December first and the air smells like Christmas cookies. At least, I smelled Christmas cookies, shuffling off to class through the frozen air, breathe billowing from me as smoke from a dragon's nostrils. Call me unobservant, but I'd never noticed the evergreens along the path by the Timmer apartments are Christmas trees. I don't mean they're shaped like Christmas tress, I mean they literally are the same trees that one finds under the big white tents this time of year, lopped off at the base and impaled in a bucket of water, waiting to be shoved into plastic netting and tied with twine atop the family minivan in anticipation of a few weeks of standing sentinel in some corner, stalwartly guarding a pile of gaudily wrapped packages and adorned with heavy porcelain balls and light little crafts made by kids in preschool covered in macaroni and glitter, to await the end of the season when the packages will be torn to shreds and the tree divested of its ornaments to sit ignominiously on the curb for the garbage man. I wanted to hug it, but decided to be on time to class instead. Also, people were watching me.
It's been getting steadily colder lately. It used to be, a few weeks ago, a day this cold would come around, and I would shiver half-heartedly and check the forecast, where I would experience a moment of hope and happiness as the numbers increased back up again throughout the week. No more. While there is still no snow on the horizon, it is becoming apparent that this cruel weather is here to stay.
This post has been waiting to come out for a few days now, ever since Tuesday afternoon when I lay once again prone on the ground clutching my weapon in cold, gloved hands, spending a solid twenty minutes in reflective silence. It occurred to me that those 20 or so minutes on Tuesday afternoons are some of the calmest, quietest moments of my week. By no means are they the most comfortable. For them to be comfortable, I would have needed the weather around 20 degrees warmer to begin with. I would have wanted to spend a moment clearing all the sticks and twigs from beneath me, particularly the one digging relentlessly into the base of my breastbone. I would have situated myself so my feet were slightly lower than my head, rather than the other way around, which had me feeling slightly vertiginous and also made it that much more difficult to deal with my helmet, the major bane of a STX lane. I can never see wearing it, as it sits so far down my forehead to accommodate my bun that I spend every STX lane feeling like I have an acute case of tunnel vision. It is heavy, so heavy, so that the muscles in my neck and shoulders burn trying to keep my head up, at a level that I can partially see beneath, so that on my otherwise cold body there is a lump of completely unwanted, scalding muscular
heat that I can't ignore. And my blood throbs in my temples and my head aches with the pressure of all the bobby pins in my hair being pressed into my scalp by the tight leather headband that holds the cursed thing in place. Even gloved, my fingers feel numb against the mock trigger, like my toes, unable to wiggle confined in the tight boots. No, it is not at all comfortable. But it is quiet. For those few moments, I have no other purpose than to lie there in silence, awake and motionless and alert. I can't do homework or play games or plug in my iPod. So I think. I think about the naked trees rocking in the strong wind and how sentient they look, like lethargic dancers or swaying dryads of myth and legend, their thin, supple bodies bending far more than seems possible, their spiny fingers extended towards one another like amorous lovers or demented fiends. I think about the years' and years' worth of leaf accumulation below me, fertilizing in death the very trees that produced and nurtured them in a system that could go on endlessly, completely irrelevant of human behavior. I thought about the chipmunks I know longer saw running through the undergrowth, now firmly established in their hibernation, content to let the season pass without being involved in it, confident that the natural cycle will continue without their presence or aide. I had just started thinking about what Army camouflage would look like, were the war zone ever to move to the tundra, where green is unnatural and irregular and brown and white the predominant color tones, when operations began.
We ran a successful lane, ignoring a few snags and hitches along the way. Predominant among these was the irate civilian and her fluffy snow dog, disgruntled and annoyed to find college students playing soldier laying quietly in the woods of what, apparently, was
her property. How dare you come into my part of the woods, the woman asked us, when the college's land so
clearly ends a few trees back the other way? I just want to walk my dog without having to deal with you people creeping in silence through the brambles. Oops. Our bad. Silly us for thinking woods were woods and that we had any right to crawl through them when they were so
obviously yours and not the college's, leaving out the fact that the only reason we're even out here in the cold woods in the first place is to practice serving our country, and ipso facto you, by defending America against all enemies both foreign and domestic. Forgive us for thinking that you wouldn't mind us spending an hour or so a week walking though, if we'd even known this was your land, which for the record we didn't. Ah well, no blood no foul. I was sick of high crawling over sticks anyway.
And that's it. One semester's worth of Army training and STX lanes over with. Now that wasn't so bad, was it? And now it's almost Christmas, when I have weeks of no responsibility, no pressure, no worries until January. Ready for some Florida sunshine :D
