nature more than progress. I love this time in the morning. The pavement before me is deep black from the heavy rains. And for a change, the desert looks clean, not dusty. It still almost sparkles despite its coming total destruction. The air is fresh too and even smells clean. I am quickly taking in deep, huge gulps, hoping I can store it up and remember this time in a few months when I am choked by thick heat, dust and yet more civilization.

This new road that has torn a ragged gash will probably become a short cut for me from an overly congested route I take nearly every day. It will also probably make life easier. And this is life: change; it is good and bad. I am very sad to see this natural tract of land be over run by pavement. But in a year or two I am sure I will forget the splendor that once was and will be decomposing under my tires. I am sure I will eventually use the road to shorten my route despite my initial disgust and dismay at the destruction it caused. Time is atrocity’s best and only friend. Where I am living now was first an endless open desert too, then a sprawling orange grove. Now it is tract housing. This is change. It is good and bad.

I say all these things because I believe them. I believe that each of us has within us all the wisdom we need to make wise choices for ourselves. I believe that if each of us does the work – or play - to find our own unique balance, our own way of being in the world and our own brand of genius, we will all be serving each other in the best way we can.

I believe all this. I dedicate much of my life to teaching practices that can help people find their way to this place of integrity. But sometimes it takes a German backpacker in my garden to really show me what it means.

I’d just returned from teaching one of my yoga classes when I got one of those lessons. My boyfriend was out in the backyard with the two young Germans he had hired to help him get through a huge pile of heavy yard work.

He’d come across the first of the Germans through a mutual friend who had heard that we needed some help putting in a retaining wall. There was a young German backpacker in Wellington who had just qualified as a landscape gardener. He was looking for some work and we were looking for a worker. We got him out to the house and it was immediately apparent that he was perfect for the job. Not only did have great ideas to improve our plans for the wall, he was also obviously enjoying himself so much that when we took a break, he would be off in another corner of the garden finding a tree that needed pruning or a fence that needed repairing.

He mentioned that he was travelling with a friend and that she also needed work. We told him to bring her out as well and the next day they both arrived. As the day went on it became clear that gardening was not her passion. She got through the work, but did so slowly and, unlike her partner in grime, without the attention to detail that only comes from passion.

At the end of the day, as I arrived back from yoga – full of my theories about each person finding and standing in their unique place – I asked my boyfriend whether he was asking them both to come back the next day. I thought maybe he would let the reluctant gardener go. He said they were both invited back, of course, but he would have to find something different for her to do, something that she would love.

I suggested maybe she would like to do my housework for me, but sadly he didn’t think that would be the answer. He was sure that he could find a job in the yard that she would find enjoyable. It was, he said, his only management rule: Find what it is that people love doing and give them more of that to do.

In that one simple statement he showed me what all my theory about supporting people to find their unique place in the world really meant in the cut and thrust of daily life. For my boyfriend it meant letting go of his own ideas about what needed to be done and instead looking to see what would best serve this person who had showed up in his garden. He knew that what served her best would, in the end, also serve him.

So, once again, our garden and the man who tends it are teaching me what it really means to bring my yoga off the mat and out into my world.

If I had my way, I’d sleep from about midnight to 5 or 6 a.m., and then again from 2 to 4 p.m. I’m worthless in the afternoons anyway — sleepy — especially if my lunch includes even a single carb (unless I combat it with tons of iced tea). Barring just the right chemical composition of my afternoon meal, I’m sort of zombielike until Afternoon Coffee saves the day around 4.

I was a gifted and reliable napper until summer 2007. That summer, I had a copy editing internship at the Indianapolis Star. It was a real sweet gig — especially because I only had one job — but the thing is, I got out of work around 1:30 a.m., then we’d go have a drink at a bar, then I’d drive home at about 3. Or stay up even later and crash at a friend’s house. Which was great for everyone else, because we didn’t have to show up until 4:30 in the afternoon. I, however, am through-and-through a Morning Person, and was physically incapable of sleeping in past 9 a.m. until the eighth week of the 10-week internship. “Fine,” I thought those first few weeks, as I read the entire newspaper and schlepped to the apartment complex’s gym. “I’ll just catch up in the afternoon.” And every afternoon, I’d lie down in the perfectly quiet house and try to sleep. But I was too anxious. I’d worry about everything, or nothing, and toss and turn, and then it would be time to get ready for work. This nap-preventing anxiety carried through much of my 26-month stint in California, sometimes even on weekends, and that was a damn shame, too.

But now I am getting my skills back. I’m taking a two-month hiatus at home. I don’t have a bed, bedroom or closet here, but I do get to use the couch in the basement entertainment room, unless someone calls dibs and has friends over. I also don’t have a job, responsibilities or deadlines, and I receive few calls or e-mails. I do the crossword every morning, spend entire days in sweatpants, and — hand to God — almost never want to do anything but talk to my parents and siblings. The items in my calendar on a recent week were “Monday, lunch with Aunt Sue” and “Friday, haircut.” Even going to a friend’s house feels a bit like a chore. So, just when I convinced myself I could live without, my naps have returned, like a lover from a long voyage at sea. And our reunion is even better than the first time around, because I’m not taking even a 20-minute “rest my eyes” period for granted.

I guess she just forgets about all the stories I have told her about my lab disasters. Once when I was teaching AP Chemistry, I botched a demonstration because I boiled packaging material instead of the aromatic compounds that I was supposed to use. I now know that cardboard chips do not have any particularly interesting chemical or physical properties. They certainly smell nothing like wintergreen or citrus fruits.

The problem is that following a list of instructions and carefully measuring exact amounts never really appealed to me, which is probably why I ended up getting my master’s degree in English instead of Biochemistry. I prefer to improvise and experiment. Baking just bores me. Furthermore, baking disasters aren’t nearly as exciting as cooking disasters. I speak from experience.

I have had several baking disasters: bread that didn’t rise, cakes that caved in, frosting that was too hard, cookie bars that never cooked through, to name a few. None of that compares to the time my friend nearly burned down my apartment trying to make chicken fried steak. Now that is a disaster worth remembering. My dog is still traumatized by smoke detectors and always keeps a safe distance when we are cooking (unless we drop something). If you are going to mess something up, shouldn’t the mistake be spectacular?

Baking reminds me too much of this biochemistry lab I took my senior year of college. Every week, we would show up in the morning, place some chemicals in a machine and wait for a graph to print out. The chemicals changed every week (at least that’s what the TA claimed), but the process was always the same. Baking is redundant. The ingredients almost always involve some variation of flour, salt, butter, eggs and sugar. You always have to mix them in the same specific order. You always use the same equipment. (I don’t even attempt baking without the mixer we got as a wedding present.) You stick them in the oven and wait to be disappointed.

However, cooking is always a new experience: braising, broiling, boiling, frying, sautéing, grilling, simmering, stewing, blending, chopping, slicing, dicing. There are an abundance of herbs and spices to choose from: basil, oregano, rosemary, curry, cumin, coriander, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, sage, saffron, cilantro, thyme, parsley, lemongrass, paprika, and of course garlic, plenty of garlic. International cooking creates infinitely more possibilities and room for experimentation. Just last night, we made samosas using Tupperware empanada-makers.

Cooking also requires little precision. I rarely use measuring spoons anymore. I almost always end up substituting ingredients or adding something the recipe didn’t call for. And don’t even get me started on my own cooking disasters. My arm still gets a tinge of soreness when I think about cooking risotto on the stovetop. I exploded a casserole dish once because I thought it was a Dutch oven. Now that is a spectacular mistake.

People often ask me why I now teach English instead of chemistry. Today I am going to teach students how to take notes for a research paper. Tomorrow I am going to help them analyze poems by William Wordsworth and Dylan Thomas. Last week, we studied satire, and next week we study a short story. And literary disasters are the best kind. Of course, check back in with me when I have a stack of papers to grade.

I became an aunt when I was eight, so the older I get, the more I understand what it means to be an aunt…and the more I feel like I need to play catch-up. Missing the show was definitely not an option. I told my sister two months ago we would be there. Then again, we were thinking it was a simple school play. A little dance show, if you will. We’ll go to the show, spend the weekend with my sister and the family, and it will be great.

But I was very wrong.

Only when we had tickets in hand did we know they cost forty dollars a piece. And that Madison was a snowflake among a group of about 12 or 15. And that she’d only be on stage for two minutes. And that of all the rows of snowflakes, she was in the very back corner.

It would have been easy to come up with an excuse not to go. When my niece isn’t standing right in front of me, with her cute red hair and her cute big blue eyes, it’s easy to come up with lots of excuses. We can’t afford it with Christmas coming up. We don’t want to make the drive. It’s such a tiny part; we’ll come when she gets a lead role.

But we decided to stay committed, paid for our tickets, and made the long trek up to South Bend after work Friday night, not pulling up to my sister’s driveway until 11 p.m. After writing my sister the $80 check for the tickets, I tried to get myself excited. It was Christmas, after all, and I had never seen The Nutcracker.

As we found our seats three rows from the front in the ornately decorated theater, I couldn’t help but notice how packed the place was. This was no mere school play. This was community theater. The ballet was at the Morris Theater downtown, an ornately decorated and old theater. Most were dressed up, out for a Christmas event with family and friends with plans to have a nice dinner afterwards.

And they were going to see my little niece dance like a snowflake in The Nutcracker.

I settled in to watch. The dancers were amazing. As I said, I am not a huge fan of ballet, but when you are sitting three rows from the front, you realize how incredibly strong you’d have to be to dance like that. I loved the music, and kept anticipating when the snowflakes would come out.

Finally they did. Though all the little girls were dressed alike, I could Madison out of a crowd of a million. Already tall and thin, she had her red hair pulled up into a tight bun, rosy cheeks, and a huge smile. She threw her arms in her moves, trying to be as graceful as possible, obviously loving being on the stage. She didn’t let anything distract her. She didn’t look to see what the other girls were doing. She didn’t look at her feet. She looked straight out into the audience, head held high, looking beautiful in her white leotard and skirt. Her thin arms swirled around her head as she twirled and dipped and bowed. I couldn’t help it; my throat got tight and tears welled up in my eyes. I was so proud of her. So confident at such a young age.

For a split second I could remember when my sister found out she was having a girl (I truly believe she would have kept trying until she had a girl). I remember when Madison got her baby pictures done on a pillow of feathers, and everyone remarked that she looked like a little cherubim. I remember her pudgy little toddler body with the curly red hair when she was three. I remember babysitting her and playing out in the yard when she was five.

Now I have something else to add to my list of memories. Now I have this precious moment I am sure I will remember for a long time. Long after Madison takes lead roles and graduates and gets married and has her own kids. I’ll remember being a proud aunt the day she danced in The Nutcracker. It was definitely worth the $80.