Browsed by
Category: holidays

After Love

After Love

In memory of the poet Maxine Kumin, who died eight days ago, and of St. Valentine’s Day:

After Love

Afterward, the compromise.
Bodies resume their boundaries.
 
These legs, for instance, mine.
Your arms take you back in.
 
Spoons of our fingers, lips
admit their ownership.
 
The bedding yawns, a door
blows aimlessly ajar
 
and overhead, a plane
singsongs coming down.
 
Nothing is changed, except
there was a moment when
 
the wolf, the mongering wolf
who stands outside the self
 
lay lightly down, and slept.

Maxine Kumin, “After Love” from Selected Poems, 1960-1990. Copyright © 1970 by Maxine Kumin.

Radiant Way

Radiant Way

For me it’s a return to work after two weeks off — a good day to celebrate the Epiphany, a feast that marks revelation, the manifestation of the divine and, in the words of James Joyce (courtesy of the Writer’s Almanac), the “sudden ‘revelation of the whatness of a thing,’ the moment when ‘the soul of the commonest object … seems to us radiant.'”

The workaday world sorely needs some radiance, some shining representation of its meaning and purpose.

So today, on my return, I will look for it.

Begin Again

Begin Again

Twelve hours into the new year and it still feels like early morning. One late-night reveler in my family just returned from her evening out. Another sent a text at 3:02 a.m., as if she was ringing in 2014 in California — only she was 20 miles away.

I caught up with our oldest daughter at midnight her time, 6 p.m. here. She was celebrating with fellow Peace Corps volunteers at a work station in northern Benin.

As for me, I woke up unsure whether I was in Virginia or Kentucky.

Disorientation: It’s good for the soul. And not a bad way to begin again.

Fast Away

Fast Away

As the old year passes, I take to the road. No time yet to mull over 2013. That will happen today, when I’m driving.

Meanwhile, a photo I snapped yesterday — sleeping vines, dried tendrils. Not unlike the palm of a hand or the expanse of a road map. Crinkled, worn, main arteries obvious now that leaves have gone.

Here at the cusp of a new year, it’s not hard to see where I’m going, where I’ve been.

Appreciation

Appreciation


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 bannister 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 bannister 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.

Photo: Flow TV

This is a re-post from December 24, 2011. Merry Christmas!
It’s a Wrap!

It’s a Wrap!


Gift wrapping can be a meditative experience. Last night as I was cutting and taping and smoothing edges, I thought about my
system, that it’s a little like painting. I spend as much time prepping as I do
actually wrapping.

Prepping means finding the items, removing their price tags,
matching them with their gift receipts, swaddling them in tissue paper and arranging them in a box. Only then can the wrapping begin. Of course there are
items that need no boxes. Books are good for this. Or other things (can’t be too specific here or I would spoil some surprises) that come already boxed. God bless ’em.

And then there are gift bags. I’ve been late
to jump aboard the gift bag train. Seems like cheating to me. But when it’s 11 p.m. and the back is hurting from bending over the bed (which is how I always
wrap gifts and probably always will), the gift bags and the perky colored
tissue paper start to look pretty good.

I finished a lot of wrap-prep and even some
wrapping last night. Enough to tell me how much more buying I have to do. So now – yes, I know, I know – I will have even more
wrapping to do tonight. What can I say? ‘Tis the season.

Checking It Twice

Checking It Twice

This year, for the first time, my Christmas list is electronic. I’m using the “notes” feature of my smart phone.

It has worked surprisingly well — with one exception. There’s no easy way to “check off” the purchased items. I’m making do by typing an asterisk beside each one.

How I wish I could draw a thick black line or make a decisive “X” through the gifts I’ve bought. I suppose I could just delete them, but that’s no fun.

Makes me realize that a list is not just about what I have to do; it’s about what I’ve already done. Checking off the finished tasks makes me feel competent and efficient — which at this time of year I most decidedly am not! All the more reason to crave the illusion.

It’s a pathetic little revelation, but a revelation just the same!

Where We Are

Where We Are

Lights strung along rooftops, wound around tree trunks and lampposts. Nets of lights on shrubs and hedges. Spotlights on wreathed front doors.

At the far end of my neighborhood is a house with a backyard that dips down into the woods. I never know where the yard ends and the woods begin. Except this time of year.

We light our lives to taunt the darkness. But along the way we outline them too.

The lights tell us where we are.

Christmas Itself

Christmas Itself

A week till the big day, and there is still much to do. Gifts that need buying. Cookies that need baking. Cards that need mailing. Packages that need wrapping.

It’s easy to get caught up in seasonal hysteria.

But then I look at our tree and remember how pleasant it was to trim it this year. I think of dear ones here and far away. I see the dog biscuit the UPS man has left on top of the packages by our door, a funny peace offering to the canine who drives him crazy.

I take my time on the cookies, the notes, the ribbons and bows.

These aren’t way stations on the road to Christmas. They are Christmas itself.

Light from Inside

Light from Inside

A gray morning. I turn on the tree lights early. I sit and work beside the fir.

At first it distracts me, so many ornaments have stories. And even the shape of the tree this year — a widened base, giving it a solid, grounded feel — draws my gaze.

But I strengthen my resolve. I will myself to see it only from the corner of an eye.  To work beside it, to let its presence spur and not derail the day.

Less than a week until solstice; the light must come from inside.