this world and the way it works

Remember a couple of weeks ago when the snow stayed off the sidewalks? Well.

There might still come another two inches to cover the grass and turn this into a white Christmas, but I will live without it. In the meantime, I have a particular Christmas song in my head, the only one I know that mentions Saturday Night Live, in homage to my aunt Karen, who loved David Cassidy growing up, and my mother who gamely shared a room with her and tolerated David Cassidy pinups because she loved her sister, and my grandmother who lost both of her daughters but learned to let the rest of us light her up. May your life be filled with sunshine, may your every wish come true, may you find a sweet fulfillment in everything you do. That’s Christmas talk, sure, but it’s Tuesday talk and March talk and birthday talk and it is eminently suited for days when everything you touch turns into a white sidewalk of sloppiness.

The angel on my shoulder says Walk in the grass, then, girl, you won’t melt. Or maybe you will, ha ha! It gets away with anything it likes and has taken to smoking Parliaments.

Christmas doesn’t mean the same when so many of the people who were at your childhood table aren’t there anymore. It just doesn’t. But it means something new, something you don’t absorb blindly because tradition makes it so. It evolves, lets in new family members, glows with LED instead of whatever we call those strings of lights I grew up with. I will spend it doing things I’ve put off, putting the year to rights and then putting it to rest, learning to get rid of the vignetting that comes along with this lens or learning to love it. I will perfect my fig vinaigrette. It might not look like celebrating to anyone who requires decorations to see Christmas, but it is, I promise you, I promise. It is as close as I come to Snoopy-dancing.

and then...

And then winter didn’t walk away, but the blues did, with the kind of fond backward glances that blues like to give you because they’re drama queens. And then you picked up their ashtray and their lipstick-smudged coffee cup and broke out the Febreze and flung open the windows. And it wasn’t snowy but it was still cold and you realized that flinging open windows for effect is not smart right now, but damn, it felt good to do that on December fourteenth with its pearl gray sky and its green but faded grass.

And you said it’s time to get some frames for those other two pictures. Flowers mean spring and every day brings it closer.

and you said ACK I forgot to add that image when I published the post the first time!

And you said my God, thank you for this.

And you realized what your hair looked like when you woke up, and even your curls were happy to see today and happy to live on top of a brain rinsed clean with relief. And they bounced and danced and would not be tamed, and there was a giggle and you weren’t sure if it came from you or the curls.

And then you tracked a package online and said oh darling to the Internet for its package-tracking skills and its people-meeting skills and its email (overfull with love and just-checking-in and plans for the future and snug babies growing in happy mothers) and its camera lenses from the US that cost 75 bucks less than they do here. (I went with the 35mm instead of the 50 because I rarely shoot portraits, in case you’re interested. And even if you aren’t, voila! You’ve read the sentence anyway.)

And it was a Wednesday like many others and while you kept typing it was ticking away, so you saved your post and got ready to live it instead.

the weight of silence

Lately I feel the loss of my mother, as her birthday approaches and my heart thumps in the echo chamber of her absence. It is the sound of her birthday song, which I cannot sing to anyone else, the way I cannot sing either of the cats’ songs anymore.

A wiser person would tell me Sing your own song. And it is half magic to hear the wisdom I need, just when I need it, without an actual wise person at my side sipping from a china cup. The other half is held breath. I don’t know how to do that; I’ve never had a song of my own. I guess I’ll learn by making mistakes, the way I learn everything else.

But there is a drumbeat. The creak of strings being tested and tuned. There is someone out there—no one from this house—who sets things to rights, who sees a bicycle on its side and stands it up against a tree, even though no one has claimed it for more than a month. There is another one of those crazy 2011 sunsets, Pinon pink and Black Mesa blue, singing together for a heartbeat before vanishing into the dark. There is a mad hunt for my shoe as I race to catch the last of the light, the bicycle, another weekend in the history books. There is a long exhale, and so much fear, but fear is more honest than happiness right now. Except for the love that others feel for me, everything else I have that matters has come through fear and made it. So will I. And on the way, I’ll make some noise.

winter is worth a word-laden Wednesday

I used to live in a place where, when it snowed, it was such an event that everyone took photographs of their snowy houses to be used as photo Christmas cards for holidays yet to come. I remember the year that Melanie lived in Savannah, the long drives there and back, the way I-16 loves it when you drive along it and sing in your empty car, my first sight of cotton fields. One of the only things I can appreciate about snow (besides the fact that I seem to have learned about custom white balances at long last) is when there is just a little bit of it and it collects on the tips of the dormant bushes and reminds me, however obliquely, of Georgia and cotton plants once again.

Spinach salad with tomatoes, red onion, blue cheese, pomegranate arils, and walnuts, to come.

in which I risk a jinx

It’s cold out there, with snow blowing sideways and upward in the wind. It’s that popcorn kind of snow, round and fluffy and craving a good roving musician or two to accompany it with a tarantella. It’s a good feeling, to dance until you melt away.

I quoted the opening line of The Thief of Always this weekend: The great gray beast February had eaten Harvey Swick alive. Myron said that in Ukrainian, the word for February means “vicious.” The winds outside must have visited Ukraine and learned to be vicious, to cut through my jeans and thermals and gloves and my enormous puffy coat.

A few years ago, I even had a playlist called great gray beasts, moody February music either melancholy for times past or desperate for a better future. But I’ll tell you something: Lately I’m waking up at six-thirty, at the first pink streaks in the sky. All the sorts of behaviors that usually wait a few months to kick in—the desire to spring-clean, rearrange furniture, eat a dinner composed entirely of knitting-needle-thin asparagus—they’re here now. And the sky, that brilliant blue! The gray cloud-beasts show up, but they’re quickly blown away by that frigid wind.

And so I knock on wood. Maybe February 2011 isn’t so tough after all. Maybe it’s a scared little boy in leather and metal, wearing the costume it always has, but deep down its favorite movie has a talking puppydog for a main character. Maybe those winds can just blow back to Ukraine and be vicious over there, and leave my blue skies behind.