'A Little Cold Won't Kill Him' – Me, A Moron

my very talented friend Kailey Stockburger took this photo. you can see her work currently exhibited in Artlink’s 2024 Midwest Regional exhibition

It’s so cold this week that even the Hoosiers* are complaining. Schools have been closed due to “wind chill”, a phrase I swear I never heard before I moved here, to the flattest place on earth, where there is nowhere, ever, to shelter from the wind.

Right now, it’s a balmy -13C, with a RealFeel of -17C. Mild, compared to yesterday’s -16C (RealFeel -27C). You feel the cold right down to your bones, no matter how many layers of clothing you’re wearing.

As an Irish person, I’ve always seen a ski mask as a frightening, and dramatic, fashion choice; right now, it is not a choice but a necessity, at least if you’re planning on spending any amount of time outdoors. (I am not. I am staying indoors as much as possible, writing and knitting and drinking hot drinks.)

On Monday, I drive Atlas the .1 of a mile up the road to his babysitter’s house. The car is in the garage, but still it’s cold when we get in.

All of the safety manuals tell you not to put a coat on a baby in a car seat, but I can’t help wondering which would be worse: to be wearing a coat when the car slides across the ice going 20mph and hits someone’s postbox, or to die of hypothermia in the back seat. He’s wearing a warm jumper, long trousers, socks and Ugg boots handed down to us from my sister, but still, his cheeks begin to redden before we’ve even reversed out the driveway.

Later, my husband will tell me that I should have started the car earlier, allowed it to warm up before driving it out on to the road and around the corner.

“We were fine,” I tell him, and then, because I can’t help myself, “A little cold won’t kill him.”

Brandin gives me a look I have grown worryingly familiar with – the what-kind-of-moron-are-you look – and says, “It’s bad for the car,” as if my thinking he was concerned for the baby is somehow ridiculous.

As it happens, the car isn’t really the issue, where Atlas is concerned; it’s the 10 or so feet between the car and his babysitter’s house. As soon as I open the door and the wind whips its way inside, his little face begins to screw up into an expression of dismay, disgruntlement and disgust, all at once.

By the time I’ve got him out of the car, a task made infinitely more difficult by his death grip on the Duplo Lightning McQueen I had to use as a bribe to get him out of the house, he’s crying. His head is buried into my shoulder, but it’s a tactical move, rather than one borne out of any kind of affection. I can tell that he is raging with me by how stiff his legs are, how clenched his fists.

What’s truly inexplicable is that, as we reach the threshold of Robin’s house, and I deposit him over the lintel and kick the snow off my boots, his crying amps up. Doesn’t he realise it’s warm in there? Dry? Windless? Apparently not.

Still, he gets over it; as I shut the door behind me, the screams stop. I wait a moment and hear his little footsteps as he runs, away from me, towards the toys, or the other children, or both, who knows.

Back home, our older two boys have been suiting and booting themselves up in preparation for going out on the trampoline. They have trousers and T-shirts and jumpers on, then thick socks and snow pants – the ones that are like little snow jumpsuits, with a bib that goes up and over their jumpers – and, as they begin to layer on gloves and coats, we have the first moment of conflict.

“Aren’t you wearing a hat?” I ask William, who is 11, and has just finished awkwardly putting on his Dad’s winter gloves, having left his own at his mom’s.

“No,” he tells me, “I’m just going to put up my hood.”

I look outside. It looks nice enough – the sky is blue and the sun is shining, but I can see the wind whipping through the trees across the pond and his brother, who got out a few minutes ahead of him, is already looking distinctly clown-y, his cheeks, bright red circles on his otherwise pale face.

“Put on a hat,” I tell him. “It’s too cold outside today.”

He removes the gloves quickly, furiously, slamming them on the kitchen table. I feel sorry for him as they hit the veneer, because thick winter gloves do not make a satisfying slamming sound, and there’s something disappointing about the whole thing. It doesn’t so much seem like an angry gesture as it does a pathetic one. The gloves remind me of an over-ripe cucumber, no longer satisfying and crunchy but soft, squidgy and slightly stomach-churning.

I push the hat over his head, brushing his hair back slightly. “There,” I say, and then (because I can’t help myself), “Don’t you look gorgeous!”

He scowls at me as he puts his gloves back on, reaching for the rear sliding door and pulling on it, leaning back to get more momentum. The door freezes and sticks each night, and again at random intervals throughout the day, depending on how long it’s been since the dog went out to do his business, and the snow that has compacted on the other side of it makes it hard to open and close.

I watch as they climb onto the trampoline together, the jumping surface covered in a thick layer of snow and ice, which begins to break up as they stride across it. Each footstep releases another puff of white dust, blowing up and around them.

The sandbox, which, at some point, got filled with rain water, has frozen over, too; inside are gardening tools, a spade, a fork, relics of a warmer time, when children dug for fossils and rocks, built castles and moats and buried hands and feet beneath the sand.

Finn stands on top of the frozen box, sliding around the surface in his probably-still-too-big-for-him winter boots (but there’s no point in buying the exact right size for children, is there? They grow so fast). “Can I have a tool?!” he asks me, as I slide open the door to tell them not to throw chunks of ice at the net of the trampoline. “To dig out the gardening fork.”

The ice in the sandbox is at least a foot thick, and frozen solid.

“It won’t work,” I tell him. “It’s too thick, and you’ll break whatever you try to use, and anyway, your mom’s gonna be here soon.” I say “mom” when I talk to them about her, because they say “mom”, too, and I can’t take another moment of having my pronunciation corrected, especially before 9am.

I turn back to my coffee, cooling on the counter. I take a sip, and a moment, too, to appreciate being indoors, in the heat, drinking this warm liquid, instead of being outside, digging for treasure in a frozen box. I suppose I would have thought that fun, too, once.

When I look outside again, Finn is leaning down over the outline of the gardening fork – one prong reaching up towards the sky, like Adam reaching out to God on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel – and breathing on to the ice.

“It’s working!” he shouts, excitedly, to William, who has taken off his gloves and is walking around the garden, slowly, like a detective in Fargo, examining the scene.

I open the door again.

“William,” I say, “Please put your gloves back on.”

He does, but not without shooting me a glare over his shoulder, from beneath his fringe.

They’ve been out, now, for seven minutes, almost eight. There’s a chart that tells you how long it takes for frostbite to set in at specific temperatures, and though I haven’t consulted it today – it’s in Fahrenheit, which confuses me – I have decided 10 minutes will be their max.

I’m building myself up to tell them to come in when they have a fight – something about ice on the swing set, someone ruining it for someone else – and decide, all on their own, that it’s time to come in anyway.

I’m relieved; they rarely listen to my directives, at least not the first time, and calling them from the back door embarrasses me. I imagine the neighbours, watching the Irish woman down the road shouting at her kids from the back door. I may as well be shaking a sack cloth out the window, I think, or threatening someone with a wooden spoon.

They don’t know they’ve done me this small favour, though, and in any case my gratitude wanes as they begin to disrobe by the back door.

“Where does this go?” I ask, pointing at a pair of snow pants, abandoned on the floor in a way that makes them look a bit like their wearer just – poof! – disappeared into thin air, or turned into a mouse.

Finn shrugs. “It’s wet,” he says, flatly, as if that explains why he left it on the floor, as if all wet things belong on the floor.

William’s things are on the floor too, but he is now so involved in a game on the Switch that he’s unable to hear or see anything else. I empathise; that’s why I rarely play video games. During my Theme Hospital phase, I truly believe the house could have burnt down around me and I wouldn’t have noticed, too busy trying to level up enough to hire a top-rated surgeon.

When their mom arrives to pick them up, she comes with bad news.

“Is there e-learning today?” Finn asks, enthusiastically, before he’s even said hello.

“No,” she says, “just a two-hour delay.”

The morning trampoline escapades seem, I’m sure, like a lifetime ago as they get back into their coats – wet now, because I’m an idiot who didn’t think through what would happen when they rolled around in the snow right before going to school – and shove their feet into, inexplicably, their Crocs.

“Your feet will be cold,” their mom tells them, and they shrug in response. I catch her eye and we shrug, too. Maybe they’ll learn a lesson. Maybe they won’t. Recess is cancelled anyway, so they’ll be inside all day.

I tell them, then, about the school I went to, where classes were held in prefabs for years as the money was raised for renovations, and the heaters frequently didn’t work.

“And would school be cancelled?” William asks, earnestly.

The past may be a foreign country, but so is Ireland, as I tell him that, no, it wouldn’t. “But it doesn’t get so cold there,” I say.

“I don’t think I’d like Ireland,” he says, then. “You don’t get enough snow and it’s always raining.”

As they drive off to school, and I warm up my coffee and get out the ingredients for rice pudding for breakfast, because no one’s here to stop me, I think, at least some of what I tell them goes in.

*A Hoosier is a person from, or currently living in, Indiana. It’s also, apparently, the name of our National Forest. Here are some theories on the origin of the word, in case you’re interested.