I woke up to a lovely fog: a world of softened edges and limited horizons.
Gone is the street behind me, and the house with the long drive beyond. Front and center are the particulars of my yard: the leaf piles at the back, the twisted trunk of the volunteer cherry, the covered garden bench.
Fog makes us all myopic. It takes away the forest and gives us the trees. It provides an excuse for seeing only what is close at hand.
Sometimes I need that.
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December dawns gray and cold. A new month. I began the last one in an old house by the sea. I begin this one in the two-story suburban home I’ve lived in for decades. A garbage truck trundles by as I write. It’s the third garbage truck I’ve heard this morning.
Ah, the suburbs! The beauty and the bane of them. I love the trees and solitude. I deplore the sameness and isolation.
But that’s an old story. The new story is this: Here I am.
If Thanksgiving lasted a week instead of 24 hours, this would be its final and most celebratory day — the last verse of the hymn, when voices sing louder and the organist pulls out all the stops. It would be the gratitude you feel after sickness, relief tinged with wonder that the body can be again as it once was.
The last day of a week of gratitude would be a crescendo of thanks, cymbals crashing, timpani rolling, a fanfare of trumpets.
And because this week of thanksgiving would be ending on the birthdays of two people dear to me — a daughter and a brother — there would be a special surge of gratitude for the presence of these two people in my life.
Come to think of it, a week of thankfulness might prove so invigorating that next I’d need a month of it.
I make my way down the hill from my house at the foot of Artillery Hill in Fort Worden, stroll along the brow, listen to the surf surging below.
From there it’s up one hill and then another. But at the top of that second hill, huffing and puffing, I see all of Admiralty Inlet spread out before me.
I snap photos. And in fact, I snapped plenty of them. But they never did it justice, never captured the openness and the light.
No matter — it’s in my mind now, and in my bones and sinews, too.
Cold weather moved in yesterday. It wasn’t frigid by winter standards, but by the gentler measures of late fall, it was significant.
The wind and cold reminded me how hard it can be to drag myself out of a warm house into a brisk breeze. But it also reminded me that the body is a furnace stoked by motion. The colder I am, the faster I walk.
Yesterday I was almost running.
(One place where I wasn’t cold yesterday: a sunny bank full of warmth and glare.)
I noticed it on my recent forays in Washington state but I notice it here, too: the beauty abundant this time of year. Though it is the season of diminishment, it’s also a season of plentitude, a harvest of fluttering last leaves, a bounty of bare branches.
Leave beauty up to nature, I think, conveniently skipping tornadoes, wildfires and other natural disasters. Nature knows what to take and what to leave behind. It is seldom gaudy or superfluous, always the right amount of color or cover.
There is a subtle reassurance this time of year. It speaks of weathering, of seeking splendor in the frail and fallen, of finding enough in what is left behind.
The day after the feast: Leftovers fill the fridge. Two turkeys vie for space and baggies of extras are jammed into every other nook and cranny. The coolers still house sodas and beer, and bottles of unopened wine line up like soldiers in a drill.
There’s a load of laundry churning away — placemats and tea towels mainly, having forgone cloth napkins for paper this year — but the china and silver are washed and stored for the next big occasion.
Outside, the wind is blowing, the pumpkins are still intact. But inside, all is calm. The dust is no longer flying. Twenty-nine people have come and gone … and we survived.
Before the flurry of preparation begins, I search for a poem to serve as grace before the meal. Or if not, to sum up gratitude for my eyes only. This one does:
Ripeness
Jane Hirshfield
Ripeness is
what falls away with ease.
To let your body
love this world
that gave itself to your care
in all of its ripeness,
with ease,
and will take itself from you
in equal ripeness and ease,
is also harvest.
And however sharply
you are tested —
this sorrow, that great love —
it too will leave on that clean knife.
I’m reminded this morning that it’s been 60 years to the day since President Kennedy was shot. The act that defined our country for many years, until the other tragedies came along.
Now there are young adults who were born after 9/11, who have no direct or televised experience of the smoldering ruins or the silent skies.
Time marches on; memories do not. They stay locked in place — in amber, perhaps, or something far less valuable. They define us, as a generation and as a people.
How do we honor them and move on? Only by understanding them, I guess, by realizing the many ways they hold us in their thrall.
Rain dislodges leaves and sends them dripping and dropping into the backyard, which is already covered with them. Nothing like the old days, when we would wade through them ankle deep, but still a presence, a reminder of the season.
When I look at the leaves from my upstairs window, I see a palimpsest, a manuscript that tells two stories, the lines on top and the faint scratches beneath: a new story and an older one. I see the yard as it is now, but I also see the yard of yore, little girls jumping into piles of brown and gold.
Those little girls are grown. Now their children come to jump in the leaves, to bounce on the trampoline, to run and dance and play. But when I look at the yard I don’t just see the newest little people, I see the ones that are no more, the young women who are once again the children I knew them to be.
