I’ve spent the morning with yarn. Spools and spools of it. Sage greens and sky blues, violets and aubergines. Yarn for placemats and scarves and table runners and blankets. Tapestry yarn and loom yarn. The textures and colors invite me to touch and imagine.
The yarn belonged to my dear friend Nancy, and now, through the kindness and connections of another friend, it will find a new home.
My experience with yarn is limited to amateurish crochet projects, but Nancy was a weaver extraordinaire. I’m so grateful that her work and her yarn will live on.
“I gotta know what day it is,” says the character Murray in the film “A Thousand Clowns,” a favorite of mine. Murray is a truth-teller. He wants to own each day, “or else the years go right by and none of them belong to you.”
Murray tries to avoid the mind-numbing workaday world, where he sits on the subway staring out the window, not knowing whether it’s a Monday or a Wednesday, knowing only that it’s a work day. I know what he means; I’ve been there. But it’s also liberating to be so tangled up in holiday time that you have to remind yourself every morning what day it is.
That’s where I am now. From what I can tell, today is Saturday, but it feels like the fifth Saturday in a row, maybe even the sixth. It feels deliciously unmoored. The days seem more mine when I can’t name them, when they’re detached from any duties or associations, when they’re pure and unfiltered.
So here’s to the holidays, when a Friday feels like a Saturday and a Saturday feels like a Sunday. Here’s to time untethered.
One two-year-old I know peels the paper off her presents and then hands each to me. A preschooler removes every shred of paper but seems stymied by the box. A four-year-old looks with wonder at the rotating ballerina who pirouettes every time a music box is opened.
It’s the wonder of Christmas on young faces I’ve noticed most this year — with the usual variations based on age, temperament and nap times.
The elders have their own signature gift-opening techniques. Some ignore their presents, treating them as they might another candle on the birthday cake. Others gobble up the gifts, always ready for the next.
It’s the bounty of the season in bite-sized morsels — the best and sometimes the only — way to savor it.
Once again the days have passed, the splendid ones and the trying ones. Once again we’ve come back to this point, which is for me, and for many, the great pause. Christmas Eve. Christmas Day. Soon to be followed by New Year’s Day and the delicious week in between. Once again I’ll re-run this blog post, one I wrote in 2011. Merry Christmas!
12/24/11
Our old house has seen better days. The siding is dented, the walkway is cracked, the yard is muddy and tracked with Copper’s paw prints. Inside is one of the fullest and most aromatic trees we’ve ever chopped down. Cards line the mantel, the fridge is so full it takes ten minutes to find the cream cheese. Which is to say we are as ready as we will ever be. The family is gathering. I need to make one more trip to the grocery store.
This morning I thought about a scene from one of my favorite Christmas movies, one I hope we’ll have time to watch in the next few days. In “It’s a Wonderful Life,” Jimmy Stewart has just learned he faces bank fraud and prison, and as he comes home beside himself with worry, he grabs the knob of the banister in his old house — and it comes off in his hand. He is exasperated at this; it seems to represent his failures and shortcomings.
By the end of the movie, after he’s been visited by an angel, after his family and friends have rallied around him in an unprecedented way, after he’s had a chance to see what the world would have been like without him — he grabs the banister knob again. And once again, it comes off in his hand. But this time, he kisses it. The house is still cold and drafty and in need of repair. But it has been sanctified by friendship and love and solidarity.
Christmas doesn’t take away our problems. But it counters them with joy. It reminds us to appreciate the humble, familiar things that surround us every day, and to draw strength from the people we love. And surely there is a bit of the miraculous in that.
This year our Christmas tree needs a drink of water each morning and sometimes one at night. It’s not stalling at bedtime; it’s a genuine requirement. And I’m genuinely happy about it.
I’ve always known there’s a window of time in which to water a tree that if missed pretty much guarantees an early demise. Last year’s tree was neglected in those early hours and never recovered.
It’s hard not to see in this some lesson about needs and timing, that we apportion to the people and the causes in our life the sustenance they require when they require it. Easier done with a Christmas tree than less tangible entities. Still, I’m glad this tree is still thirsty days after it was decorated.
(Last year’s tree. If you’re quiet you might hear the needles dropping.)
I’ve barely had time to tie my shoes lately, let alone nurture my creative self. But yesterday I found myself at an appointment close to the W&OD Trail, the rails-to-trails path that leads from suburban D.C. to the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
The section I usually cover is between miles 16 to 19, the Reston area. But yesterday I ventured west, past mile 20, walking through the town of Herndon, with its old-fashioned downtown and fortnightly library (named for a group of 19th-century women whose study club met every two weeks).
I meandered off the trail a few times to see a neighborhood, enter the library, and browse in a thrift store. In other words, I explored. I went places I hadn’t been in a very long time and, if only for a few minutes, lost myself in them.
It didn’t take long for the to-dos to crowd back in again, but for two hours yesterday, I was free.
(You never know who you might meet on the W&OD Trail.)
This morning I’m watching a scene that is as old as time: the dance of predator and prey. It’s the hawk, perhaps the same one who attacked the parakeets a few weeks ago, and he’s hungry for breakfast. From my office window I have a bird’s eye (make that a raptor’s eye) view of the backyard and can watch him just as he is watching others.
The hawk perches on the low-lying limbs of the witch hazel tree and scans the yard looking for signs of movement. Several times I’ve seen him swoop down to earth, responding to the slightest rustle. So far he’s been unsuccessful, but it’s only a matter of time before some small critter is his forever.
As for the critters, they dart back and forth. Squirrels burrow through leaves looking for acorns. Woodpeckers and sparrows flit from branch to suet block seeking their own sustenance.
Here I am with my own stomach growling — but I don’t want to leave this elemental enactment. There is some ancient wisdom in it, some explanation for why things are the way they are — and I want to take it in a little longer.
(Rather than trot out my one blurry hawk photo again, here’s a beautiful but creepy shot of a 2016 Renwick exhibit.)
I read an essay the other day about Aldo Leopold, which got me thinking about the great conservationist and some writing I did about him a few years ago.
At first glance Aldo Leopold’s book ASand County Almanac (1949) seemed to be like other evocative writing about place — books by Annie Dillard or Henry David Thoreau, for example, books that shed light not only on cities or rivers but also on the author or the human condition, books in which the landscape is a vehicle to the self.
What I got was much more. It was not just a book about the transformation Leopold and his family underwent as they fixed up an old chicken coop in Wisconsin and lived there on weekends. It was in this place that Leopold wrote the essays that became his masterpiece, A Sand County Almanac, a book that encapsulates the philosophy of place that makes him one of our earliest prophets of ecology and wilderness preservation. This book, like the twisted little apples of Winesburg, Ohio, is the hard-won fruit of the deep thinking Leopold brought to the land on which he chose to live.
“There are those who can live without wild things, and some who cannot. These essays are the delights and dilemmas of one who cannot,” writes Leopold in his introduction. But from such big pronouncements the work quickly becomes more specific: the winter awakening of a skunk, the trail of a meadow mouse, the fate of the passenger pigeon, the life of a downed tree, the difference between a shovel (which makes us givers) and the axe (which makes us takers).
To Leopold, place is much more than a vehicle for self-discovery. It is essential to the health and welfare of our planet. The landscape is not here for our amusement or to further our self-awareness; we are working parts of it. Leopold sings of the wilderness, the wild creatures, the original grasses and grizzlies and wolves and weevils that are born and nurtured by a particular soil and rainfall. Here is the moral work of place, the ecology of belonging.
I was so full of the lessons and carols yesterday morning that I forgot what day it was. No matter, the radio soon reminded me that it was Beethoven’s special day. And that meant it was also the birthday of our very own, dearly departed Copper. So as I listened to the Seventh Symphony, the Coriolan Overture and the “Hammerklavier” Sonata, I was also thinking of a certain sweet doggie.
We never knew his real birthday, but December 16, 2006, was the day we brought him home from the Loudon County shelter. His debut performance involved slipping out of his inaugural collar (after that, he always wore a harness) and dashing down the street with a frantic parade of humans in his wake. He was eventually retrieved and brought into his new home. From then on, there was never an open door he didn’t try to rush, never a closed one he didn’t try to open by grabbing the knob in his mouth.
I make light of it now, but at the time it was terrifying. Here was this beautiful creature with silky hair, strong shoulders and big brown eyes, a canine we adored from the moment we saw him, and he seemed determined to leave the only loving family he ever had. This was not from ingratitude but from anxiety. The little guy was a bundle of nerves. Later in his life he cowered when thunder pealed. Sometimes he even barked at his own tail thumping.
Yesterday was the second December 16th that’s come and gone without Copper. Is life simpler without him? Yes it is. But it’s poorer, too.
The Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols I know is the one that takes place in King’s College Cambridge on Christmas Eve. It’s the one that begins with these words “Once in Royal David’s City,” often sung in the dulcet tones of a boy soprano.
It’s also the one that the famous Groton School of Groton, Massachusetts, holds or used to hold, which we once foolishly attended with newborn Suzanne. She didn’t cry … much. But I spent most of the service worrying that she would, especially during the agonizingly long minutes when the solemn procession blocked our exit.
The Festival of Lessons and Carols last night was a different matter. It was beautiful and earnest, not a flame in the darkness but a well-lit performance featuring the choir and its new director, an organist extraordinaire. The reading and songs weren’t the exact ones I was expecting but they checked all the boxes.
Afterward we went up and talked with the director, congratulated him on the success of the event and asked some questions about the organ. Turns out, it’s a hybrid instrument, part digital, part real pipes. I had no idea such a combination exists and am doubly amazed now at the sound that comes out of it.
To hear “O Come, O Come Emmanuel” on that instrument is to hear the carol in all its ancient and aching wonderment. A suiting accompaniment to the words of Isaiah: “Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight and the rough places plain.”
