Some of you have been wondering where your boyfriend has been lately, what he’s up to these days. I know it’s been a while since I’ve mentioned him.

Your boyfriend is actually, at this very instant, a few feet away from me at my favorite cafe, where I’ve been sitting in a chair and writing in my journal (such bliss!) for the last few hours. He arrived on the scene about half an hour ago, and from the very first moment I saw him, it was obvious that he was YOUR BOYFRIEND.

He sat at an unoccupied table very near me and started giving me looks, as if we knew each other well. I refused to make eye contact, but I could see with my peripheral vision that he had the exaggerated facial expressions and abrupt gestures of a crazy dude. I didn’t want to diagnose someone based on what they seemed to do in my peripheral vision, but when your boyfriend started talking to himself in complete and angry sentences, the state of things became quite clear.

Uh oh, I thought. Not again. Not again because this was the second crazy dude of the evening to hang out in that spot and try out some unorthodox communication. The first one (indisputably another one of your boyfriends) did something mysterious with his fingers while mooing a little bit and looking at me. Am I emitting crazy-dude-attractant tonight? Is it perhaps my unwashed hair? My secret insane journal ramblings? My increasingly convincing fantasy life?

I was caught off guard when this second iteration of your boyfriend appeared, but I think I handled it well. I started a fake phone conversation with an imaginary friend about my nonexistent husband, our recent wedding (details of this were easy to conjure, I simply recalled highlights of my most recent wedding photography gig), the fact that he will arrive soon to meet me and take me to a show, how we took our vacation together this year and it worked out great, how we’re buying a home together and yes, it’s stressful, but it’s not making us fight, we’ve been working on honest yet gentle communication, not making assumptions is the key you know…

After ten minutes of this, I felt I was beginning to forfeit my own small claim to sanity, and I hung up.

The effect of my conversation was this: your boyfriend stopped trying to make eye contact with me, but he kept going with the jerking and the muttering; though he was no longer trying to look into my eyes, he still wanted my attention. He purchased a latte and of course he spilled it, I knew he would the moment he set it down in front of him. He brought a sugar canister over to his table and spilled that too. He took off his glasses and leaned over and sort of cried- there were muffled sobs but I don’t think there were any tears. Moments later he was laughing, and soon after that he was scratching his body all over, as if ants were crawling on him under his clothes.

Fortunately for me, at that moment a small crowd of customers clustered right next to his table and commenced an animated discussion of upcoming musical events in our town, and he got distracted from me for a little while. He also shut up, which was a relief. But soon, things got very claustrophobic for your boyfriend, what with all those people hanging around. He responded to this physical invasion by swatting at imaginary insects with a newspaper, then by grabbing the back of the chair I’d propped my feet on and pulling it sharply so that my feet fell off.

Okay, FINE, I thought towards him. Take the chair. You clearly need the extra personal space.

Perhaps encouraged by his successful conquest of my footrest, your boyfriend started talking to himself again. This time, he did it by pretending to talk on the phone- only without an actual phone in his hand. He simply held up his imaginary phone to his head and chattered away. (Chattered may be too cheery a word. He ranted. No gushing endorsements of gentle communication from him!)

I should mention at this point that your boyfriend had just plugged his non-imaginary cell phone into a nearby electrical outlet, so it’s not like he was pretending because he didn’t have a phone. He had somebody’s phone, possibly even his own. Did his phone not actually work, and was he pretending because he wished it worked? Or was he practicing for the phone calls he would make just as soon as his phone was charged and operational again? What kind of goofy trick was this, anyway?

The part of me that scoffed at this crazy behavior was immediately taken to task by the part of me that had engaged in a fake phone conversation mere minutes before. What’s the difference between us, really? I wondered. Am I truly just as crazy, only more subtle about it, more likely to use a real phone? Was he carrying out his own version of a universal crazy-person ritual that I naturally found myself enacting as well? Was he making fun of me?

As always happens in these situations, my misgivings about my own sanity and about my right to criticize and derive amusement from your boyfriend’s lack of sanity were deeply complicated by memories of my own brother. Who was himself schizophrenic towards the end of his life, who probably behaved much like this dude at cafes sometimes and generated similar fear and confusion and snickering and scorn in fellow cafe patrons.

So of course, of course, as always happens in these situations, I imagined my brother’s isolation and sadness while witnessing another’s, and I sneaked a glance at your boyfriend’s face, trying to understand how bad it might be in his particular case and maybe get another sliver of a clue about how it felt to be my brother. (I will always wonder about my brother, and there is nothing you can do to stop me from mentioning it when the need arises, so don’t even try. If you ever get tired of hearing about it, just skip to the next paragraph, I won’t notice the difference.)

So yes, as always happens in these situations: as soon as I looked at his face, your boyfriend sensed confirmation of his hunch that we knew each other intimately, that we had shared many lifetimes of experience in this magical multiverse, so he started to stare at me again. And that, in case you were wondering, is what your boyfriend is doing right now.

Seven years ago, I lived in a place that had a real winter. I did not venture outside during the winter months without first covering most of my body with puffy and/or woolly clothing, even on sunny days. In middle part of the winter, snow would fall, and I loved this. But it was a lot of work, loving snow properly. Snow would fall from the sky by the bushel and this sometimes made it hard to get around, especially on foot. Paradoxically, this is where my love of walking to my daily destinations (as opposed to riding on something with wheels) first began.

Every workday, in the morning, I’d walk to the train that took me to my job in the next town. But in the evening I’d skip the train (because it left an hour after my work shift ended, and it seemed silly to wait an hour to be carried only three miles, after all I did have working lower appendages and time on my hands) and walk those three miles home.

In the autumn, this was an easy walk through the golden glory of falling leaves. In the winter, the walk got harder, but I did it anyway. Through whatever deluge the night had sent us, through huge piles of the frozen stuff or puddles of the cold and liquid. Three miles isn’t very far to walk, but when you add snow and lots of traffic, it becomes a fabulous workout.

There was nothing casual about leaving the house in the winter. I did not flounce out the door with only a sweater and a vague idea of what was falling out of the sky. I wore a large parka, and boots, and two pairs of socks. Several shirts, long underwear, scarf and gloves. Some days I’d put plastic bags over my socks before stuffing my feet into my boots. I wore two hats at the same time.

When it snowed every day, there was never any decent place to walk on the side of the road. Big piles of snow covered all sidewalks and shoulders and paths, pushed there by the ghostly morning snowplows. The road was narrowed to just its car lanes, with the snow forming walls over the sidewalks. There were snowplows designed to clear paths on sidewalks, but these were rare beasts, almost never seen in daylight, and their work was undone every time the bigger snowplows churned snow from the roads onto the sidewalks again.

Sidewalk snow was often covered with a hard crust of ice, which I’d break through with every step. Once I broke through, I’d sink six inches or so into the softer stuff beneath, and the jagged ice crust would saw at my lower legs. Then I’d have to pull my feet out of the snow and take another step. With pants and long underwear on, the sawing sensation was dulled, but every time I lifted a boot out of the hole I’d created, chunks of ice-encrusted snow would come with it, so that my boots grew heavier with every stride.

If the snowdrifts happened to be hard enough to walk on without sinking through, it was because they were made of ice and chunks of rock. In that case, I’d avoid walking on them if I possibly could. They would inevitably be glass-slippery and would send me flying into traffic if I fell the wrong way. The only place to walk with any ease was right there on the road, where salt had melted the ice. Where the cars were supposed to be, where I was definitely not welcome.

The road, just as you’d expect, was not a pedestrian-friendly space. When cars would come towards me, I’d jump out of the way into a snowdrift, and either sink through the crust and gain several pounds of snow on my person, or slide off and flail wildly as I tried to find a good direction to fall. Walk ten yards on the road, jump out of the way, extricate myself from a snowdrift, wait for the right moment to jump back into the road, walk ten more yards, jump out of the way again, extricate myself, etc. until I was finally home.

It wasn’t all snowdrifts, all winter long. Sometimes the snow would melt and rain would fall and the sidewalks would become large icy puddles. I’d still have to walk in the road with traffic when that happened, but instead of jumping into snowdrifts to avoid oncoming cars, I’d jump into freezing water. (The freezing water situation is what prompted the plastic bags over the socks.)

This sounds like a hard way to get home from work, but it was actually quite fun. I liked starting off for home dressed in so many layers, ready to bounce off of hard surfaces and repel precipitation from all directions. With snow falling thick and cars lumbering by, I felt anonymous, a smudge of blue coat moving in a blurry landscape. Almost nobody was out walking. When cars chased me into the drifts, I’d scream at the top of my lungs, just because it was thrilling to do that, and I’d be completely unheard.

Halfway home, I’d be sweating from all the jumping in and out of snowdrifts. I’d take off my two hats, my gloves, and my scarf, and let snow fall on me for the last mile home. I remember how delicious the cold flakes felt on my hot forehead when I took off my scratchy wet wool hat. I remember the mixture of relief and disappointment I felt when I walked through the door of my house and took off my soaked socks, the adventure over for the day.

Winter weather in the cold northeast was hard on my emotions. For months on end, the sun rarely had a chance to reach my skin. I sat in front of a light-therapy box every morning, trying to shake off seasonal depression. My walks home were the highlight of that winter. I discovered that the sadness in my life can be greatly alleviated by a daily physical challenge. The more ridiculous and inefficient the challenge is, the better it makes me feel.

Gym workouts don’t do the trick. It has to be a challenge that accomplishes something necessary, like getting me home from work. But it also needs to be something that only a ninny would do, like wading through miles of frozen slush or, as I do now, hiking for three hours to get to and from a six-hour shift.

Oh, the breakthroughs that can happen on a long walk! The magnificent realizations. During every long walk, there is always some point where it becomes blazingly obvious that everything is going to be okay. No matter how the journey started, or what is waiting for me at the other end.

I had a super-fun Christmas this year, thanks to Sundari (my aunt) who offered to host a gathering at her house, a large Victorian she shares with a few other people. It is a perfect place for a party, with plenty of room for wandering and chasing toddler nephews.

The lucky folks on my Christmas list this year got journals with either collages or photographs on the front and back covers. Here is my favorite collage out of the whole bunch. The front cover had a photo of sea lions, and this was on the back:

Chuck and Bev (the grandparents) pitched in with me to buy a fancy furnished Green Dollhouse for Jasper. Here we are assembling it. Jasper does know how to use a screwdriver, but he kind of lost interest in helping us once we got everything out of the box.

Here are a few shots from outside, where Jasper and Achoo (that’s what he calls Esther) were doing something entertaining with a hula hoop. Later, Jasper commanded me to take pictures of the moon.

Not pictured: the Christmas spa experience in Sundari’s lovely woodstove-heated room, in which Jasper took off his clothes and insisted we rub him down with nice-smelling lotions and salves before he ran around singing, dancing, collapsing tragically like an opera star, and mourning his own fictional death.

Hey, guess what! There’s some new Ripe or Giraffe? right over here.

Yearning for wiener dogs? Check out the first installation ever at Ripe or Giraffe? (it’s the new destination for all the crap in my closet!)

Here’s a preview: