My Winter of Discontent

Maybe it started when I was running and hurt my knee, the discontent that is. To compensate I favored that knee and now I feel like I am walking with a wobble.  Then both legs started aching and I especially feel it at night while in bed.  

The feeling of being wobbly went from my legs to my head.  It is a sense of being lethargic and not caring about things I should get done around the house. I seem to be floating in slow motion.  How many weeks have I been looking at the mess underneath my laundry sink thinking I should clean it out? It would probably take fifteen minutes at the most, but I am fighting with myself over its importance in the scheme of things.

This winter has not been as blustery and brutal as last year’s so I should be happier that the roads are clear and I can come and go as I please, but there is a discontent that puts me in a peculiar spot.  I ask myself why I seem not as happy as I should be. Why do I not care if I come and go? Why do I sometimes wish I could just stay in bed and cover up my head?

Maybe it is the books I’ve been reading.  I just finished Anne Lamott’s Imperfect Birds.  It is fiction dealing with a teenager and drugs and her parent’s obliviousness to much of what she was doing until it reached a breaking point. The ending is satisfactory, but the story line is disconcerting.

Now I am reading a nonfiction book by Steve Luxenberg,  Annie’s Ghosts...A Journey into a Family Secret.  This book is set in Detroit where Steve grew up with a mother who said she was an only child.  At the end of her life it was discovered that she had a sister who spent 30 years in a mental institution in Detroit.  Even though Steve and his siblings had gotten this information before their mother's death, his mother never mentioned it and they didn't ask so she took it to her grave. After his mother’s death Steve started investigating and the story is a grim one.  I have not yet finished this fascinating book.  

To break up the depressing books I stop to read an essay in David Sedaris’ book Let’s Explore Diabetes With Owls….essays, etc.  I find myself giggling at his writing style. I heard David speak several years ago and I was laughing so hard I was getting tears in my eyes.  I need writers like him to  reverse the winter doldrums.

John Steinbeck wrote the book The Winter of Our Discontent, but he got the name of that book from a quote in Shakespeare’s Richard III. Richard begins the play by saying:

Now is the winter of our discontent

Made glorious summer by this son of York

And all the clouds that low’r’d upon our house

In the deep bosom of the ocean buried

Most people just quote “Now is the winter of our discontent,” but to do that is to miss the fact that Richard is saying because of the son of York, his discontent is gone and buried in the ocean. However as the play continues, Richard’s unhappiness returns.  

I think I am susceptible to the gray of Michigan winters.  Yet I do not want to go to sunnier climes.  Our grandchildren and children are close by and we don’t want to be absent grandparents.  

I know that if I use my discontent as a stepping stone to understanding why I feel this way, maybe I can have a glorious summer both literally and figuratively.  It is up to me. Meanwhile the sun is lighting up this day and there is no discontent in that.