Pushing Through

I was outside the other day, and I walked down the sidewalk in my yard next to my house for no good reason other than it was sunny and I wanted to feel the sun's warmth on my face. Even though it was a chilly thirty-something degrees, it felt good to be out there, in the sun.

Today, it's a little snowy, but I live in Buffalo, and that's to be expected in February. And sometimes April.

It's grand how things, people survive in all kinds of conditions. Things, people, adapt. We don't realize what we're doing at the time, it's just what we do.

When we lived in Chicago, traffic driving into the city was sometimes torturous. Some days, it would take me over 2 hours to get to work, yet some days I could be there in 30 minutes. You never really knew what kind of commute it would be until you were in it. Sure, you could listen to traffic reports ("traffic and weather together on the 8's" is still ingrained in my mind, thanks, WBBM), but if something happened after you were already on the highway, you were just stuck. Especially if you were in the express lanes. But that's another story for another day. I never learned how to take surface roads from where we lived to get into the city, so if I didn't take the highway, I was lost. There was no GPS back then, and if I was driving, I couldn't/wouldn't read a map.

Many days, I'd drive to the L (the L is the CTA train) park-n-ride, and take the L to work. That was great because I got off the train at Daley Plaza, about 2 short blocks from my building. There was a tunnel that went under Marshall Field's department store (now it's a Macy's, harrumph). So on rainy days, I would take the tunnel and come outside right across the street from the building where I worked. Chicago had some cool stuff like that.

One winter, Chicago had a pretty good snowstorm. I just looked it up, and I must be thinking of 1999. Although the article I read said that CTA trains and buses ran normally, the train I took (the blue line) stopped at a station, and couldn't continue on to the loop (downtown Chicago, where I worked) because of bent tracks. We'd lived in Chicago for almost 7 years by then, but because Chicago was so big (234 square miles), there were many parts (basically any part of Chicago that wasn't downtown, near Wrigley, or near Comiskey) that I just didn't know how to navigate. I ended up getting off the train, taking a train back to the park and ride (and my car), then driving to work. I was really late that day. Sure, I could have taken a bus downtown, if I knew which bus to take. I never really learned bus routes, either; I didn't bother because the train was usually so much more efficient.

Yes, sometimes going to work was quite the adventure, and sometimes it was uneventful. The uneventful trips far outweighed the adventurous ones, thank goodness.

When we were back in Buffalo buying our house, our mortgage company was about 10 miles from where we lived. It seemed as our closing date approached, at least once a week there would be a new form or statement they needed. Some stuff I could fax to them, but sometimes they needed the actual paper. I'd bundle my daughter in the car, and we'd make the trip to the mortgage company to deliver whatever paper they wanted that day. One day, as I was on the highway, I realized it was rush hour, and panic set in. Oh my GOSH, I'll never make it to the place before it closes!! Heh. Rush hour in Buffalo is a far cry from rush hour virtually anywhere else. It may have taken me an extra few minutes to get through downtown if that.

I remember that specific trip because it was then that I realized what I had gone through for 10 years. While I was getting to work in Chicago, I never gave it a thought; I just did what I had to do. I didn't sit there lamenting that other cities didn't have that kind of traffic, I just did it. I adapted.

I think we all adapt. I think we have to. I adapt to how I feel on a particular day, as I'm sure you do, too, though for different reasons. Parents of a newborn learn to live being sleep-deprived. People who live in desert climates learn how to live with the heat. People who live where it snows learn to shovel and live with the snow. We all have to adapt to live, otherwise, we're just existing.

I took this picture of my daffodils sprouting on the day it was sunny. That was February 2, Groundhog Day.

I took this picture of the same daffodils today. They are just pushing through, doing what they do.

Aren't we all?