There are intelligent reasons for Feigning Sleep.

It’s early, noises downstairs. I pull the covers up tight, pretend I’m asleep.

Yesterday I promise to send dessert to today’s skating party. That was before last night’s discovery there’s nary a stick of butter in the house. Ever tried to make dessert without butter? I flip through every recipe in the box.

On Feigning Sleep by allie taylor

Should go on Pinterest to find a dessert recipe sans butter. But it’s too late, so I head to bed. Think: I’ll get up in the morning, go out get butter, make a dessert. Well that’s what I thought last night. Now it’s today, the floor’s ice cold. I’m hiding under these covers, playing the game.

Jon heads to the shower, I hear a little voice from behind the bathroom door say softly, “Wait”. So trusting, he heads down for breakfast first. He’s passed narrowly by a little person on the stairs, toilet plunger in hand. This clues him in, but moments too late. The rushing water, voices reach me from under the covers. Don’t know exactly what’s happening. (But I can imagine.) I pull the covers tighter. (Later learn the flood sogged the last few toilet paper rolls in the house.)

That’s the way today started. Add to that, I’m now wearing Old Spice Fresh High Endurance deodorant, pilfered off Jon’s bath room shelf. Somehow my Secret went MIA yesterday. (Scary: who in my manly household is after my Secret? Everyone blames Hudson.)

One thing after another happens all morning, I won’t bore you with the sordid details. Except that it involves a certain Tom Brady snowman in my front yard. Yeah, the one labeled “Deflate Gate” with food coloring? (The label added after the above picture is taken.) Yeah that snowman. It’s the bottles of food coloring. The four forgotten bottles in the snow pants pockets. Discovered after the fact this morning, in the dryer. These are the details I’m talking about. The clock ticks as I deal with washer/dryer, clothes, lack of deodorant, butter, dessert, toilet paper.

My grocery list grows. Finally I get out the door, need to return quickly, have a lunch appointment at noon. (And who knows what else could happen while I’m gone?) Shopping, I get a text from a southern friend, she’s hoping for snow. Hope she gets it. We’ve sure had our fill, and they might as well have some fun too. You know what I’m supposed to be buying: butter and toilet paper. But somehow I’ve bought the store. Asparagus, tomatoes, bread, milk, eggs, cereal, chicken bouillon, baby carrots, strawberries, flour, sugar, chocolate chips, oreos, Secret. I check out, the baggers cheerfully fill me in on all the rotten customers they’ve had this morning. Customers with a lot of rules.

I unpack the groceries in the trunk, buckle in, realize I never got the toilet paper. Head back in, spend more pesos on the biggest pack I can find, walk out the door with enough toilet paper for an army. (Good, ‘cuz that’s what I have.)

I finally make it home about 11:15. More stuff happens that doesn’t involve butter or baking.

Guess what lovely “dessert” they get for the skating party? (Good thing I bought the store.)

(There are intelligent reasons for Feigning Sleep. Next time I’ll remember to feign a little longer.)

Related Post: Little Experiment

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So we’re getting socked with more snow in New England today. As in 10-16 inches expected at my house. Those of us in forced hibernation might particularly enjoy this funny anecdote from last week’s blizzard, Juno 2015. Resourceful New England women, battling the elements… Please welcome the author, my sister Susan.

On Burying the Cow

by Susan Giordano

Every ten seconds or so, I’d wave my arm predictably or raise a leg intentionally just to let any curious passers-by or concerned neighbors know NOT to call 911! Peace and satisfaction overwhelmed as I lay triumphantly on the woman-made pile of snow–my own Great (snow) Wall of China–separating our cars from threatening invader drifts. The snow melted on bright flushed cheeks, fogging my sunglasses, blurring the usually crisp clean tall tree lines, wavy. Their branches swayed back and forth predictably as if under the hypnotic trance of the lofty whirling winds. Staring up into the stormy grey abyss, I could only see cold confectionary sugar sifting silently and relentessly down.

A couple days earlier on another icy cold afternoon, we had travelled to the Connecticut border to retrieve a quarter of a grass-fed cow for storage in the freezer. Having reached our farm destination, I noticed in the back yard, as high as a telephone wire on a street pole, a 250 foot laundry line of wet hanging clothes that floated up a long hill–there must have been three loads-worth I estimated, imagining the labor this job entailed.

“My dryer broke,” our farmer friend explained casually.

“Why so high?” I wondered aloud.

“They say the higher the clothes, the windier, the faster they dry,” was the sensible reply.

I further learned her husband was working out of town for the weekend, which was especially tough THIS morning, because sadly enough, one of her cows had just died of pneumonia and she had to bury it, this morning.

(Thoughtfully, her husband had prepared ahead before he left, she explained, and had dug a hole with a backhoe–just in case.) So, that was good. It’s not everyday one meets a woman who deftly works around a broken dryer mid-winter and buries a cow–all in the same morning!

Just two days later, winter storm Juno of 2015 dropped its fresh white historic payload into our forty-foot driveway. Like my farmer friend’s scene, my husband was also “out of town” of sorts, busily making conference calls from his basement work office most of the day.
Reminded by my inspirational farm visit, I summoned strength and determined to clear the thickly blanketed driveway, to “bury my own cow.” The self-imposed mission was set. And with the exception of pleasant occasional visits from my youngest helpers, Will, 10, and Caroline, 7–I was on my own.

This job called for an old-fashioned shovel. Armed and perhaps dangerous, it was show time.
After a long mid-day go of it, I shoveled a few strategically-planned paths toward the street, breaking through the daunting mountainous plow pile where the driveway meets the road, and amassing a *Jerimoth Hill-sized mogul for the joy of my sledding-aged children. I proudly thought, while uncomfortably stretching my aching back — my farmer friend — she has nothing on me…

I could have rested for an hour that afternoon on my little hill in the silent swirling snow, waving off imaginary worried neighbors, staring at the frozen dashes sprinkling evenly from above. But there was more to be done. I planted my “flag” atop the conquered peak and slowly, regrouping, trudged back down over the Great Wall into the house and down the stairs to conquer the next personal never-ending battle, below. Switching yet another wet load of laundry into the dryer, I meekly pressed the “start” button.

*Jerimoth Hill (812 ft, 247 m), the highest natural point in Rhode Island.

Learn more about high flyin’, clothes dryin’, cow buryin’ farmer Julia Boyce: Evolving Farmer  Click to Julia’s story, #6 of Reader’s Digest Best Life Stories.

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