And all my instincts, they return

I had such fun with Katie and Josh this afternoon. We made dinner--chicken and pasta and vegetables, mmm. Josh and I helped Katie proofread/edit this big biology paper she has to write, so I learned a lot about self-fertilization, and may have even taught her something about relative clauses (but maybe not--that's okay; I now know so much about grammar I scare myself). We watched the South Park movie, which I'd just watched with Sarah yesterday. This was still only the fourth time I saw it, and it makes me quite happy.

Then they got ready to give me a ride home. As we walked to the door of their building they speculated on whether the car would start; they had forgotten to plug it in. It's a beat-up, rustly old blue station wagon. We waded through snowdrifts to get to the car, and fumbled with the locks. We got in and it seemed just as cold in there as it had been outside, only without the massive amount of wind.

Josh turned the key and the car tried to start, but the engine just would not turn over. It made this weird noise and shook. It was kind of interesting. I knew it must not be anything bad, because Katie and Josh are both hypersensitive and rather paranoid about this sort of thing (with good reason; this car has often given them trouble), and they didn't say anything.

Well, that's not true: Katie was encouraging the car. "Come on, you can do it."

I talked, too; I said, "Almost there ... " I don't know if I was talking to my fellow passengers or to the car. The shaking/noise combination was indeed becoming more frequent. Finally, the car did start, though it was hard to tell at first because it just seemed like a slightly faster version of the previous shaking and noise. By the time I was sure that the car was going to stay running, Josh said, "It always sounds like the back of the car's going to explode when it starts up like this." It made me laugh. People like Josh tend to take statements like this more seriously than I do, but I usually can't help being amused. Sometimes he can't, either, no matter how sincerely he means whatever he is saying. I think this is one of those times.

The car did not explode. The car did not move yet, either. "This is going to be slippery," Josh warned us. Actually, I think he was warning Katie. Katie and Josh have a hard time letting the other drive; as much as they love each other, they find it hard to give up control of the vehicle in which they are riding. Neither of them is a bad driver; I'm fine riding with both of them ... but then, I'm used to ceding control to someone else if I want to get anywhere. I hear that people who are afraid of flying are sometimes not really as afraid of falling out of the sky as they are of giving up control of their movement to someone else, and that's why they might rather drive, even though they are statistically more likely to get in a car crash than a place crash.

We knew it would be slippery. Even five or six hours earlier, when they'd picked me up, everything had been icy. Katie had slipped on the sidewalk, and riding in the car certainly was interesting. I haven't experienced such frictionless locomotion since last winter. It's a stomach-lurching kind of experience that people pay money to experience in things like roller coasters. I love roller coasters. You're less likely to hit trees and other cars and such when you are on a roller coaster, though.

We made our slow, slippery way out of the parking lot ... well, almost out of the parking lot. I think our first complete stop we'd achieved since we started moving was the one just before Josh said, "It's stuck." Katie and I volunteered to get out and push. I'd already forgotten how cold it was outside. It bit into my fingers, even when I put my glittens on. The wind whipped my hair around. I was standing in snow halfway up my calves. I wasn't surprised to find that the ground beneath me was snow and glare ice; my Skecher boots could get no traction. I tried to show Katie how to push intermittently, getting the car to rock back and forth a little so it would use its own momentum to help us get it out of the snowbank.

I felt like an expert at this, and I had time to wonder why. My mom does have a tendency to get stuck--in the driveway, if nothing else--at least once a winter. Plus, in general, I'm never the person driving the car, so I'm always a person pushing the car.

Eventually Katie and I did manage to push at the same time and get the car moving a little bit. I heard her sigh in relief, but I felt something different. "Keep pushing!" I said, pushing. "We're not done yet." For some reason this sort of thing makes sense to me. We were close to being done, though; the car was helping us now and we could just shove it along until it was clear of the snowbank. This is our first big winter storm of the year; a few days ago it was fifty degrees. But my reflexes for car-pushing are all still there, it seems, just below the surface and ready when I need them. THat is, oddly, comforting to me, in the way that familiar things often are comforting; they don't have to be good things.

While I didn't relish being out in the cold and snow, some part of me felt good (which was good, since it took my mind off being so cold when I got back in the car). Maybe it was endorphins or something, maybe it's just my strange personality being proud of dealing with the trials of living in Minnesota. My dad, who likes the winter, says they keep the riff-raff out.

Others might say it keeps us crazies in.