I Would Say Nothing for Cookies

My mother leaves the door open in winter, but I say nothing, nothing at all.

It's winter in Australia, and I'm beginning to feel it. In Boston, I could comfortably walk around in a tee shirt in five degrees Celsius (or 41F). But it's 5 degrees outside, now, and I'm shivering because, well, it's also 5 degrees inside. My mother has left all the windows open.

I just went to put the kettle on and noticed, again, that the back door of the house is also wide open. Then my mother said to me: "It's a bit nippy, isn't it?"

I didn't mention the back door. The trick to maintaining peaceful relations with my extended family is to avoid noting things. Sometimes, sadly, I notice things by accident, and it makes me cross at myself because I know that if I notice something, I think about that something, and then I'm tempted to say something about it ... and trust me, saying things — in fact, saying anything whatsoever — has a lesser effect than silence. Therefore, when my mother leaves windows and doors open throughout winter, and when she comments on the coldness within the house, I shake my head with fatalistic agreement. Because, after all, there's no accounting for the weather, is there?

To be clear, the back door is kept open so the puppies can go in and out as they please. We say puppies, though they're about nine or ten years of age respectively, but to my mother, they're puppies, and that's fine with me.

I somehow suspect most people in Queensland leave their windows and doors open in winter, for much the same reason nobody here carries an umbrella during the wet season; it doesn't occur to anybody. You might think that's odd, isn't it? But it's not really.

Twenty years ago, I spent almost a year in Vorarlberg, Austria. I was there with my friend Zoya, who was doing some sort of Fulbright Scholarship in the region. One evening, some locals invited us out to see some fireworks. We had to ascend this large hill where people from the town were building a bonfire. As the sun settled behind the mountains, we could see below us the town of Feldkirch. In the distance, several other small villages ... in fact, we could see several bonfires on distant hills. It was all quaint and beautiful and ... then I noticed something about the bonfire.

Right in the middle of the fire was a human figure.

"It's a witch," explained one local, beaming. "We burn effigies of witches to commemorate ..."

Actually, I don't know what he said next. I'd stopped listening, because — why would I listen, when these people were clearly out of their minds?

Mind you, this was twenty years ago and society hadn't even invented the word 'problematic' at that point. But some of us already had a sense of its meaning.

"So," I said, waving my hand at the scarecrow-like female mannequin, "this is a representation of a young woman in your community who somehow didn't conform to your provincial norms, so you had to set her on fire, obviously. And now all the villages in the region come together and joyously celebrate that lynching and light a fire." Then I paused, remembering where I was. "But at least it's not a pile of books, right?"

And here, Zoya dragged me away by the arm. I would later concede it was probably for the best. I returned the favor the following year, by dragging her away from some police in downtown Washington DC, at whom she was yelling (for some reason) 'fascist pig!'

In Iceland, over 62% of people believe in the existence of elves. Elsewhere, in America, they have this foodstuff called Velveeta, and they call it cheese, but it's not cheese — in fact, I wouldn't call it a foodstuff. They're very confused about some things, you know.

But I've lived in several countries, and everywhere I've been I've seen entire communities acting like utter lunatics. Queenslanders leaving windows open through winter while complaining about the cold is just the local manifestation of it. Elsewhere, they burn effigies of female misfits.

By the way, I'm shivering.

I have two crocheted Afghan rugs on top of me, and I'm sipping decaf instant coffee. I'm in an armchair facing a large-screen television; my mother is to my left, on a sofa. On the television, we see the mountains of Austria — which is why I was thinking about that country a moment ago.

Because the news on television is so bleak, my mother has taken to watching YouTube on the big screen. All she watches are mini-documentaries of people's train trips around the world. Right now, we're watching an amateur travel documentary, made by a Japanese traveler crossing from Austria into Switzerland. There's no voice-over, only subtitles; the traveler (his name is Kuga) is refreshingly unobtrusive.

This should not interest me, but it's compelling all the same. I've taken that same journey before. Frankly, I've taken dozens and dozens of train rides across Europe. Regional trains in Germany are shockingly inexpensive. At one point, my friends and I were taking weekly journeys all over that country, which is incidentally how I wound up being arrested on the Polish border.

My mother is 82 — she's far too elderly to travel, which means she'll never be arrested on the Polish border. This, to me, seems a shame.

And so we sit together each evening in the freezing cold and travel vicariously alongside this circumspect Japanese traveler, courtesy of YouTube. I glance at the television now. Currently, he is crossing into Switzerland.

He is not detained at the Swiss border for accidentally saying the wrong thing. I am irrationally impressed. Or perhaps, the Japanese traveler is not so well-informed as I. For example:

Did you know that women in Switzerland weren't allowed to vote in federal elections until 1971? Or, to put it another way, were you aware that the Swiss suffragette movement took up roughly seven-tenths of the 20th Century?

I mention this because this is what I think about whenever I enter Switzerland. Actually, no — the last time I visited, I was horribly preoccupied with the Swiss banking establishment. Which, if you didn't know, required fifty years — and an international court — to finally give back the money it held in its deposits that belonged to families of people who died during the Holocaust.

I mean, all countries do terrible things. The Germans wear socks with sandals. Americans have their cheese-like isotopes. And Australians — Australians will witlessly talk about cricket all day if you let them. Personally, I appreciate in the abstract any sort of game that is unexciting by design. I like how the game is intended to soothe and calm spectators. All the same, it's boring and the whole thing would make more sense if it had been conceived as a prank.

A plausible theory has presented itself to me, in which the entire sport known as cricket was conceived, in the 19th Century, as an elaborate joke by an enemy of Her Majesty's Great Britain, in order to make that country look ridiculous. And we know the perpetrator of that joke was Germany, because nobody is laughing.

I have written all the above, here, in this post, because I cannot say a word of it to my mother or else she'll become cross and not bake me any of those cookies she made the other day.

My mother doesn't even like cricket, but my father did, and more to the point, she doesn't like the way I don't seem to take things seriously.

So, I sit here, shivering under a heap of afghans, feeling the wind blow in from the darkness outside. Upon my face is a very serious expression indeed.

Then abruptly, my mother remembers that her house has built-in heating.

"You know, I could put it on for you," she says. "Though I will say it doesn't seem to work that well."

I do not glance at the open door. I do not say a word. I simply shake my head and say nothing, because — and I'm being honest here — my mother makes really good cookies.

With chaste affection,

Kris