Another polar vortex is heading south, and a lot of us are in its path. The last time it was this cold – at least in my neck of the woods – was February 2013. I was living in a 100-year-old duplex with pipes that were about that old, too. From the archives, a story of water. (And the Jim of the story is the same Jim I love and adore, and for more than his mad plumbing skillz ♥)

Wishing you and your plumbing a safe and warm Polar Vortex 2019!

February 2013

To survive, we need air, food, water, and shelter. Last week, on the two coldest days of the Polar Vortex so far, I had air, food, and shelter, but for 36 hours, I was without running water due to what I thought was a burst pipe.

I knew I would be away for a few days, but I would be home before it got seriously cold in order to open the cupboards under the sinks and place space heaters in front of them. In Minnesota, I never experienced a frozen or burst pipe, but a few years after moving to Pennsylvania in 1991, the pipes in my apartment froze, and I spent several hours in the basement thawing them with a hair dryer. This time, I had a plan. And you know how the universe loves a plan.

Confident that I was prepared and in time for the deep freeze, I opened the door and walked into a lake in the kitchen as water hissed from a pipe under the sink. I stood there for a moment, confused, like the house yelled “Surprise!” Only there were no balloons, streamers or confetti, and there was definitely no cake.

When the shock wore off, I went downstairs and turned off the water main, and with every towel I owned, sopped up the flood in the kitchen. Next, I called my landlord, who called a plumber, who called me and said he might get a chance to stop by the next day. It was noon, the temperature was dropping, and I had one flush left in the toilet.

I needed water.

I have very little concept of distance or volume. I can’t tell you how long my driveway is or how much gas it takes to fill the tank of my lawn mower. And if I guessed, you’d laugh. That’s why I’m not an architect. At Target, I stared at the gallons of water on the shelf and wondered how much I’d need to get through a day, or at the very least, a night. I settled on 10 and wheeled my purchases out to my car, cursing the minus 10-degree wind chill.

It was sobering to realize how much water I use to simply wash my hands, brush my teeth, and flush the toilet. Ten gallons seemed like so much, and yet by morning, there were only two left. With no plumber in sight, I headed back to the store for six more.

Cold, cold, ridiculous cold. My Jeep was not happy. My exposed skin was not happy. When I got home, I turned on the stove and mixed up a batch of whole wheat, low-fat chocolate chip cookies. I heated a gallon of water on the stove so I could wash dishes, and poured another gallon in a plastic pan to rinse them, acutely aware that I normally use more than two gallons of water when I wash dishes in the regular way, when water magically comes out of the faucet.

Potentially-more-than-a-friend Jim the Carpenter called and asked if the plumber had been there. No, I told him. I’ll fix it, he said. I thanked him and told him I’d baked cookies. (I just didn’t tell him what kind.)

Jim arrived with everything to fix a broken pipe – gater bites, a piece of copper pipe, and soldering equipment – because from what I told him (in my “The pipe is hissing!” voice), he thought the pipe was split. I followed him downstairs and stopped just before the entrance to the creepy dark room in the basement under the kitchen. I’ve never been in that room because the bulb had burned out and I’ve read a lot of Edgar Allan Poe. Jim scanned the wall with his flashlight and said all the pipes were fine.

We walked back upstairs and he looked under the sink. He found the valve to the outdoor water spigot (so THAT’S where that is!) and turned it off. He went back to the basement, turned on the water main, and – low and behold – no hiss, no leak.

The valve, he explained, had most likely froze from the skimpy temperatures a few days before, but I was only half listening. The sound of the toilet tank filling was like a symphony.

The temperatures warmed the next day. I washed dishes and took a shower. I am fortunate, and I hope to not forget that.

As I write this, there are 300,000 people in West Virginia who are without running water because of a chemical spill, and there are hundreds of millions of people worldwide who lack safe drinking water. What I take for granted is another person’s precious commodity.

While my short-term water inconvenience hardly makes me an expert on chronic water shortage, I can allow it to teach me compassion for those who experience it.

Growing up, my family opened gifts on Christmas Eve, including Santa gifts. This meant that the night before the night before Christmas, Santa came to our house.

Defying logic (like there is anything logical about Santa), our parents told us that Santa started his trip at our house before heading to where it was already Christmas Eve: the International Date Line. Of course I believed them. Magic and logic were all the same back then. Santa, the Tooth Fairy, the Jolly Green Giant… They all seemed perfectly real to me, until I was 10. That’s when I cracked the whole Santa mystery. More on that in a minute.

Every Christmas Eve, Dad read the Christmas story from the book of Luke before we opened gifts. I always felt sad for Baby Jesus, getting gifts like gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Maybe back then those were considered awesome gifts. But to me they were the equivalent of socks and underwear. Not that socks and underwear aren’t good and often necessary gifts, but I was fortunate that there were usually a few things from my Sears catalog wish list under the tree, too.

Of all the gifts I’ve received over the years  – gold, frankincense, and myrrh not withstanding – one gift from 1980 is still the best. And most mysterious.

I was a senior in high school and was a waitress at Country Kitchen. A week before Christmas, I came home after the dinner shift, and there was a 12-inch red and green can on the front stoop. On top was a note: “To Lynn, From Santa.” I brought it inside and asked if anyone knew who left it. My dad said it wasn’t there when he came home from work, and no one remembered hearing a car pull up in the driveway.

Whatever was inside was sealed like a can of peas and could only be opened with a can opener. I brought it to the kitchen. My mom yelled from the family room, “You can’t open that until Christmas!”

“But why? We don’t even know who it’s from!”

That didn’t matter. Haraldson Christmas Rule No. 1: No gift shall be opened until Christmas Eve. No exceptions.

Perplexed (and ticked about Rule No. 1), I spent a few hours analyzing the handwriting on the lid. I was no stranger to handwriting analysis. Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden were my literary idols.

The Christmas when I was 10, I noticed that the thank you note Santa left was written on the same notepaper my mom kept in the cupboard. The handwriting was just like my dad’s. Being a wary and somewhat nervous child, I was relieved!! to know the truth about Santa; to know that on the night before the night before Christmas, no old guy wandered around our house looking for paper and a pen while we all slept. It was my dad all along! Whew…

Seven years later, though…

I couldn’t figure it out. The handwriting on the can wasn’t obvious. Was it a boy’s handwriting? A girl’s? I couldn’t tell. There were a few strange customers at Country Kitchen who might leave me gifts outside my house, but that was too creepy to consider. I wasn’t dating anyone seriously, and definitely not anyone of mystery or intrigue.

Out of guesses, there was nothing more I could do but let the can sit under the tree for seven torturous days.

On Christmas Eve, I sat on the couch with a can opener in my hand. Dad read the Christmas story. Then my little sister opened her first gift. Then my little brother opened his first gift. (Haraldson Christmas Rule No. 2: Gifts are always opened in order of age.) When it was finally my turn, I cranked open the can as fast as I could. Inside was a teddy bear and a note: “Merry Christmas. Love, Dad.”

Best gift ever.

Wishing you all a very merry night before night before Christmas!

I’m (finally) putting together a book compiled of my favorite columns and blogs that I’ve written over the past 20 years. The process has been like looking at photo albums with commentary.

I wanted to share this particular column I wrote in 2004 because I am stunned/happy/laughing at how, 14 years later, what I wrote about my daughters still holds true. Carlene and Cassie, you still are the lights of my life, and I love you both so much. I wouldn’t change a thing.

Twin Daughters of Different Fathers 

Sometime in 2004 

Dan Fogelberg and Tim Weisburg collaborated on an album in 1979 called Twin Sons of Different Mothers. It was my favorite nighttime music, and a welcome change from disco. Fogelberg’s words and Weisburg’s flute fed both the angst and peace of my typical 16-year-old self. I knew every note, every crescendo, every run. I even taught myself the flute part from the first track, “Twins Theme.” Life was full of possibilities. I was going to be either a veterinarian or a roadie for the Eagles. I’d have died laughing if someone told me that instead, within 5 years, I would produce my own “album”: Twin daughters of different fathers. 

Never one to do things the conventional way, I turned the old saying “The first child can take any time, the second one takes nine months” on its ear. 

Everyone assumed daughter number one was a guest at her father’s and my wedding. Otherwise, why would a 23-year-old farmer marry an 18-year-old city girl? When Carlene made her appearance, reluctantly, three weeks shy of our one-year anniversary, the finger counting had ended and people realized she took the “morally correct” nine months to come into being. 

We were a happy little family unit of three, making plans to expand. But just as life requires birth, it requires death. My farmer boy died, leaving me and our little daughter a family of two. We moved to the city, where I went through the motions of life, feeling very little and making choices I wouldn’t otherwise make if not for the constant numbness. It was within this almost hypnotic state that daughter number two came into being. 

Cassandre was an actual guest at my second wedding. She was 9 months old, teething and crawling, and unaware of the way she turned my world right side up again. Carlene had nicknamed her Cassie Bear in the hospital, and liked to hold her like her favorite Cabbage Patch Doll, which in so many ways Cassie was. They became like the Chinese symbol yin-yang: two opposite energies that could not exist without each other. So it was no surprise to me when Carlene moved to Pittsburgh recently, living as close to Cassie as she could without actually having to share a bathroom. 

When Carlene was born, her burgeoning personality was not like anything she’d exhibited in utero. A constant kicker and puncher inside, there was no child as quiet and modest as Carlene. Cassie, on the other hand, moved very little, which kept me anxious nearly the entire pregnancy. If not for the hiccups she got nightly, I’d have been a constant basket case. Once she was out, she hit the ground running, and made sure everyone knew she was alive. 

Carlene loved to nap. I had to wean her from them a few weeks before she started kindergarten. She still likes to get 10 hours of sleep when she can. Cassie, of course, liked being awake, and stopped taking naps at age 2 simply because, like Bartleby the Scrivener, she preferred not to. She still thrives on motion, and I usually need a nap after spending a day with her. 

Everyone has a ratio of book smarts to street smarts. Our ability to think more than feel or feel more than think parlays into our daily lives and influences everything, from the choices we make about which car to buy or clothes to wear, to the jobs we take, the people we choose as friends and lovers, the movies we watch, or the games we play. Mothering two such opposite children gives me a front seat to this psychology. Carlene thinks deeply and methodically. Cassie feels deeply and passionately. Carlene carefully plans. Cassie makes decisions on the fly. Carlene follows directions. Cassie makes up the rules as she goes. Both are independent in very different ways: Carlene stubbornly so and Cassie instinctively so. 

Cassie is a defender of the underdog. Carlene prefers justice. 

Carlene got As in calculus, but it took her weeks to learn how to check the oil and fill the windshield wiper fluid tank in our car. Cassie couldn’t see what the Pythagorean theorem had to do with her, but she earned enough money from dog sitting, cat sitting and a paper route to buy a stereo, computer and television. Cassie instinctively knows things most of us have to learn. The world outside of books makes sense to her, where Carlene would be lost without books. 

The girls often flew to Minnesota, Seattle, and Los Angeles to see family. As you might guess, Carlene was an aisle-seat girl and Cassie loved the window. Yet for all her adventurousness, it was Cassie I put in charge of the money and calling card (and her sister, too, for that matter). 

Sighing “I’ll do it” accompanied by an eye roll was a common occurrence for Cassie, killer of spiders and plunger of toilets. Yet it was Carlene who risked bodily injury to clean Cassie’s room while she was away so that Cass had a path to her bed. 

Cassie takes pride in her physical strength. I often wonder if it wasn’t Cassie’s example that convinced Carlene to join the track team in high school. We’d always said Carlene was smart as a whip, but ran like a girl. Challenging herself physically that way uncovered a new side of her, one she still embraces today. 

Their similarities are what we all want children to be: hard working and kind. They were courteous to my friends and co-workers and, except when Cassie would crawl under the table in restaurants to pull out a loose tooth when she was little, I was never embarrassed to take them out in public. 

Carlene never left home easily. Cassie was out the door almost as soon as she got her diploma. That they live in close proximity again makes me happy. I worry less that Carlene will get lost (she has a lousy sense of direction) or that Cassie will be sad (that dominant “feeling” side of her has its downside sometimes). 

I found my copy of Twin Sons of Different Mothers while writing this column. “Paris Nocturne” is still a lovely song, and it reminds me that the 16-year-old I was still lives inside this 42-year-old body. At 16, I dreamed of becoming a veterinarian, a groupie, a poet, and a pilot, but becoming a mother in a circuitous fashion to two engagingly polar opposites was more heady and humbling than anything I could have ever imagined sitting in my room in the dark, listening to music. 

Around 2 a.m. this morning, Zuzu the Wonder Dog needed to go outside. Most nights, in a sleepy stupor, I open the door, she does her thing, and she trots back in. This morning, though, before I opened the door, I saw standing under the neighbor’s yard light the silhouette of a large buck. He was looking in our direction and Zuzu was looking in his. God knows she loves to bark at and chase wildlife (just ask our cats and the bear she chased away from the garbage last week), and so I snapped on her collar and leash and took her out manually. I thought the buck would run away, but he just looked at us. He was quite amazing.

After heading back to bed, I laid awake for 30 minutes before I gave up sleep and went to the spare room. The windows were open and I listened to the crickets, and heard the faint call of an owl. It warmed me inside. Melted some of that ice cold anger I’ve felt since Dr. Ford said #MeToo.

#MeToo is so big that it can be overwhelmingly draining without self-care. It’s as important to make space to listen to stories of sexual assault as it is to honor our own emotions and reactive feelings. For me, the good that’s come out of the last few weeks is that I’ve strengthened my meditation practice, heightened my awareness, and deepened my compassion. Have I been a perfect practitioner? Just look at my Facebook posts. But I won’t turn away from the anger – it has an important place in our emotional lives – but I won’t let it swallow me whole.

In these times, I’ve found the practice of inquiry to be the most useful. Rather than try to fix anything, I sit with my feelings of anger, disappointment, and downright despair, and I name them. Examine them. Allow them to wash through me without doing anything except being fully aware of their power. My mantra is “I don’t understand why this is happening,” rather than a question such as, “Why do people knowingly inflict harm?” I’ve found that sitting with a statement gives me strength to contemplate a question. As Tara Brach explains, “The intention of inquiry is to awaken to our experience exactly as it is in this present moment. While inquiry may expose judgments and thoughts about what we feel is wrong, it focuses on our immediate feelings and sensations.”

Sexual power and religious absolutism are the gods de jure, and they need to be brought to justice one story, one protest, one vote at a time. But please, take care of yourselves and your emotional lives as you journey on. Use inquiry to identify what’s good in your life, too. Breathe. And then breathe again. And again. Listen to crickets or children laughing or even the hum of a fan. Before you act, do nothing more than focus your attention on a tree, a house, a piece of artwork, or a deer standing in a yard light in the middle of the night. Inquiry builds the emotional muscle we need to carry on.

Namaste, my friends. Have faith that in the long run, justice and goodness – and not paranoia and fear – will prevail.

My oldest daughter is 35 years old today, which is surprising considering I’m 39, or at least I still think like I’m 39 and not what I thought 54 would be like when I was 39. Anyway, I wrote this column in 2001 when Carlene was 18 (and I was 37) when she was a senior in high school and wondering where she should go to college. I love this girl to pieces, and I wish for her the same things now as I did then.

Blackbird Fly (published in The Clarion News, May 2001)

“Blackbird singing in the dead of night / Take these broken wings and learn to fly / All your life / You were only waiting for this moment to arise.”

You asked me, “What do you want, Mom? What do you think I should do?” And it was clear by the tone of your voice that you expected me to say something customary like, “I just want you to be happy,” but with a choked-up guilt-ridden undertone that said “…but keep in mind I’d be happy if you stayed here in Clarion.”

Weren’t you surprised when I didn’t?

I don’t have eyes in the back of my head for nothing, my daughter. Yes I want you to be happy, but I’ve learned a thing or two about you in these 18 years and I know the life you’ve secretly dreamed about for years will die if you don’t leave this town, your home, and see for yourself what lies beyond these hills.

You have an adventurous spirit and a cautious heart. The combination has served you well so far and you must trust it won’t let you down in the future. You’ve learned there is no monster under the bed, no boogey man in the closet, no sandman, and no such thing as ghosts, yet you know there are bigger mysteries to solve, other truths to uncover, out there somewhere all your own. To not live where your heart and head can be free or to deny yourself that place of self-discovery would be placing yourself on a certain and predictable course, and God knows after years of listening to me tell you what the world is like you’re entitled to discover the world for yourself.

So…what do I want? That’s a question I’ve been thinking about and trying to answer since you were born. This is what I’ve come up with so far:

I want you to be happy in your own skin, to be at peace with your decisions, to love God, and to visit the Rocky Mountains in the winter.

I want you to drink good wine and see the midnight sun and walk along the Champs-Elysées with your best friend.

I want you to have babies when you’re ready and visit your grandparents once a year. I want you to never forget your sister’s birthday and to go to Jasper once in awhile and place flowers on your dad’s grave.

I want you to never know an overdue bill, an IRS audit, or a broken tailpipe you can’t afford to fix. I want you to concentrate on what you do that makes you successful and to not dwell on failures.

I want you to come home from wherever you are when you’re homesick and to go back again feeling stronger for having been home again, because I’ll always be here for you and you can wash your clothes while I make you manicotti and chocolate cake. Your room will still be purple and I won’t rent it out or turn it into the hot tub room like I threatened.

You see, I don’t care where you go to college as long as you get the education you need to be what you want to be.

I don’t care where you lay your head at night as long as it’s warm and safe and, when it’s right, with the person who loves you more than life.

I don’t care what you do for a living as long as it doesn’t hurt other people, that it envelops your God-given talents and gifts, and that it gives you satisfaction and affords you the kind of home you can relax in at the end of the day.

I trust you. I have faith in you. But mostly I love you, and love is the reason I can let go. I’m going to hurt for awhile and I’ll probably cry all the way home after helping you move into your dorm, but I don’t want you to feel you’ve caused me pain because you will not have. Love is just like that sometimes.

I’ll miss the smell of your perfume floating up the stairs after you leave for school. I’ll miss hearing you tell me good night and feeling your kiss on my cheek before you go to bed. I’ll miss seeing your face every day, our spontaneous talks in the kitchen and the way you play with the dogs.

But while I’ll miss you very much, I know I’ll still be your mother when you’re frustrated, your mom when you need advice and your mommy when you need money or just a hug.

Your moment is here, my girl, and you’re ready to fly. And that is truly what I think you should do.