Static Season

From the window by my desk I can see my neighbors, who range in age from 65 to 95, tromping through the woods, gathering sap from the sugar maples. It’s sugaring season in Vermont, which means that the temperature still drops below freezing at night—which means that static season is still with us.

In my war against static electricity, I have enlisted all the weapons suggested by the internet homemaking goddesses. Since dry air makes the problem worse, I keep the humidifier going full tilt day and night. I pour generous quantities of white vinegar into the washing machine, keep wool balls in the dryer (which never fail to get lost inside pant legs), and remove clothes while they are still damp. But nothing works very well. (Dryer sheets supposedly help, but my green conscience prevents me from using them.)

My poor dog, Bisou, has been shocked so many times that she flinches when I reach down to pet her, especially if she’s lying on her favorite, an ancient afghan that I crocheted out of polyester yarn before I knew that the material attracts static like nothing else on earth. Her red-gold hair stands up corona-like all around her as I draw near, and I have trained myself to touch metal before I touch her.

There are mornings when my clothes stick to me as if I were heading onto a gale. Should I idiotically decide to put on a skirt, it gloms onto me like ivy on a dying oak, and clicks in protest if I try to separate it from my thighs. The household pundits on the web say that spraying water on oneself helps, but in my experience this only works if I drench myself until I’m dripping.

But even worse than clingy clothes is the hair magnetism. If I sit down anywhere in the house, I get covered in long red strands from Bisou, short gray and white wisps from Telemann, and my own brown and white contributions. When I stand up, my legs are a palimpsest that reveals who’s been sitting where.

Why don’t I brush my animals, you ask? But I do! Faithfully! Every week I compost handfuls of dog and cat hair (I used to put it out for the birds to use in their nests, but I have learned that pet hair holds moisture, and can get tangled in the legs of baby birds, cutting off circulation). However, regardless of how much I brush there’s always more--I suspect that at least fifty percent of the nutrition in pet food goes to making hair--and it homes in on me with the kind of determination only seen in lemmings headed for the sea.

Why don’t I use a lint brush? I do, but only on special occasions and within five seconds prior to leaving the house. If I used it every time I get hair on my pants, I would go through several of those sticky paper rolls every day.

People who know me probably think that I mostly wear gray, or that grayish/brownish/yellowish shade known to wildlife biologists as agouti. But what looks agouti to the world is in fact black with a frosting of pet hair. Fully three-quarters of the garments I own are black as midnight. That, however, may change soon, when I grow weary of plucking, picking, and brushing and, choosing to join those whom I cannot beat, get rid of my sober and, on a good day, slimming black clothes and replace them with items in gray, tan, taupe, ash, khaki, oatmeal, camel, fawn, or mud.

Here’s a story about static electricity, from the era before safety belts and bucket seats: one cold day in New Jersey, a friend’s elderly mother, wearing polyester slacks, went for a ride with her husband. As she slid across the front bench seat to sit next to him, she felt a shock and said, “Honey, please remind the mechanic to fix those shock absorbers.”

So Not in the Present Moment

On a 10F morning last week I found myself longing for a sweater.  Not just any sweater, but the mother of all sweaters.  Something that would encase me from neck to knees in spacious wooliness.  Something both soft and substantial and possibly good looking.  Something that would warm  the chilly cockles of my heart.

I was in Manchester Center, the town that outlets built, on yoga business anyway, so after class I walked into a couple of stores.  I thought that not only would they have sweaters, but sweaters would be on sale.  But there wasn't a single woolly, serious sweater in sight.

Instead, the stores were crammed with tiny shorts and sleeveless tops, all in icy blues, sherbet pinks and acid greens and yellows.  Spring had apparently arrived and was in full swing in the world of retail.  It did not make me feel  happy, and it utterly failed to warm the cockles of my heart.  In fact those silly clothes in their silly colors set my teeth on edge, and made me feel even colder than I already was.

Retail is famous for rushing the calendar.  Halloween arrives in stores on the heels of the Fourth of July, Thanksgiving happens in the early fall, and sometimes I feel like it's Christmas all year round.  But not to be able to find a sweater in the middle of January--in Vermont yet--goes beyond the pale.  Here I am, doing my best to enjoy the season, trying to be at one with the cold, and the stores want me to think spring!  They want me to hate the  cold and the snow and  buy a pair of shorts in the hopes that it will make the winter go away faster.  If I didn't like this kind of winter I would not have moved to the Vermont in the first place, or I turn into that animal  not found in Nature, a snowbird, and fly to the Gulf of Mexico to splash in the surf until mud season was over.

But I am here because I like it cold and white and dead.  All I want is a good sweater to keep me warm.  Do you hear me, stores? 

December, 2008 "Dressing Up"

I miss dressing up every day. Although I used to work in academia, where down-at-the-heel looks were considered a sign of intellectual rigor, I could never embrace that aspect of the profession. Instead, I used to pay lots of attention to what I wore to work.

Mostly, I dressed up because it was fun, and because it allowed me, first thing in the morning, to accomplish a small creative act in what grew to seem an ever duller workday.

Early Morning Creativity

I never laid out my outfit the night before. In the morning, before opening the closet I would consult 1. the weather, and 2. my mood. Some days called for brilliant hues, others for blacks and greys. Having made that decision, I would pull out a straight skirt, a blouse, and a jacket or sweater. Or I would choose a dress. I owned very few suits, because they limited my options too much. Then came the shoes, with high, high heels. I could climb mountains in high heels in those days--even my bedroom slippers had little heels. The pantyhose, which I ordered by the gross, had to match the skirt and shoes—I'd read somewhere that that “lengthened the line.”

Make-up came next. I would put on foundation, powder, eye-shadow, eye-liner and mascara. I would outline my lips with pencil and fill them in in a lighter shade with lipstick, which I would then blot. (I won't go into the hair-related stuff, which played a major role in my morning routine.) Lastly, I would choose the correct earrings for the outfit, spritz myself with a little perfume, pick the gloves to go with my shoes. If upon checking in the mirror I found myself lacking a little oomph, I would rummage through my scarf drawer until I found something that I could wrap around my neck or drape on my shoulders that would save the look.

Thus arrayed I would set off for campus, about a mile and a half from my house, my heart filled with courage and my mind with principles, my heels tapping authoritatively on the sidewalk. At a time when women's toehold in academia was precarious, dressing up made me feel that whatever victories I earned—tenure, promotion, a seat on some committee or other—I had earned as a woman, or at least as the kind of woman I was.

Now that I live in Vermont, that morning ritual seems insane. These days, I throw a barn jacket over my pajamas and run to feed the chickens, then run back to feed the dogs. I long ago gave away the unopened packages of panty hose, the jackets with shoulder pads, the narrow skirts. If I were to go outside right now in a pair of high heels, I would have to be rescued by the local fire department. In winter I wear jeans and a thick sweater; in summer, jeans and a cotton top. My rubber-soled boots never tap authoritatively on the sidewalk (there is no sidewalk).

Even in Vermont, however, there is an occasional opportunity to dress up. But it's not the same. As with any art, dressing up takes practice, and I am sorely out of it. I need to face it: my dress-up days are gone.

But if that is the price I have to pay for the sound of my rooster at dawn, for empty roads bordered with sheep-dotted fields, for living in Vermont, then someone else can have the high-heeled shoes, the Hermes scarves, and all the rest.