Curl up, reader, on the couch with a cup of steaming tea, a small reading lamp to illume your reading material and just the lights on the tree twinkling in the background for ambience.
Listen for the sounds of the season; the silence of snowfall, Tchaikovsky, boots stomping off stubborn bits of snow in the back hall, perhaps even distant sleigh bells in the chilly night.
Did you have a favorite holiday game when a child? Something you can resurrect now that will capture an innocent feel for the season? Something that will serve to remind you of what is (and by implication what is not) important?
One of my favorite childhood Christmas memories is sitting in the darkened living room in front of the tree and making my eyes blurry, so that each light took on multiple soft points, then making them even blurrier until the tree dissolved into a soft riot of multicolored stars to wonder over. With a quick release of my ocular muscles, the tree would snap back into focus and then I could do it all over again.
My column this week was going to be about quitting cut trees with which to decorate our living rooms. I wanted to propose a new type of holiday tree farm in which digging up the tree and planting it in a bucket, rather than severing it from its stalk, becomes the norm. I envisioned dragging trees-in-pots into homes (not much more trouble really than how we do it now), and back out to the curb when the holidays were over.
They would be safer and more fire-proof because they would be alive and rooted, not withering toward an end. The greener or more landed among us could plant them in our own yards come spring. Or I'm sure a cadre of reducers, reusers and recyclers would crop up to prowl curbs on trash day to rescue the still living trees and direct them for planting elsewhere.
In my mind's eye, quitting cut trees gave me visions of discounts from retailers for returned trees, busy nursery workers sprucing up trees for re-sale or planting and of course more trees in the world.
But it is not trees I have been thinking about these past days. In my world right now, things are down to elementals; information that is even more basic than what day is it, what month or what season. I have literally lost track of those things. I know when it is dark, or light. I know when it is snowing and when it has stopped. I know when we are getting low on pain killers or anti-anxiety pills and where to get more.
You met Trigger, my good friend Marya, several columns ago. Marya has been challenged with something few of us will ever need negotiate in life. A week ago, she was given a foreseeably short life expectancy. She seems to have turned up with a rare and random aggressive mutation. The first diagnosis has been partially retracted because of in-depth molecular staining results that suggest something potentially better than what it appeared to be: late stage pancreatic cancer.
We are hoping for something (anything) else right now and on the day you read this, she will be back in Boston in front of her team and waiting to hear, again, what is causing all these troubles and what can be done about them.
Whatever this turns out to be, it is being met head on with similar strength by a random aggressive cohort of friends, neighbors, boyfriend, family and an amazing medical team in Boston.
In November, I was lucky enough to quit my life (aka job) in what I thought was going to be an attempt to be a writer. While I know I will do that someday, I think what I really left for was to be free to spend more time in Northampton with Marya, and her dogs (Phoebe and Keenan) and her birds (Larry and three unnamed parakeets).
The fight here may be titan but it is expressed mundanely day to day in the form of pill counting, finding pharmacies that carry Schedule I narcotics, vacuuming, playing with dogs, feeding birds and finding ways to remain calm. Hikes help, and despite the nasty stupid things littering the inside of Marya's body, when her pain is controlled she is still a stronger and heartier hiker than me.
And so off we go. I don't know the day, but I do know it's snowing and it's time to find my boots and coat, because it's beautiful out there and no doctors need to see her today.
Atticus has had a little trouble adjusting and managing the stress coming off his mama, but Rescue Remedy is helping. He is settling in. Send him doggie anxiety tips at suzanne.danforth@gmail.com.
