Wednesday, December 5, 2007

First Real Snow

The first real snow of the season makes me feel like a kid again. There's something magical about the whirls of white, the frosted outline of bare branches.

I scraped up as much as I could of the 1 inch layer that was on the ground this morning for Dominic to make snowballs. We had about 20 minutes to play before the school bus came. More magic: the speed at which your child can eat breakfast when he wants to go out in the snow vs. the speed at which he eats breakfast on a normal school day.

I drove to work carefully.
The magic of the morning faded as I worked my way into traffic.

I think the change in weather came by a bit earlier than expected, and many of the streets were not clear yet. On the way I saw this truck flipped over; we all had to slow down as the police helped the tow truck driver maneuver into place.

The focus on diabetes365 this week is "maintenance." All I could think of this morning was maintaining a safe speed. In traffic, and in dealing with a chronic disease, this message is apropos. With diabetes there are unexpected turns in the road. There are days of smooth sailing, and days when you crash. No matter what, you can't take your eyes off the road or your hands off the wheel when steering through life with this disease, because it never lets up, it never takes a break, it never allows you to pull to the side of the road and sleep.

Roll, baby, roll.

4 comments:

jules said...

That's a great word... Maintenance. Much better than control because really what can you control?? Certainly not diabetes, it's very unruly... to say the least.
Thanks for reading :)
Hope all is well!!
jules

dae said...

I've only seen snow once in my whole life, when my family flew to Seoul for a holiday a few years ago. I hate hate hate cold weather. I was born to live in the tropics I tell ya!

Naomi said...

I hope you have a great cruise, Jules!

Daena, I have a love-hate relationship with snow. I love to watch it, love to play in it, and then love to come inside & get warm! Hate to drive in it...

Anonymous said...

Hi Naomi -
It's Teri (of Teri and Mitch, and now also Hannah and Matthias). Your Christmas card got to us, and we're overjoyed to hear from you. All your kids are gorgeous and I'm impressed by all that you're doing for the gluten/celiac issue. We're going to try to onigiri -- can we have your recipe?

Email me at tdoerkse at mansfield dot edu, and I'll send you more news and cute kid pictures and things.

We've missed you!
Teri