Blood Musk

March 09, 2012 - 1:34

It is pre-dawn, very dark, and I am swaddled in a cotton quilt. I am buckled into the passenger side of the station wagon, which is idling in the drive way. I had been placed there while I was sleeping, and I am barely awake, but there is acuity in this memory because it is the coldest I had ever been at the time. The car heater is blowing icy air. It is winter. I don't know where my mother is; but eventually she comes to the car after it has warmed up, with a piece of toast, and we drive to the day care that she worked at during this period of time. I was prostrate to that initial cognizance of cold, and I feel as though the physical remembrance of it remains inside my muscles. (I'm not positive, but I believe that Scientology might align with me on this imagining.) I am three or four.
At age five I took my first set of swimming lessons. These occurred early in the morning, and on this particular day the temperature was unnaturally frigid. The instructor was a college-aged boy. He insisted on this brisk morning that we be very brave, and plunge ourselves into the water suddenly. No wading. Just jump. Which we did. This lesson covered bobbing, and I tried very hard to work the ice out of my limbs with frantic movement. Immersion, then crowning, immersion, then crowning; but I couldn't work the cold out, and being young I began to cry, so my mother took me home. I was shaking so exaggeratedly that she put me in a luke-warm bath. (I said the hot water burned my frost-bit skin.) In the water I shook for a bit in physical earnest, but then even longer than I needed to, as I felt weak for leaving lessons early and needed to justify the predatory chill, even to myself.
In first grade I dreaded recess in the winter. Either they offered us refuge in the muggy gym, or they drove us into the Idaho inclement- it was dependent on a faint temperature arbitration. On this day it was a couple of degrees shy of shelter indoors, yet it was Siberian in my estimation. Typically, I would spend my recesses on the climbing structures, but the chill was so strong that day that the monkey bars had gathered a layer of frost. I knew that I had to move if I were to thrive in this 25 minute climate immersion, so I swung. As fast and frenetically as I could. I yelled at my friend Emily, on the swing beside me, "I am imagining there is a fireplace in front of us!", and this I remember being my first real proof of "mind over matter", as I became somewhat warmed.

Early memories of being cold.