EDMONTON EXISTENTIAL

November Is Poor Posture Month!

I hate November. I wish it was like February, a short month. Ancient Romans and early Christians just couldn’t get it right. How hard would it have been to reshuffle a few days?

The wind was up Sunday morning, needles like spatters of boiling water. The sky was the colour of the underside of a saucepan lid. When the ice fell from the low sky it crackled on the dead leaves like a campfire, but without the glow, the heat, the bad guitar and off-key singing. Thirty days of grey, a prison sentence of limbo before winter comes.

The ultimate aftermath of every blessed thing is death. The overarching sound of November is Remembrance Day, ceremonial gunfire and the bugler’s “The Last Post.” Faith is hard to keep when the neighbourhood resembles a battle zone the morning after, a defoliated and devastated wasteland. As the last Byronic poet Mick Jagger sang, “The fields is mumble brown and fallow, and springtime takes the long way ‘round.”

November makes me flinch. It’s a full month of those fractal nanoseconds I’ve experienced in bicycle crashes, car accidents and on a football field or hockey rink, that dreadful flash of awareness as I was about to be laid out knowing it was going to hurt and it would keep on hurting the next day too. November snow is hard little flecks, not the fluffy stuff wafting feather-like in moonglow to reinforce latent feelings of goodwill toward all and accentuate whimsical outdoor Christmas decorations.

Sneakers and some snazzy walking around shoes have been tucked away. Rubber gardening clogs have replaced the snow boots on the basement storage shelf. The billed caps I wear constantly, one for indoors and one for the great wide open as property lines permit, are seasonal and so football (which replaced summer baseball) is switched out for hockey. Toques and mitts (the right one still crusty with last winter’s snot) have migrated upstairs. The jackets in the hall closet have been rotated out to make space for heavier coats – including that ratty green one I’m not permitted to wear beyond the boundaries of the Crooked 9.

I’m convinced winter coats are patterned differently from their more temperate and more stylish counterparts. Their cuts encourage poor posture, stooping, hunching. When I shrug my way into one of mine, my motor reflex is to slouch, shrink. It’s automatic.

Weather here tends to roll in from the north and west. I watch the sky from the front porch. Monday morning was eerily calm, as if all the shooting had suddenly ceased. The snow came around lunchtime, gritty little pellets. I swear I witnessed the exact moment when they stopped melting on contact with the warmer ground and instead began to accumulate. It snowed all day. It snowed all night. It’s still snowing now, two hours after an invisible sunrise. It’s all a bit deflating. And it happens every year around this time; sixty-two Novembers and counting. I may bend, but I will not break and shrivel into an old man although my old coats smell a little musty.    

                      

meGeoff has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of rumination on crippling seasonal depression since 2013. My novella Of Course You Did is available. Visit www.megeoff.com to find your preferred format and retailer.