From the decadence of an upscale family resort in a remote corner of the Swiss Alps, I thought I would have plenty of time to read and blog. I brought two books – one of them the thousand pages of Armenian resistance to slaughter by the Turks at Musa Dagh – an Economist and countless scientific papers on my laptop. The resort offers supervised activities from morning till late and plenty to do and discover for the kids. One day into our five-night stay, all I’ve done is written this post.
View from our hotel room towards the upper Linth valley.
With the daughter registered for ski school in the mornings and the son much like his father not particularly fond of the cold, I have to accompany the rest of the family to the lifts and take the boy back to the hotel when he starts whining about his misery. This will probably be after about twenty minutes.
I then go to the pool with him where he impresses me with his fearlessness, the total opposite of the pansy he’s in the snow. He jumps into the deep end all by himself. His head goes underwater for a few seconds before he’s being pulled back up by his floaties. That’s when I grab him to blow the hair from his face. His eyes twinkle with glee. Again, he shrieks.
Then it’s afternoon. The boy sleeps while the girl is off doing god knows what god knows where. She has a way of finding us when she needs to. I’m sitting on a sofa by the bar reading or writing as I had intended all along. The peace doesn’t last for more than an hour.
With all the money spent on this holiday that’s everything one could hope for but not exactly cheap, I should be enjoying the mountains and the snow. As one of the adults would probably need to stay near the kids – a two-year-old isn’t exactly independent enough to enjoy random hours away – this singular pleasure doesn’t tempt me much. The other thing is my hands. A few days after the most recent chemo session, my fingers still haven’t recovered from the effects of oxaliplatin.
Even though it’s only around freezing today, I bundled up like an explorer destined for the South Pole, with layers of fleece and functional membrane from nose to toes. I start sweating immediately, but as soon as I set foot outdoors, my hands tell me to go back. The tips of my fingers start tingling and lose their connection with the rest of my body. When the boy starts whining about how cold he is, I’m happy to carry him back. The pool is warm.
I’ve always had a low tolerance for the cold. Back in Utah, I went snowriding three or four times a season, not for lack of money or enjoyment of first tracks in fresh powder but because of cold hands. There was one day in Park City when the temperatures was around 15° F (too cold to contemplate in Celsius) at the base of the mountain in the morning. I took the lift to the top and suffered through a million miniscule icicles back down as fast as I could. I spent the rest of the morning in a coffee shop, reading the newspaper at the cost of half a lift pass. What am I doing here in the Alps in the middle of winter?
0 comments:
Post a Comment