I Promise It Will Get Easier

It takes us thirty minutes to walk three blocks. But we walked them.

It is a frosty witching-hour in late December, the kind of cold stillness in the air you can almost see: clear hard outlines of trees and streets in the fading light, shapes and shadows defined stiff and frozen. My children are alternately plodding and skipping up the steep sidewalk ahead of me. Cabin fever was infecting us all, and so I dragged both my…