Who am I ?

There are opportunities in going through the every day mundane steps of life that can tell a perfect stranger who you are, or more correctly begin to tell stranger who you are. I feel blogging is like that. With the exception of a few friends who follow my blogs I have been blessed to have found friends whom just know me from my posts.
There are a lot of bloggers doing thirty day blog posts and I find them very interesting and I definitely am learning things about my new found friends, yet I can not seem to join in, I know that once I make that commitment it will seem like pressure and I may not keep up. See right there is a detail about me.
Today forty five miles North of Boston it is below 9 degrees with wind chill in the negative twenty. There is a one hundred year old family house that had been completely refurbished two years ago that I reside in, I live in the first floor with my boyfriend and two cats! When I moved here my twenty three year old daughter and her 1 year old moved with me, we had relocated from a two bedroom condo in an old Victorian house less than a mile away. I loved the condo in that Victorian, love old houses period. My daughter had returned from college with a baby and we needed more room so we moved, and in less than eighteen months that had imploded and now I live in a big three bedroom apartment with boyfriend and two cats! I often post about my granddaughter and my daughters and the situation imploded but we do maintain a relationship as that is who we are, we can disagree and still love each other and be there for each other. My granddaughter has her own room all set up and she stays with me about twice a week, I am blessed that way.
The details of how I deal with the cold are pretty telling to who I am, I awoke to the hum of the small electric heater blowing hot air at my side of the bed, I am half covered with blankets yet my feet are uncovered and I am scrambling for my bathrobe that is beside the bed, so that in case of fire I am never that naked woman that the firefighters have to wrap a blanket around. I want to be warm but hate feeling bound by clothes or blankets when I sleep. It is seven am, DBF has left for work already, I heard him earlier as he was closing the door behind him, I also heard the sound of him tossing rock salt on the front steps, and chatting with the neighbor upstairs as she loaded her three boys, 9, 7 and 5 into their SUV. My feet hit the tiles in the kitchen outside my bedroom and I decide to wrap them in some soft plushy socks before headed to the coffee maker. The bathroom is toasty warm, I had kept the door shut all night as explained to me the billionth time by DBF, the heating vent is the first off the oil burning heating system in the cellar and it gets the first push of heat and when the door is shut it makes the bathroom feel like a sauna and there is one room in the house to retreat too when the chill is clinging to the air in all the other rooms. Thinking about my love of old houses I wonder how that can be when I so hate the cold, it is such a contradiction as I have yet to find a draft free old house and I have lived in many. Leaving the bathroom, and grabbing my coffee I head to my office where I am trying this post. I think about all the houses I have lived and feel that my love began in the home I grew up in, less than 10 miles away in a small town along the river. The town is unaffordable to me now, as it has been developed with new subdivisions where open fields once were, the older homes have been redone much like the Victorian condo I lived in, and even the two family home I grew up in with my six siblings has been turned into two expensive condos that are unaffordable to me. That house was where I spent the first thirteen years of my life, a three bedroom apartment. My mother and father shared the a room, their five daughters in the other and their two sons in the small back bedroom, that you had to walk through the girls room too. That is how it was until my dad died when I was nine
I grew up poor for the first thirteen years of my life, not modest, like I would describe now, but poor,it was apparent to me early on in my life that we were poor as we lived in an an affluent town. I was never without food, or without heat or without anything, I ate, and I knew if I put something on my plate I had best eat it, and I knew we ate was for supper without complaint, no second choices and no hesitations. I knew the money for food was hard to come by, and that at times my Grandfather would dig clams from the clam flats as that was the only way. I was always warm and had clothes, they were never new clothes and being number 4 of five girls they were very worn.
Thinking back and getting back to how cold it is right now, I found myself thinking about that home I grew up in and how the upstairs was always cold and after climbing out of bed, we would head down the stairs and at the base of the stairs to the left separating the hall and the living room was a large metal grate four feet by two feet wide where the furnace would blow hot air up into the house. We kids would take turns straddling the furnace and feeling the hot air blow our hair and warm us from our toes to the tip of our noses. Those grates were dangerous though, my little sister whom is almost forty now, still bares the scar on her foot when she was just under two and the gate that usually stood between the hall and that grate was not up, she with bare feet walked across the grate and burned her feet badly. It was awful and reason why those grates no longer exists I am sure, as they were dangerous,but in my memory and in this cold streak, I miss that grate and the feeling of warmth you got by standing over it.
So this morning, after my coffee I forced myself to get dressed as I had to go set up my Mom's pills for the week, she has late stage Parkinson's Disease and a host of other ailments and is unable to set them up herself, this is our routine, I set the pills up once a week, I check in daily by phone and try to have coffee with her four or five times a week, she looks forward to it and on some level so do I. I am usually in and out before her husband wakes up and I have to play nice. I layer my clothes on, in the bathroom that feels like a sauna, and than warm up my car, whom I call Betsy, I have a habit of naming inanimate objects. The car warms up and I prepare a care package of sorts, the stuffed pepper soup I made yesterday. She taught me to cook and she fed a family of nine, and we cook large, so I will be handing this soup out like Halloween Candy to anyone who wants it, rather than freeze it. The car has been warming and I pull my coat on, my hat ( my daughter knitted me a hat for Christmas, I love it!) grab her soup and balance my pocket book and my coffee and head out the door. I drink my coffee from a favorite ceramic mug and that travels with me, it is not a travel mug, I am not a fan of the plastic or stainless steel, so I rather drive balancing my favorite ceramic mug. appropriate to how I am thinking I adjust the radio to hear The House that Built me, sung by Miranda Lambert
Onward I go, listening to a favorite song, tapping my fingers beneath my lavender mittens, planning my day, Mom, come home, write for awhile and hit the gym, and by 3:30 I will be picking up my granddaughter and we will have fine night together. I am a simple girl and happy with that, and getting smaller I might add :)