A Year and Six Seconds by Isabel Gillies

Author:Isabel Gillies
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hachette Books

Chapter 18

Even though heartbroken, I was quickly getting into the habit of not living with Josiah. I had even gotten into the habit of doing the thing I hated most to do alone: the bundle. During the 1700s in Colonial New England, there was a practice called “bundling” that was used during the courtship of a man and a woman before marriage to assess whether or not there was compatibility (without having sex, of course). The young couple was put to bed together for the night; to prevent them from doing it, a dividing board was placed between them, or one of them was tied into a cloth bag called a “bundling” bag. I love this bundling idea, and think actually you could suss out whether or not you could be close to someone for a long time just by being wrapped in a bag alongside them all night. I bet a lot of compatibility in bed and elsewhere is about how you breathe or smell or what noises you make. I am not at all sure you have to actually have sex for your brain to understand if it is a go with another person or not. Plus, maybe you could whisper and chat like kids at a sleepover until you both drifted off. Sounds lovely to me, even if it is a little puritanical and weird; I do come from those puritanical people, after all. But I am talking about the other kind of bundling right now, the parka kind.

When Josiah and I were together and living in snowy Ohio, boy, did we bundle. There were snowsuits and hats, mittens and backup pants, and scratchy scarves around the whole enchilada. Bundling is a pain in the ass, it’s necessary, and it takes forever. When Josiah was leaving me, I swear I almost said, “But who is going to do the bundle with me?” The thought of doing it alone made me want to wither into a raisin or never take the boys outside again. But the deal with boys is that they HAVE TO go outside. It was my rule that I had to at least be out somewhere by 11:00 a.m. every day. All of us dressed, all of us ready for whatever might be waiting outside.

To make “the bundle” possible at my parents’, I tried to be organized. I had two baskets for outdoor gear in the front hall, and I would weed through these every day. The wet hats went to the dryer, the old socks came out of the boots. But the baskets always looked like two piles of unsorted madness. And organization was only half of the problem; with two boys under five, the process of getting out the door was like trying to keep marbles on a table. Even with cheerful encouraging, neither of them could put the clothes on by themselves. Inevitably, while you are trying to boot up one, the other has gotten hot and itchy in all the wool and has started taking things off.

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