Hurtling through the Holidays

...and my to-do list was spooling out in my head, all the million little things to do. The presents to buy, the meals to plan, the Christmas cards to send out, the house to clean in preparation for guests. But the usual urgency wasn’t there. I was nursing a cold on top of a cold, and then I gifted that to my husband, and we were both trudging around the house cradling our Kleenex boxes. 

We joked about not putting up the tree. I mean, why? In a few weeks we’d be taking it down. But then I don’t know what happened. We hauled the Christmas stuff up from the basement. We watched Diehard. (Yes, it is a Christmas movie.) We bought presents for the family we sponsor at our local community center. Both kids needed winter coats and it was killing me how cute the little coats were. I played the Charlie Brown Christmas music and set the pot on the stove with the orange peels and cinnamon sticks. 

This is one of the ideas in the Hygge book that my daughter gave me a few Christmases ago. Hygge is a Danish thing where, instead of fighting the winter season, you go All In on it. You can do this by either hunkering down cozily with blankets and books and warm beverages and fragrant scents wafting from a pot on the stove, or else, you can bundle up and go cross country skiing. Needless to say, I lean more toward the hunkering down option. 

I crossed Christmas cards off the to-do list. How I accomplished this task was I decided not to do it. I read a book. I listened to a podcast about the history of Santa. I lost myself for an hour, scrolling through pictures from Christmases past. Most of the Christmases past are a blur. I wasn’t a person who lived in the present. I was planning and whirling and out of breath. Sometimes I hid in the bathroom. 

After, I would remember with an ache in my heart all the lovely moments I’d only been half paying attention to. 

The years whirred by, but something nice: the lovely moments added up. I have thousands of them now that I can revisit whenever I want to. But what I want is to make more lovely moments. And I want to be there, fully present, for each one. 

Yesterday it snowed again, and all of the plans we had for the weekend flew out the window. We took a walk during the height of the storm. There’s a small, newly planted tree at the end of our street by the Starbucks. Last summer a truck plowed through and tore up the sidewalk. There were weeks of construction, but somehow the new sidewalk got torn up again, and the whole thing had to be redone. When it was finally finished, someone planted the small tree. 

It looks like the Charlie Brown Christmas tree, my husband said, when we clomped by it in the snow. We should decorate it. 

I laughed because I was thinking of the mysterious Yarn Bomber lady who lives in our neighborhood and sometimes, overnight, she will decorate a light pole with a colorful, knitted sleeve. 

What if there was a Christmas Bulb Bomber, I said.

What if it was us, my husband said. 

Why not? 

How you stay present is you stop thinking for a second and take the world in through your senses. Cold wet snow pelting your cheeks. Flakes on your tongue. The crunch of boots. The smell of coffee drifting out of the Starbucks drive thru window. 

Silver bulbs dangling on the branches of a tree. 

    

Shoveling Out

It snowed hard one night, and in the morning, I had to dig my car out. This was a heavy wet snow, a good five inches, and not expected (by me. I think other people expected it) so, first, I had to figure out where my winter boots were and where had I thrown my hat and gloves? I half slipped down the back steps in pursuit of the snow shovel, which was somewhere in the garage. 

We can’t park our cars in the garage. We have a single car driveway that takes a sharp turn, and parking back there would be a constant struggle (for me), but also, it’s where my husband has set up his woodworking shop. Anyway, there was a lot of snow to clear, car-wise and driveway-wise, and forty-five minutes flinging snow around was not how I had envisioned spending my morning.  

What I had imagined myself doing was writing. What I’m writing about is the past. In the past it is sunny and warm. I am five years old and living at a campground. I am not a person who romanticizes the past. But spending several days back as my five-year-old self, roaming around the campground where we lived for a summer, has been a nice break from reality. 

There’s a pond to splash in and woods to explore. A playground and camp store where you can buy fudgesicles for a quarter a piece. We live in a tent, but it’s a big tent. Enough space for all of our sleeping bags, plus my baby brother’s playpen. 

What’s I’m trying to do is unwind time, trace it all backwards to some perfect point before things went wrong. I call my aunt who lived with us at the campground to ask her what she remembers. My aunt is like me. She remembers everything. 

I used to think this was a gift, but now I’m starting to wonder if it’s a curse. My aunt tells me stories about who she bought the tent from and the time a skunk wandered into the campsite and how she liked to read her book in the afternoons while my baby brother napped and my mother took my other brother and me to the pond to swim. 

I have a clear memory of the two of us running down a hill with our towels flapping behind us. Another memory of sitting at the picnic table, coloring in our coloring books while it rained on the blue tarp that stretched over the campsite. I turned six that summer and celebrated my birthday under that tarp. Someone gave me a Barbie camper, and I drove it around and around the picnic table. I don’t know what any of this adds up to. 

I was happy at the campground, therefore, happiness is possible. Happiness is possible even though my family had been kicked out of our rental and had nowhere to live for the summer. Five-going-on-six-year-olds only know so much about the world. But in other ways, they know things adults have forgotten. This all made more sense in my head while I was shoveling the walks and scraping off my car. 

The driveway went clean, and not really thinking about it, I started shoveling out into the street. A foot on my shovel, a jab of the blade through crust, another clump added to the pile, layer upon layer of snow. 

Not entirely dug out. Maybe it will never be entirely dug out. But cleared enough to move past. 

Swimming in the Library

This week is my week to do the craft in the youth department. This is a thing we do at our library, fun art projects for kids to work on and take home. My coworkers have set a very high bar, coming up with clever designs and prepping all the components, the easy-to-follow directions and samples and materials. 

My turn, and I’m floundering. It takes me a good month to find a craft that looks simple enough to do. Not for the kids. For me. 

I am not a craftsy person. I say this about myself, and then I wonder if saying it makes it so. Why can’t I be a craftsy person? How hard can it be to make stencils, cut paper, glue a bunch of thingamabobs together? 

Not hard, but somehow, hard. Whipping out my reading glasses at the desk to do the careful tracing and cutting, I have to stop every two minutes to help a child find a book or clean up a baby toy that’s been spittled on or take note of the train table where a little boy is making a high-pitched choo choo sound over and over again, so many times that it’s become the soundtrack of the youth department and I don’t notice it anymore until it stops, the absence of choo-choooing nearly as loud as the noise itself, an echo of it still ringing in my ears. But in a nice way. 

Have I ever told you how much I love this place? I don’t know what it is. The books. The kids. The book-kid combo. The love sneaked up on me, and now I am full-blown swimming in it. Speaking of swimming, that’s what my watch thinks I’m doing every day when I’m at work. Yes, I know. I had been trying to go Un-Smart with the watches, but I finally gave in on it and got a new fitbit. 

The fitbit has a screen that is so tiny, I can’t see it without my reading glasses. Fortunately, there’s a synched-up phone app where I can learn fun facts about my heart rate and sleep stages and steps. This is how I realized that my watch has been logging swimming sessions every morning. The swimming sessions coincide with the times when I’m shelving books. I think it must be calculating the arm movement, the reaching, the stretching, and all of that bending and dipping around the book cart. 

(By the way, I love shelving too. The gentle shushing when a book slides into its place. The surge of satisfaction when I empty a cart. Plus, I’m always getting new book suggestions. Here’s one: How Can I Help You by Laura Sims. It’s about a killer nurse who’s on the run and working in a library VS the failed novelist recently hired as a research librarian who is growing more and more suspicious of the nurse. I picked the book up because I wanted to see how accurately it portrayed working at a library. It did a decent job… sorta, capturing the array of services we provide, the sometimes weirdo questions we get at the desk, but something was missing: Neither of these characters wanted to help anyone. And that’s what we do at the library.) 

Anyway, after my intense swimming activity, I took a rest and worked on my silly craft. I call it “Cocoa with Polar Bear.” The website where I found the idea says to glue real mini marshmallows on top of the cocoa cup, but I nixed that and decided on a smushed cotton ball. Over the week, I traced and cut out approximately ten thousand parts and pieces, assembled all of the necessary craft supplies—glues, scissors, markers, cotton balls—spent an absurd amount of time putting a sample together and writing up the easy-to-follow instructions. 

Stop by the library this week, if you’d like to make one. You’ll find me down in the Youth Department swimming. 

Breakthrough

I’m back to writing this week, a project that I’ve been working on for several years now, after setting it down and picking it back up multiple times. First, there was a global pandemic and then the world was on fire, 

and someone had surgery, and I had surgery, someone was sick, the dog was sick, we went out of town, we had visitors from out of town. I had a meeting, a doctor’s appointment, a haircut. I had to make dinner, do the Wordle, go to work at the library. The weather was gray. The weather was rainy. And then the time changed, and the time changed back. 

You can see where I’m going with this. It was never the right time to write. I would sit at my desk. I would look at my keyboard. I would look out the window. I would open my phone. I would want to toss it out the window. Instead, I would do the laundry. 

It doesn't help that the project I'm working on is painful. It's a story about the past, and I want to write it, but also, it's hard.  

I used to teach classes about this. Not how to write. But HOW TO WRITE. Meaning, how to sit your butt in the chair and just do it. I had so many good tips and tricks. Somewhere along the way, I forgot them all. It was the slippery subject matter, the pandemic, the world, the Wordle, etc. Anyway, fortunately, there’s always a moment in the process when something hits you, and you let go of the dumb excuses and plunk yourself in the chair. 

What hit me this week was I got kicked in the chest by a mule. 

Not literally. But it felt like it. I was lugging the garbage bin down the driveway and somehow the handle whacked into me so hard that I lost my breath for a few seconds. I stood there, stunned, taking stock of myself, but everything seemed to be in its proper place, and I went on with my day. That night, though, it hurt a little to breathe. It hurt in the morning too. 

I googled it. Worst case scenario: broken ribs or collapsed lung. But that seemed ridiculously overdramatic. The week went on, and I wasn’t feeling any better. I returned to googling. What if I did break a rib or collapse a lung? I have osteoporosis. It’s in the realm of possibility. When I was a child, I fell and hurt my wrist. Did I need to go to the doctor? 

No, my mother told me. If it was broken, you would know. That made sense except, I didn't know. Later, my arm ended up in a cast, and I was grateful to have something to show for it after putting her through the trouble. But back to the garbage bin bashing me in the chest, I finally gave in and had it X-rayed. 

It’s fine. Nothing broken, but good that I had it checked out, the doctor said kindly. 

Still, I can’t help thinking about it, that gray area between knowing and not knowing and why was I so annoyed with myself for feeling pain? Wait. Did I feel guilty for not having a broken rib? What was really going on here? 

Something funny about the past is how it pops up when you least expect it, the things you think are settled, shaking loose, the missing pieces hiding in plain sight.  

Bad Weather

The other day it snowed unexpectedly. I say unexpectedly, but maybe it was just me not expecting it. In addition to not reading the news, I no longer look at my weather app. I know what you’re thinking: That’s dumb. 

It’s a valid point. The issue is the weather app is wrong more times than it’s right. I’m planning a walk with the dog, for example, and I carefully check the radar for rain. Nothing on the screen, so off we go, but then suddenly, we’re caught in a downpour and huddling like fools under a tree. Lately, I'm taking my chances and planning for the weather the old-school way. I step outside. There’s also good old-fashioned word-of-mouth. 

A patron at the library will remark about the upcoming cold front, or conversely, the warm spell. Someone may have mentioned snow. But if they did, I forgot. We don’t usually get snow this early in the season. What we got wasn’t much. Only a couple of inches, but so bright and blinding, it shocked the dog.  

The trees too seemed shocked by it. Most still have all their leaves, and the snow weighed them down. The tree on our patio was half-crushed and drooping onto the concrete, the branches threatening to snap.

I was still in my robe, but I grabbed a broom and started knocking the snow off, realizing in that same moment, that the snow I was whacking had to go somewhere--me. I saved the tree, but I stumbled back into the house looking like I’d fallen into a snow bank. 

It was cold.

And the cold hung on for most of the week. I had to pull out my heavy coat and dig around for my hat and mittens for our short dog walks, short, because the dog is still wobbily on her legs, and now, the medication they’ve given her has messed with her digestive system. I won’t go into the details. 

She’s sleeping beside me now, after another night pacing and panting. I have never had a pet that I loved this much and I don’t know how we do this part. How do we do this part? She’s older and it’s not entirely unexpected, so why do I feel like I’ve woken up in an unfamiliar world, everything cold and blinding and collapsing under snow?  

Here Now

It was a long week and I ate too much leftover Halloween candy. We have bowlfuls at work and I can’t stay away from it. I’ll just take one, I say to myself. I’ll just take two. I’ll just take three. The trouble is I was exhausted. Up with the dog who had a flare up of pain. The vet thinks she has disk degeneration in her back. We’ve been slipping pain pills in cheese cubes, and for whatever reason, it’s not helping. 

She wants to go for walks but walks start the pain spiral. But you try telling that to a deaf dog. When I take her out, I try to guide her slowly, one house down from ours, two. I give her leash a tug to turn back, and she looks at me, confused. She wants to keep going on our usual trotty walk around the neighborhood. She plants her feet and goes rigid in a way that I know is going to hurt her later. I pick her up because I am an idiot. I have disk degeneration too. 

I eat another piece of candy. It doesn’t even taste that good. Have you noticed how all of the chocolate candies taste the same now? My conspiracy theory is that they ARE all the same, and they’re not made out of chocolate. It’s sugar, with different flavorings added to it. Peanut butter flavor to taste like Reese’s Peanut cups. Biscuity caramel flavor to taste like a Twix. And some kind of addictive substance which makes me want to keep eating it. Oh, right. It’s called sugar. I eat another candy and hate myself and the world. 

A good friend is struck down by a rare virus and is hospitalized. The dark rolls in hard at 5:30 because of the stupid time change. I’m in that place again where nothing makes sense. Why one thing happens or another and what can we do? 

Night, and the dog is up at 2 am, panting, pacing. I help her downstairs so she will be close to the backdoor in case she needs to stumble out. I curl up on the couch and try to get her to curl up with me. She won’t. I curl up on the floor and she paces around me. One hour, two, three. I blink at her in the dark. I can’t help her. The thought is both clarifying and terrible. 

Weirdly, in the morning, she is fine. Wanting to prance around the block and giving me the side eye when I won’t let her. I wish she could hear me, but then, at the same time, what would I say to her? We will make it through this. Or, we won’t make it through this. This, whatever this is, is where we are now. 

I pat her back gently and kiss the top of her head. I forgot that this is one thing I can do. Be here when I am here. Later, at work, I only eat one piece of candy (okay, two pieces of candy), slow, slow, so that it almost tastes good. If you are a praying kind of person, will you say a prayer for my friend? 

In Between

It’s November and I don’t know how that happened. I mean the way time speeds up and then it’s already passed. Just yesterday I was planting tomato seedlings, and suddenly, I am yanking the overgrown, flopped-over plants out of the ground. At the library we all said we would dress up for Halloween.

The theme was “Decade You Were Born.” I didn’t want to do it. I’m not a dress-up kind of person. But the night before, I threw something together. A gauzy flowery top and tights, a peace sign drawn on my cheek. I was the Summer of Love. No one at work could guess. People don’t remember that summer. I don’t remember that summer. 

But then, I was a baby. Flash forward, and I am teetering into Old-Lady. A patron at the library told me I look like her child’s grandmother. The little girl toddled over to me and plunked down in my lap. A whoosh of baby scent and I went rushing through time and space. I was the child. I was the mother of children. I was the old lady stranger, cross-legged on the colored-square carpet at the library. It was fall.  It was spring. It was fall again. 

A kid came in dressed up in her Halloween costume, and I asked her what she was. Rumi, she said. Her nanny saw my puzzled look. It’s from KPop Demon Hunters, she explained. 

Oh, I said. I had no idea what she was talking about. 

It's a movie, my manager piped up. What? You haven’t heard of this? 

Apparently, it’s all the rage in her house. Her four-year-old is obsessed. Every morning they blast the soundtrack in the car on the way to preschool. Now my manager can’t get the songs out of her head. I laughed, but there was a twinge of achy nostalgia. Those days are gone for me. 

But who says so? I watch the KPop movie with my husband. Within two minutes we are delighted, a word I never use, but it truly fits here. Something about the music (which is insanely catchy), the bright colors, the message about accepting who you are and everyone joining together to defeat the darkness. What’s not to love about that? 

Halloween is over and we barrel toward winter. It’s spring. It’s summer. It’s fall again. I wake up. I go to bed. I drive to the library. I drive home. In between, I am planting something. I am dressing up. I am holding a stranger’s child. 

I am singing.