The Cough, Crunch & Squeak

The cough: Everyone in Minnesota seems to get the holiday cough. Some are unlucky enough to catch one of the viruses going around this time of year and their cough is heard down the grocery aisles and over the cubicle walls. For the rest of us, the below-zero weather does it.  Cold dry air causes spasms in our airways that makes even the healthy wheeze and cackle. We quickly learn to breathe through our scarves and not through our open mouths. When the weather gets so cold that condensation builds up on our windows inside the house, we are forced to turn the humidifier down even further—bringing on even more of the winter cough.

The crunch: Walking on snow usually produces no sound at all, as sound waves are absorbed by the fluffy blanket surrounding us. Yet, shovels scrape driveways, ice scrapers clear windshields and prying open a rarely used door that has iced over—all of these actions produce a crunch. In Minnesota, when the weather dips between 0 and 20 degrees, that same silent snow speaks to us. Walking in it produces a distinctive crunch.

The squeak: When temperature drops even further, to anything below zero and especially when it gets down to -14 as it has the past few days, even the ice crystals within snow freezes. This causes snow to squeak when compressed. It is a delightful sound. Tires backing out of driveways squeak. Footsteps approaching mall entrances squeak. We squeak walking to the mailbox. We squeak as we hurry to an open liquor store to stock up before New Year’s Eve. It matters not how big or little you may be, or what your footwear of choice might be—we all squeak. Everyone hears it, and we smile because of it. 

Even in this ridiculous cold—I love Minnesota. 

Don't believe me? Here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfD11omFQ88

In Praise of Water

I like to ponder the simple things that remind me how wonderful life can be. 

This morning, I closed my eyes in the shower, enjoying the hot water beating on the back of my head. I could feel my breath deepen and my muscles relax. Oh, how I love a long, hot shower! It’s like a little piece of heaven.

Water is certainly one of my favorite things. There is no form of water that I don’t appreciate, whether it is hot water in a shower, sudsy water in a bath, or bubbly water in a Jacuzzi. I crave crystal clear water in a glass and love looking out over sparkling blue water on any of Minnesota’s 10,000 lakes. I am comforted when I hear heavy rain in a thunderstorm and feel peaceful seeing ice crystals form on a window. 

I find it soothing to watch snow fall silently in winter, or to see how smooth mounds of it have formed over what were sharp edges only hours before. I am often in awe looking out our living room window to see snow so deep that deck chairs are reduced to puffy odd-shaped pillows or how the patio table looks like a white coconut cream pie.

My favorite experience with water might be scuba diving in the crystal blue waters of the Caribbean and watching the elegant spotted drum dance near the opening of a coral cave. 

But somewhere in the midst of this reverie – my praise of water – I am reminded of an incident a few weeks ago – one where water had not been my friend.

I was buzzing about the house, "picking up" as they say, cleaning this and that, trying to make order of things after months of living in disarray during a kitchen remodel. A water bottle sat on our kitchen table, now parked in our living room. The bottle held little more than a swallow or two. 

Or, so I thought. 

I uncapped the bottle, tipped it back to drink the last swig. Surprise! There was more remaining than I expected and suddenly I inhaled when I should have swallowed. The result? I could not breathe. No air could come into my lungs. I spit the water out, tried to cough, but found that I had no air remaining in my lungs to expel the water. I crouched close to the floor and proceeded to inhale as if through a straw that had a lemon seed plugging the bottom. If air could be measured by grains, my rate of inhale was one grain at a time.

My husband rushed over, ready to give me the Heimlich, but I raised my hands or somehow signaled an “I can do this” sort of gesture. A half breath gave me a single cough and then back to the death rattle, air molecule by molecule slowly filling my lungs, until again I had another thimble-sized breath to manage a second cough.

I have since read that under normal conditions one typically cannot die from inhaling water. Alas, I even discovered this has a name: pulmonary aspiration. Or, as we might more commonly call it something “going down the wrong pipe.”  

But how is this even possible? A little anatomy lesson might be useful. The windpipe, or trachea, is in front of the esophagus. Normally, we don’t inhale at the same time as we swallow. To swallow, the voice box lifts to close off the trachea and the gateway to the esophagus is opened. It works much like a railroad switch. But, sometimes, things go wrong. A person laughs, or is distracted and busy with multi-tasking. Wires get crossed. Trains head down the wrong track. Water goes down the wrong pipe.

Food particles inhaled – yes, that can be lethal. Water? Not so much - at least that was the consensus of the articles I read on the Internet. (Everything on the Internet is true, I am told.) Anyway, that moment - the moment when you know something has gone wrong – that is certainly among the worst feelings I've ever had. Things go into “shut-down or violation mode” - the voice box closes to prevent more of what it perceives as a violation. It is part of our natural defenses. 

One article said that even if the worst case happens and you pass out, eventually, your throat will relax and you will begin breathing again. But since I have no intention of discovering whether this is true or not, I guess I’ll never know. 

What is the remedy, or rather, the means of prevention?

Simple: Quit multitasking. Be alert every time you drink. Truly appreciate every sip and swallow.

Or, as Caribou Coffee instructs on their coffee cup sleeves: 

“Life is short. Stay awake for it.”  

Life is Short

We are in the final weeks of a kitchen remodel. One of the inconveniences is, of course, not having a kitchen sink. After each wonderful meal, prepared by my more culinary-inclined husband, I wash the dishes in a plastic dish pan that one of us lugs down to the laundry room.

Don’t get me wrong, I have fond memories of dish washing going as far back as my memory can go, back when I could barely reach the dishes in the drainer. My assigned station was usually dish-dryer. I remember how those big items I would need to hold tight against myself to dry them properly. My shirt would often be far wetter than the dish towel.

This daily chore usually included a lot of talking, some amount of teasing, loads of laughter and perhaps even singing – before I realized I really can’t sing. I estimate that I have ten years of good memories under my belt, beginning from the age of six all the way to age sixteen.

I can only ponder why it is that the single most frequent memory that has come back to me each night as I wash and meticulously dry our dishes these past weeks is not a memory from any night out of that precious decade. Instead, the memory that plays over and over in my mind, as if a tape is played in a continuous loop, is the memory of a single night with me drying and my step-mother washing when we lived in the double-wide trailer in the foothills of Colorado during the time my father slowly built our house with his own hands over weekends and the precious hours before bedtime.

To set the stage, my step-mother some nights would be bubbly, engaging and conversational. Other nights, she would vacillate from being non-responsive to my attempts at conversation to being angry, dismissive, and openly hostile, often slamming cabinets and stomping from one end of the kitchen to the other. Decades later, I learned that “she” suffered from bipolar disorder. I don’t know how much she suffered, but I can certainly attest to the suffering she inflicted upon others in her path.

That night of my recurring memory, I can tell you that I tried hard to do everything right. But, she had been in one of her stormy moods, and after holding my breath, counting the minutes before I could retreat to my bedroom which was the room on the other side of the thin kitchen wall, I was relieved to dry and put away the last dish. I closed my bedroom door to study and get ready for bed. But, that night, I heard a sound that made me stand stock-still, my hand still resting on the door handle. It was the sound of dinnerware being taken down from the cupboard, and one by one, each item was slowly placed back into the cupboard. It wasn’t difficult to visualize what actions could possibly accompany the sounds that I heard, especially since I had survived this unstable environment by attentively listening for clues to her mood so that I could better anticipate the raging storm that might come my way.

Why would she do that? Was my drying of the dishes so inferior that she needed to re-dry each piece that I had touched? Was it so difficult to correct my “technique” so that I could meet her much higher standards? 

“Gaslighting” is a term made famous by the 1944 MGM movie ‘Gaslight,’ and seems to describe my step-mother’s behavior and other various behaviors witnessed during my teenage years living under the same roof with her. Gaslighting is the practice of convincing a mentally healthy person that they are going insane.

What I did that night is no longer important, because truly, there was no “right” answer. Anything I might have done in response would still have resulted in her declaring her actions as innocent, even virtuous. Certainly, she suffered from a terrible disorder, one that still has no known cure. But tragically, the victims of these disordered individuals rarely receive mention and seldom understand how they also need help.

These past few weeks, when every night I would dry each plate, each utensil, each pan and its lid meticulously to ensure that no drop of water remained, all the while replaying the same stupid memory over and over, it finally occurred to me that I continued to give her power over me, long after she has departed this earth. So instead, I now choose to call to mind any one of my positive memories, I try not to obsess over the dishes, and I look forward to our wonderful new kitchen and our new appliances. 

So, my advice:

1) Choose the memories you want to play in your head.

2) If you have a family member or loved one who suffers from a personality disorder, seek help and download the book Out of the Fog by Gary Walters

3) Tell someone your story. 

4) Life is short, let your dishes dry themselves! (Evidently air drying is actually more sanitary. Who knew!)