{"id":166503,"date":"2024-01-11T10:37:25","date_gmt":"2024-01-11T15:37:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=166503"},"modified":"2024-01-12T11:58:11","modified_gmt":"2024-01-12T16:58:11","slug":"januarys","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2024\/01\/11\/januarys\/","title":{"rendered":"Januarys"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

Beach in January. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, Licensed Under CC0 4.0<\/a>.<\/p><\/div>\n

Every December day that I\u2019m in Maine I swim in the ocean and my husband tells me I\u2019m insane. The temperature keeps dropping. I get two respiratory infections, a twenty-four-hour stomach thing. Why? he says to me. Mom<\/em>, the children say. They have only recently transitioned me to Mom from Mommy, and every time they say it my breath catches. Their dad\u2019s Cuban and I\u2019ve tried to convince them to transition me to Mami. It\u2019s Spanish! I say. You\u2019re white, Mom, they say. You know, Mom, our younger kid says, beating yourself up isn\u2019t a hobby. I\u2019m preparing, I tell them. For what? they say. For January.<\/p>\n

The first January we live in Maine, the twenty-second month of the pandemic: we\u2019re all so tired and almost everyone I know in New York is sick. My job has gone remote and I get up each morning to work when it\u2019s still dark. I turn on the small space heater in my office and wrap a big blanket around myself, sit with my computer on my lap. Evening comes, and I text my friend five minutes before I teach at seven. I\u2019ve been at my desk for fourteen hours but can\u2019t think of a single thing I\u2019ve done. What if I hate teaching now? I say. Babe, my friend texts back, it\u2019s January. You hate everything.<\/p>\n

The Januarys in high school are all track\u2014all the early Januarys are in Florida and the monotony of those sunny, plastic, clear and cloudless days comes to feel like it\u2019s assaulting me. I run four events at least. The two-mile is the longest, and the last race of the day. Late nights on the bus, the too-big jacket and sweatpants, crumbled rubber on bare thighs while I sit and stretch with my Discman, bile in my throat at the start; everybody cheers when I win, no one after talks to me.<\/p>\n

The first January in New York, alone, on Tenth Street between C and D, I\u2019m twenty-one. I call in sick to work. I tell them I got food poisoning because I\u2019ve worked nonstop for months and I can\u2019t fathom smiling another minute, another day, at some klatch of too-thin women who order just one order of our extra-special-everybody-loves-it chocolate-bag dessert with extra spoons, whipped cream on the side; at some guy, with his hand on the low curve of my back, who keeps sending back his steak. I count the cash stuffed in the dark wood box I keep by my bed and then I call again and tell them I threw up so much I ruptured my esophagus and now I have to go to the hospital. I think about how easy lying is. I read books all day, watch TV all night, hardly eat because I can\u2019t afford to eat. The\u00a0<\/span>restaurant is uptown and I live downtown and I walk around the whole time assuming that I won\u2019t get caught and I don\u2019t. Oh God, they all say when I come back to work, their eyes scanning my face, you must have been so sick.<\/p>\n

The January we\u2019re in Florida, the town where both of us grew up, our first time as grown-ups\u2014also the first time we\u2019re a we\u2014I\u2019ve replaced the only teacher that I ever liked in high school midyear because he killed himself. A cold snap comes, sixty-five degrees and the students all wear puffy coats and there\u2019s a cockroach infestation in the English classroom hallway. I\u2019m the only English teacher not afraid of cockroaches, so often, while I\u2019m teaching, another of the English teachers will come get me, squirming. We found another one! She\u2019ll stand up by the board in my room with my students. I\u2019ll get a paper towel from the teachers\u2019 lounge and go into her classroom, where the students are all talking, unconcerned about the cockroach, relieved to have this break, and I\u2019ll pick it up if I can find it, hold it in my hand, and bring it outside by the street so it can run away.<\/p>\n

The January we live in New Orleans is the coldest January anybody in New Orleans can remember. The door to our backyard in our little Irish Channel shotgun has a crack, the big windows that I loved so much when we moved in are, my now-husband tells me, only single-paned, and I sleep in a wool cap and long underwear with two sweaters on top and we have sex with as many clothes on as we can. The Saints are bounding toward the Super Bowl and the whole town\u2019s alight. Tulane girls in ponytails and old women talk strategy out on the street. At our favorite restaurant, which has the best red beans and rice\u2014the bread pudding\u2019s even better\u2014the door doesn\u2019t close all the way unless you press it perfectly and every time someone leaves someone screams the door!<\/em> Because when it\u2019s left open, the cold gets in, and sometimes the people leaving stop and try again and sometimes someone gets up to help, and often the whole time we\u2019re there, someone is screaming the door!<\/em><\/p>\n

The January we live in Brooklyn on Ocean Parkway, I drive our tiny white Honda Fit up from Florida, where we\u2019ve been the past six weeks. My husband has to stay for work, and I have classes to teach, so I drive twenty miles an hour on the New Jersey Turnpike with the dog curled up next to the gas pedal because he is afraid of everything on earth but me. I try to get a hotel in Virginia but all the hotels are full and the one that isn\u2019t full doesn\u2019t take dogs, so I take naps on the side of the road with the car running. Then I drive again, the hazards still on, so slowly that it feels like we won\u2019t get there before spring.<\/p>\n

The January we live in Brooklyn on Underhill and Sterling, I am newly pregnant and our friends who have two kids have their heat turned off by their landlord, so they come stay in our one-bedroom apartment for the week. We set them up on the couch, the two parts of it pushed together to make one big bed with lots of blankets and pillows. They have no money left, and I lend them my MetroCard when the husband goes to look for work. Trapped inside for the hundredth day, a polar vortex making every minute outside a biting, aching cold, they have no childcare or preschool, and I give my friend my credit card and she takes the kids to the children\u2019s museum, and I get five hours to myself. I get five hours by myself with the knowledge that now there is a person just like these two people staying with us\u2014crying, eating, wetting their pants, throwing tantrums, hot-skinned, wiggly, crawling over both their mother and their father as if their bodies were their bodies\u2014that something like that is growing inside of me.<\/p>\n

The January we live in Brooklyn on Twelfth Street, I\u2019m pregnant again, and I need more work. I call the babysitter we can\u2019t afford. I put on a blazer and nice slacks that are too tight and go into a brown-bag lunch session about ghostwriting. Everybody takes notes, and there\u2019s a lot of leaning forward in one\u2019s chair, a lot of nodding earnestly. No work comes from it.<\/p>\n

The January we live upstate in Cold Spring, they don\u2019t clear the roads enough. I take the 4:30 A.M.<\/small> Metro-North into Grand Central, then the subway to my sister\u2019s Murray Hill apartment, where I drop my stuff, even though my sister and I hardly ever talk, so I can go running in Central Park before I teach.<\/p>\n

The January we live in Brooklyn on Fifteenth Street, it\u2019s too close to the BQE, I think. I google how close is too close but it\u2019s the only apartment we could find and afford in this neighborhood. There\u2019s a glass-and-metal processing plant across the street. I get up at four thirty to work but our younger kid is up by five. I have a chair set up next to the sliding glass door that leads out to the small balcony with a view of the highway. We have a folding table in front of the door where we\u2019ve piled up my overflow of books and all of the kids\u2019 art. I lean my head against the sliding glass, my computer in my lap, and watch the old men and women with their can-filled shopping carts. The street is the street that a lot of people turn down to get to the highway\u2019s onramp, so there\u2019s almost always noise, whooshing too-fast cars and honking horns, the beeping backing-up of trucks. When our kid wakes up, hot skin and sour breath replace the computer on my lap. We live on the top floor and there are pigeons that live on the apartment roof. There\u2019s a hard plastic awning over the small balcony and their claws scratch against it, and when they land on it, there\u2019s a popping sound. Our kid fits nested in my lap and we watch the traffic pick up, the sky lighten with sun. We watch the snow fall when it comes. We listen to the birds scratch-pop.<\/p>\n

The January we live in Florida again, in the pandemic\u2019s miasmic middle stretch, I don\u2019t mind all the sun and warmth as much. We share a house with my husband\u2019s parents and a room with both the kids. I stay up late and listen to them breathe. I tell my family that I have to work and sit outside with my coffee in a short-sleeved shirt and linen pants, and I watch the three large palm trees rustling in the wind in the backyard, my computer closed and quiet next to me.<\/p>\n

That first January we live in Maine, every deeper drop in temperature, every greater fall of snow or rain or both, is an opportunity to prove that I can run in that too, that I can put small spikes attached to rubber straps on my shoes, put on another layer of pants, a tube of fleece around my neck that I can pull up over my face. I like the six-degree days more than the twenty-degree days. I can hardly stand the days that go up past thirty-five. On colder days the oxygen is thinner, the internet says, so my lungs have to work harder when the air is that cold. My breath catches halfway down. But I like the way the cold braces. Bracing cold<\/em> feels like someone else\u2019s phrase, but that\u2019s the word I think of, every time I run, and the wind whips\u2014I speed up\u2014I feel my lungs work hard.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Lynn Steger Strong is the author of the novels<\/em> Hold Still,<\/em> Want, and<\/em> Flight.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“Babe, my friend texts back, it\u2019s January. You hate everything.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1683,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4393],"tags":[67827,10033],"class_list":["post-166503","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-first-person","tag-featured","tag-winter"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nJanuarys by Lynn Steger Strong<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"January 11, 2024 \u2013 "Babe, my friend texts back, it\u2019s January. 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