Fleeting ignorance a blissful refuge from a mad world

I am sitting at the sewing machine at 5 a.m., stitching long elastic ribbons onto the mittens I’d purchased over lunch the previous day, joining them in pairs to be threaded through little coat sleeves. The recent cold snap has meant only the best mittens are worn to school, and I’m trying to divert these ones from the classroom lost-and-found box.

When my early alarm went off, it took a few seconds to surface from sleep. I hovered for a moment in that liminal space just barely across the threshold of awakening, where the coming day hasn’t yet materialized in my mind. It’s a place of calm assuredness many of us have experienced — where no assumptions or negative memories touch us for a brief time. This state is so far removed from context that even in the midst of grieving a loved one we can momentarily forget they’ve died, we aren’t yet aware of the bills that must be paid or the myriad other realities that snap us to consciousness. For a brief moment, all is well in the world.

I haven’t yet opened the news, nor turned on the radio. I haven’t picked up my phone, so I have not yet been drawn in by some all-caps alert of current events. There is just me, sandwiched between two of my sons who appeared overnight as if by magic, and the cat curled up at our heads. I can choose to extend this moment and my own blissful ignorance, so I keep the world at bay until I get my little sewing task done.

Listening to the hum of the machine as the needle marches across the cuffs of the little leather mitts, I can believe, for a moment, that it’s a normal frigid January in Winnipeg when staying warm is an all-consuming mission. In the sewing room, the planet isn’t warming. The snow and cold returns like clockwork every year, and January is always the coldest month, the most difficult to get through. It will always be like this. The river trail will be open for three-plus months of skating every year, dotted with warming huts and mittens firmly secured by strings.

I can believe, for a moment, that my children will have a better life than I have, the thing every parent wants. That they’ll never know war or bullies or global destabilization. That they’ll be able to own property, save money, travel and retire in comfort. That they’ll carry the lessons from their one unifying tragedy — the COVID-19 pandemic — into their futures, becoming the old-timers who ensure the next generation of young ones knows how good they have it. They’ll take their own children skating on the river and to hockey games across the U.S. border.

For now, though, they’re still sleeping, all curly hair and soft snores. They contain every possibility for the future, and at the same time, none of them, as they hover between yesterday and today, where today is still tomorrow for them.

I trim the threads off the mittens and head downstairs to find their jackets. As I push one mitten down a sleeve, my thoughts turn to getting myself ready for the day to come.

In a few moments, I’ll know the latest news from Minnesota to Greenland. I’ll know why the sirens woke me in the night. I’ll read about climate and crime reports. I’ll check to see if my care package has been delivered to my friends in Minneapolis. I’ll confront my own confusion and frustration at the way the world is and where it’s going.

But for this last moment, this quiet and warm house is a sanctuary, the stillness threatened only by the yawns and stretches of children, from the sounds of the cat leaping down off the bed, the mitten sliding toward the cuff.

They’ll go to school and I’ll head to work. The middle child is learning about the First World War, along with the issue of conscription and the Military Service Act of 1917. “Thank goodness I’m only 11!” he says. I say nothing, struggling to visualize where we’ll be in seven years. I tell him he’s handsome and smart.

By the time I get to work I’ve scanned the morning’s headlines and have heard the news reports on the radio. I’m back in the real world, the one we’re still building, the one where anything is still possible.

In the newsroom, a colleague appears at my door. “You need to come see the sunrise. It’s incredible this morning.” And it is. We stand at the window watching tomorrow becoming today. The headlines are yet to be written, stories yet to be told. In the darkened newsroom, I’m brought back momentarily to that uncertain and liminal place. And I am filled with hope.

winnipegfreepress.com/rebeccachambers