Instead, I’ve gone sledding 5 times, taken 4 hot tubs, shovelled 9 steps twice, built two snowmen, carved one block of ice into a baseball mitt, and eaten more than my fair share of Christmas cookies.
Also, I’ve seen 11 wild turkey, a dozen deer, 2 pheasant, zillions of cardinals and chickadees, countless greedy squirrels and a huge hawk.
Everybody’s hungry in Wisconsin in the wintertime.
I do love the beach and the heat and the tropical drinks with umbrellas in them, but I have to say that nothing beats a good snowstorm to conjure up the Christmas spirit.
So today, what I’ve got time for are a few seasonal haiku. And then I’m headed back outside….
Boots, mittens, striped scarves,
snowpants, parkas, hats with flaps.
Less prepared than birds.
Flakes fill like popcorn
the meadowy bowl out back –
snowmen eat it up.
Two brave girls, one sled,
the hill steep and slick and bright.
Each ride’s bottomless.
In the end, a fire,
hot chocolate, a good book.
& wishing for more snow.
I hope this finds all of you still enjoying a little vacation, family togetherness and peace & quiet. Amidst the weather you love most. And that you are looking forward to a new year full of productive goodness and sweet surprises. My best holiday wishes and blessings to you all. Thanks for stopping by so often to visit with me. I’m grateful…
Today’s the shortest day of the year, but in central Texas that isn’t a wildly dramatic occurence.
The sun rose all pink and orange relatively early and my kids will spend a good portion of their first vacation day jump-roping and swinging in the backyard. It is chilly and crisp and bright.
To really get into the existential mood that is winter solstice, one needs to read poetry. Preferably dark, lonely, sorrowful poetry.
Like, for example, this:
The Snow Man By Wallace Stevens
One must have a mind of winter To regard the frost and the boughs Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time To behold the junipers shagged with ice, The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think Of any misery in the sound of the wind, In the sound of a few leaves
Stevens really knew how to strike the minor chord, didn’t he? Sheesh. I mean, even with the bright crispness of Texas I’m thinking I might have to get in the bath and have a good cry.
Ahhh, but never fear. I wouldn’t leave you like that. Especially those of you who really are tucked up in the hinterlands, peeking out of piles of dark and snow. Here’s a little glimmer, a little gleam:
The Darkling Thrush By Thomas Hardy
I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-gray,
And Winter's dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.
The land's sharp features seemed to be
The Century's corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.
At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.
So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.
Okay, so you had to read all the way to the end to find it. And the thrush was aged. But still. Hope. And tomorrow is a longer, brighter day.
Today I was hanging out with my youngest. Who was home from school with strep throat. Because it’s critical that someone get sick right before a holiday, immediately before an airplane flight, and on the last possible shopping-without-children morning of the holiday season. Y’know. It’s a law.
And she tells me this story that she made up. There’s a contest. “Who can sit on a piece of fruit for 8 days but not rotten it?” That is the question.
The winner comes up with some incredibly clever papier mache ugly fruit idea. Hard to rotten.
I swear, by the end of it I was ready to throw in the towel.
This was better than half of the books on the shelves.
OK, maybe not half. But a good 37 percent. And definately better than most of my ideas.
Good idea: Ice-skating in Texas at Christmastime — it makes you feel appropriately seasonal.
Not a good idea: Ice-skating the day your daughter gets her stitches out. Even when the doc says “no restrictions”. Turns out he didn’t mean ice-skating and there’ll be blood to prove the errors of your ways.
Good idea: Raising indoor/outdoor animals — it helps them feel both loved and free.
Not a good idea: Accidentally shutting one of your cats in the minivan overnight in the winter — it makes him mad and the car smells.
Good idea: Building graham-cracker cookie houses with all the neighborhood kids — again with the appropriately seasonal.
Not a good idea: Eating gumdrops the whole time. Or leaving the finished products within reach of the dog. Yes, even if she’s an old dog.
Good idea: Hanging Christmas lights across the front porch and around the front door — it’s festive and nobody’ll call you tacky unless you wait ’til March to take them down.
Not a good idea: Hanging Christmas lights across the front porch and around the front door without checking to see if they work first.
Good idea: Getting together with old friends for a dram or two of holiday cheer — warming the cockles of your heart.
Not a good idea: Getting together with old friends for more than a dram or two of holiday cheer. Oi.
Good idea: Signing up for a half marathon — good fun and good for you.
Not a good idea: Signing up for a half marathon that requires most of its training over the holidays. On the mornings after you’ve had more than a dram or two of holiday cheer. Oi again.
Here are some of the books I’m giving as gifts this year. And I say some because I think there are others I’ve already wrapped and forgotten. But I assure you, they’re winners. And I also say some because you never know when, at the very last minute, I may need one… last… book…
(Which takes me back to yesterday’s post. Please tell me that books don’t count as stuff. Please. ‘Cause if they do, I’m sunk.)
If you haven’t yet watched the no-bull, low-tech, consciousness-raising video that is The Story of Stuff, you oughta.
Sustainability activist Annie Leonard put together this little primer on the materials economy, and in case you didn’t already think you had too much crap in the garage, she helps you see the light. There are a lot of powerful moments and pretty grim facts about everything from natural resource depletion to how quickly products become obsolete. There’s also a nasty treadmill-type scene that has the average Joe going from working to watching TV to shopping, to working to watching TV to shopping. Ad infinitum.
The Story of Stuff is a kid-friendly little flick, and a great way to start all kinds of discussions about advertising, pollution and workers’ rights, but you need to watch it with them. My girls got sad — Smaller actually cried a little — and it’s helpful to push the old pause button and infuse a little hope every so often. We did that by talking about what we’re already doing right, and what else we can do. We had a lot of good ideas, and I’m not sure why the current administration hasn’t brought us on as consultants, but in the meantime, we’re gonna try to ratchet the goodness up a notch — using both sides of every sheet of paper and turning down the heat a bit. That sort of thing, times a hundred.
It’s both hard and easy this time of year to think about stuff. Hard because we’re all doing our civic and cultural duty by making our lists and checking them twice and we don’t want to be guilted into doing otherwise. Easy because everything we do is fodder for change. Our girls both asked for new scooters for Christmas. They’ve literally ridden theirs into the ground and we’ve squeezed every penny’s worth out of ’em. BUT. Instead of new scooters, they’re each getting a new set of wheels and new handle grips — because the rest of the contraption is just fine!!!
That Santa. Always got an eye on the planet.
So check it out. In the 20 minutes it’ll take to watch, you would have only moved up a place or two in line at the post office anyway…
Wednesday night marked my last class of the semester and to celebrate, we turned our classroom into a coffeehouse for a final reading.
Each student brought his or her portfolio to the podium and read aloud to the rest of us while we noshed on cookies and cider. I even lit candles, which I think were made somewhat irrelevant by the flourescent lights, but it’s the thought that counts.
The students loved hearing their classmates’ final versions, having given input to earlier drafts, and I loved the concrete acknowledgement that this is what they accomplished these sixteen weeks — these lovely, evocative, well-crafted poems.
A number of these poets seemed to dread the act of reading aloud before reading, but there was a palpable pleasure in the air once things got rolling — emanating from the readers and the audience. Poetry aloud is just beyond compare.
So, in that vein, I want to share with you this site for the PBS series The United States of Poetry. You’ll find some mighty good listening there.
For example, check out this one — in spoken word and sign language.
I am grateful there are so many ways to speak. And to listen…
Years ago, just post-college, I was taking a road trip with a girlfriend (well, okay, we were going to see The Grateful Dead in Las Vegas, of all places) and we hit a deer in the Arizona mountains.
We pulled over and realized, right away, that the deer was dead.
The trucker who stopped to help us thought we were crying about our car, which was a bit battered, but we were really crying about the deer. And about the fact that as human beings moving across the earth in big, fast, steel contraptions, we are inherently destructive. It was a humbling thing to, well, run into.
These days my most humbling encounters are as a parent. There are just endless realizations and learning experiences and epiphanies and honestly, some days, I want to say, “OK. I’ve learned my lessons for the month. Let’s just coast through on autopilot ’til the 1st, shall we?” And then it’s the very next day that one of them has a falling out with a friend, or forgets her homework, or needs stitches in her knee. And I’m back on the “learn something new everyday” train, whether I want to be or not.
The lessons are plentiful and varied and specific and contradictory:
Six-year-olds and nine-year-olds need my help. Don’t do for my six- and nine-year-old what they can do for themselves. Best friends are true blue. We all should have more than one best friend. Kids need their sleep. Set the alarm a little earlier so the kids have time in the morning to get up, get dressed and get organized. Bodies are so strong and resilient. Bodies are fragile and precious and tender.
Oi. What’s a driver, I mean a mom, to do? But really, the bottom-line lesson is always the same and it is this: Once our babies are outside of us, moving around in the world, there is only so much we can do to keep them safe — emotionally or physically. Stuff happens. Our children get overwhelmed or left out or chastised or hurt, and there is often nothing we can do about it. Except offer love and support and comfort — after the fact.
Within the last week my daughter got stitched… A girlfriend’s son got scarlet fever… My sister’s son took a nasty tumble off the roof of a car…. And all of your kids out there? Someone bombed a math test, someone got lice, someone got his heart broken for the first time. Right?
We are driving through life and we’re all gonna hit stuff. There’s just no way around it. Cliff on one side, rock wall on the other. We’re driving fast. At night. And one of our headlights is out. We’re gonna hit stuff. And sometimes all we can do is get out of the car and cry a litle and hope a trucker pulls over to help.
Who’da thunk you could spend a number of months revising a couple of hundred words? Well, you can. It’s worth it to be sure, ’cause I like what’s there now better than I did before. But my focus is kinda shot.
I’ve got a picture book manuscript in progress, a middle grade novel in progress, 3 manuscripts making their way in the world and now I’m ditching it all to do something I can’t seem to stop.
I have to admit, I love it when that happens…
(PS — I forgot about my new pledge to end every post with a gratitude. Sigh. I’m terrible at resolutions. So, backtracking to last Friday’s poetry post — I’m grateful to folks like Rita Dove who can find in themselves better words than I. And to Monday’s post about intentions and expectations, I’m grateful for our sweet little Christmas tree sitting all lit up amidst the spinny life at our house. And today I’m grateful for the muse. Very grateful. Oh, and for The Writer’s Almanac, which is on RIGHT NOW. Gotta go…)
This weekend was meant to be the grand holiday kick-off at our house — from advent calendars and Christmas trees to a Hannukkah dinner and dreidl games with friends.
Only, the thing is, we kicked off the weekend in the E.R. getting my daughter a heroic set of stitches… it was 85 degrees at the Christmas tree farm… and mice had been in our ornament box.
Sometimes things don’t go quite the way we expect.
This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. There is a difference between living an intentional life, I think, and being totally beholden to your expectations. I mean, it’s good to have dreams and to put things into motion in the direction of those dreams. Otherwise there’s always the possibility that your motion will be, um, sort of repetitive and circular (or at least elliptical) and you might end up exactly where you started. Only older and grumpier. But it’s also good to be manage your expectations so as not to be continually bowled over by shock or disappointment or change. Right?
One of the little family tag-lines we’ve got around here is, “Flexibility is the cornerstone of mental health.” Actually, it’s “Flexibility is the cornerstone of mental health, Honey,” because it tends to be used as a pointed reminder from one spouse to the other at moments of high stress.
I wish I could say that I’m always the reminder rather than the remindee. But alas…
Anyway, I’m just kind of wondering how you’re supposed to strike the perfect balance between intention and expectation so that stuff gets done in your life but you’re not brought to your knees when you start your weekend in the E.R. with your daughter who’s got a hole the size of a kiwi fruit in her knee?
I stayed profoundly cool and was quite the labor coach, getting her to breathe through her novacaine shots. But. It sort of threw me off my game for the rest of the weekend and I think I may have reacted a little strongly when all the water from the Christmas tree stand spilled.
Still, last night we ate chocolate Hannukkah coins and listened to Amahl and the Night Visitors and — nevermind the laundry heaps that were as high as the tree — I started wrapping gifts. Many of which are books. And homemade treasures with the kids’ stamps of creative verve all over them. And it was a lovely, happy, cozy time.
So maybe the key is that when you’re busy intending your life, you should leave a little room for things that are unexpected. Some of which may be, well, miracles.
