Penelope Outside

Pen and I had some quality mommy-doggy time on Christmas day.  She seemed like she enjoyed it.

(No, her right ear didn't go the way of everything else I keep losing lately.  She was just hiding it to be funny.)

On Christmas Day, You Can Drive as Slowly as You Want

With my local family temporarily under the weather, the holiday is waiting a day or so while they recuperate and I stay the heck out of the infectious zone.

Yesterday was dark and drear and rainy and wonderfully evocative, even if not horribly cold, and I spent a bit of it antiquing with a lovely friend.  Today, it is what my dad would have filled his lungs, smiled, and called "a glorious day" - again not very cold, bright and blue-sky-ed, clear and breezy and beautiful.

I hadn't made a plan except to wrap the interminably-delayed presents and perhaps work on some research for the WIP novel; but, this morning, when mom woke me up at 9:00 to wish me a merry Christmas, after lolling about in bed with the furbabies for a bit, it came to me.  We all got up, I put on clothes that can be seen in public, she went in the yard for a little while, and I checked email and so on.  About eleven o'clock, I went out to ask her if she wanted to go for a ride.

And we went to go see my dad.

Dad's in a memorial garden near where he taught for many years; and so, after a little exploring in the quiet, walled-in space where he rests, we took a little bit of a walk.  Penelope was bullied by the cutest, tiniest little dachshund you ever saw, and curled up as small as a sixty-pound mass of muscle can get, submissive to the one tiny little bruiser out of three dogs all out together.  Never saw her quite like that, but otherwise she enjoyed the walk.

There were some birds on the water; dark plumage and swimming unusually low, beaks longer and pointier, but just as orange as a duck.  One nearby dove under the ripples and stayed down a good while.  I was half tempted to think it was a Great Blue, but have never seen one do that and what little I saw of the body, surely it had to be too small.  Interesting, though.

Coming home, my spazzy window-hanger was actually tired, and she curled up on the back seat and I think may have gone to sleep.  Sweet.  Perhaps she liked the high-pitched music of Switched-on Bach, or really was just tuckered after going visitin'.  She'd made a beeline, when we walked into the garden, to dad's niche.


Now, I'm in the office with Gossie.  He lies on his window seat, and Pen is in the living room I believe, napping on my grandmother's thick wool rug, in the ray of sunshine in there.

I may have to take their example; napping, even if not in a sunbeam (though the chaise might be good for that).

Hoping all who celebrate it are enjoying as peaceful a Christmas as this, and even more joyous.  And, for those who just enjoy the quiet:  save some dumplings and veggie fried rice for me!

Twas the Day Before Christmas ...

The morning has been dark and stormy, opening with a torrent of rain that held off the very dawn.  I'm working from home, but it's quiet, and my office is filled with presents for my family I will finally wrap today.  I am joined in this cozy spot by the two you see above.  It could hardly be more perfect and cozy (the tower heater does help), and we're half-listening to "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels" on the little Roku box.

I saw this movie in the theater when it came out, with my dad.  He and I enjoyed it, and I've hardly seen it since, so this is a happy thing to have at my fingertips on a pre-holiday.

My stepfather came down with the flu yesterday, so Christmas will be postponed, either by hours or a day or so, but conveniently I took a four-day weekend, so that's not a problem.  Penelope's own tummy is quietly burbling; no holiday scents to join us so far, but I hope she's feeling okay.  They've both now curled themselves up and the only sound is that of my typing, with the movie on pause.  The scent of some of the more frou-frou presents mingles comfortably with the somewhat puppy-sweet fragrance of fur that got a little damp a couple of hours ago, and the sky is lightening, though still wonderfully drab and drippy.

The work day will be a little short, and I've got a lunch date for later, one of my longtime friends, with whom I always laugh a great deal.  Tomorrow?  Still flexible there.  But Christmas is coming, even if a little late.  May yours be merry - even if it's a movies and Chinese food affair!

Clearinghouse

Today has been less an exercise in housecleaning than in house-emptying.  Yes, three loads of laundry (and apparently I can still dress just fine with that much out of commission - itself a commentary on the excess of a single-person homeownership situation ...) - but a nice stack of trash and recycling out and to-go-out.  For some reason, during a period when I was selling a lot on eBay, I developed a mini obsession with keeping EVERY box in the house, which means the entire dormer nook in the front of the guest room is stacked with useless cardboard.  RECYCLING IT.  I'll never ship that much to my brother, and - everything this year I was planning to sell on eBay I have decided to give away.

The Jones sheath dress I wore only one time (for my confirmation at church, actually).  Someone needs that, and I'm self-conscious about the slit in the back of the skirt.  I am never going to wear it again.  It goes.

My aunt's leather trench.  I miss her deeply, I loved her so much - but as an artifact goes, this one is not a beloved memento, it's just an ill-fitting vintage piece I'm cheating some very cute (short-armed) girl out of rocking to pieces.  It goes.

The quilted tapestry jacket with marvelously soft, long mongolian wool trim.  It's adorable - but it's too trendy for me.  Its sleeves, also, are a bit slim for my granny arms.  It goes.

The SIZE SIX London Fog trench my mom and dad bought me 24 years ago (I still remember where, remember the day, remember we went to a show that night; I remember how that coat fit when I cinched in the belt).  But it is a size six - and I am not, and don't even want to be.  It goes.

The beautiful red wool suit I bought last time I was unemployed - and have never worn even one single time. The heck - that's several inches of closet space.  It goes.

Even the flattering twinset mom bought me two or three years back.  It's comfortable - but I really have worn it as much as I will.  It's *just* outside my real preferred style.  So.  And the satin blazer I've gotten more than my bargain-money's worth out of.  The wonderfully soft, velvet-trimmed suit jacket my coworkers have never seen because I busted the back seam out of it once (and I thought that jacket fit fine) - which, though it's been beautifully repaired, I fear to wear for doing that again.  Good grief, it goes.  The skirt that wasn't a set but that goes with that, I should give up too - need to get that one out of the closet.  I haven't worn it in too long.

The jewelry I never wear.  The pieces from mom.  The one or two miscalculations from eBay, too.

The amount of stuff going out of this house - I already have two HUGE shopping bags of stuff out in the trunk as it is, and the list above is on top of those things, and will cram the trunk chock full - is pretty serious.  It will feel good.

On top of this, I've done a lot of just organizing.  The guest room, for two months, has been a riot of clean sheets waiting to go back on the bed my friend used when she came for the JRW Conference in mid-october, of summer clothes not put away, of Christmas decorations and their boxes, of the hair moved for the tree's spot in the living room.  It's oppressive, living in a house otherwise sort of nice, but knowing THIS ROOM was lurking silently upstairs.

It goes.

If these things don't go, I will be mired in them.  And so much of it would be so nice for somebody else.

The edifice of cardboard boxes - well, maybe they will just be nice for the Earth, for me to take them out of the realm of waste and excess ...


***


Christmas, of course, will bring More Stuff into the house - but one great advantage of middle age is that every year there is less of that to manage, for me.  Heh - some years, hardly anything at all ... but that is an amusing set of stories for some other time.  *Grin*

So it is the right time to lighten my home's load.  Just yesterday I resisted the temptation to buy a new sofa for *such a deal* (seriously - nice, clean, comfy piece, and I'd have paid $55 for it).  But I don't need to take advantage of every deal out there.  Today I am gladder to have the sofa already here.  Another day, it will be time to let it go, to find a new/old one in its place.  But not this week.

Today is my day of solitary worship - steward to the material blessings given me.  And part of that is knowing when to give those blessings to others.  Tonight, I will revel and relax, nothing more than a bath and early bed.

Tomorrow, one last piece of shopping, then a friend for the evening.

Christmas Eve - for the first time, perhaps, ever - I have taken time off.  Time with another friend, and probably the nighttime service, a joyous celebration.  The exquisite sound of my priest's voice, singing.  Her love, all our love.  And, yes - Christ.  A worship in fellowship.

Then Christmas day, just me and the fur-bearing kidlets, relaxing (... heh ... ?) at mom and my stepfather's house.  I plan to make my dad's coffee cake.  We'll eat, we'll open gifts, we'll laugh and share and just be, pretty quietly.  It is a small holiday, just the three of us.  Penelope and Goss will liven it up I am sure.

Then home.  A quiet night.

And back to the real world.

Heat is Where the Home Is

Friday, leaving the office it was so quiet I could listen to the breeze in the leaves all around me.  Hot.  It’s that time of year, here, where everything is lushly green, where the grass is just getting ready to turn brown and dry.  This time of year, too, my sense of connection to that place, that land so close to the swamps, the suburb, where I grew up, is at its height.  The heat of June, the scent of mimosa; asphalt; chlorinated pool water.  Incredible dry pain when you step on a holly leaf left over from winter.  Soft, tender green leaves still coming in, too.  You can hear the shouts, from the neighborhood pool, up the street.

You feel, in summertime, how close this place is both to the tidewater, and to the piedmont.  The hills suddenly apparent.  Because, in summertime--we were *outside*.  Summer was the time I, at least, was really at all aware of the land, the country, the *air* all around us.  I was barefoot every day - toes actually part of the dust and earth and clay.  In soft, cool grass which over the season slowly became dusty, prickly.

The evenings become what my dad always called "soft nights" - dusk is cat-footed, gentle, slow, glowing.  Lightning bugs.  Scent of gardenia, now, wafting off my neighbor's incredible bank of green and glossy leaves.  Beautiful.

I sit outside and look to my right - on a stoop of concrete, with broken brick stairs - and a yard almost uninterrupted, by curves, by trees, by flower beds, by features.  I put my eyes on a certain spot, I look at the back of the house, and I build it again.  MY dream porch.

We grew up with porches - at first, a gravel patio, when we were very young.  Dad had a concrete patio poured one year.  Big, white spot.  We'd eat outside.  There's  a picture of me with our dog - another one, of my feet, sticking out of a big appliance box.  I was inside, in the shadow - reading, I like to suspect.  Reading B.C. comics, or MAD magazine.  But reading.

Then, the best of all - dad built a porch on top of the large patio.  Low brick walls.  I remember how that looked.  I think he turned forty before the roof was up - have this memory of neighbors and his party, sitting on those comfortable-heighted walls.  Wide, summer light.

Years - that porch was really just more house.  We were outside for dinner far more than in.  Dad built these big cabinets (... pine? with this heavy polymer plastic vinyl on them) for either side of the bricks of the chimney.  We had a furniture set and a dinner table - lawn furniture as living room.  I remember spending the night outside.  I remember even sometimes having the portable TV out there - oh yes, he had it electrified.  Ceiling fan, too.  Shades.  Lights.  But more than anything, just us, just sitting.  The first hummingbirds I ever saw, sitting in that porch.

"Letting the storm go by" - we'd sit outside there, closer in to the house, and the porch was so big, we didn't even get wet.  Beautiful, exciting, and intimate - sharing a storm with your family, outside but protected.  And together.

In winter time, the place was still more than just a hallway to the driveway.  We kept things out there in lieu of refrigeration.  The Christmas fudge would set outside - and live outside.  Bourbon balls, to this day, seem like the really should be cold.  Cakes, cookies, went outside to cool, to stay in tins where they would be safe.  Where us kids weren't *supposed* to steal them.  Where at least I always did.  Sugar scamp.

Dad's initials in that corner.  The "back" door close to the house, over by the hose, and the "front" door to the porch - toward the driveway.

The slate walkway up from the porch, to the shed dad also built.  The lean-to for our bikes, and the pussy willow behind it.  The blackberry bush.

I tilt my eyes across my empty yard, with no good place to sit outside on a soft night, and fantasize the porch of my dreams.  Three steps up from the yard, maybe two steps down from the living room.  A half circle, set on bricks.  Screened in - a door to this side, and one toward my neighbor's house too.  Can't have that side closed off.  A shingled roof leaning up toward the acute pitch of the house's slate roof.  In my dream, I can afford the porch to have a slate floor.  And afford a slate walk, too.  Walk from the back door to the driveway, and perhaps another walk to the porch.  Not sure how that would look.  But dreaming - everything's wonderful.

Sitting on my porch, enjoying a soft night.  The back window of my living room now a door - and that one window in the kitchen, now looking into the porch.  I imagine being in the kitchen, someone at the house and asking for something outside.

My house is beautiful, and I love it.

But I did miss out - not getting a porch.

C'town

Carytown at Christmas:  perfection.  This is the place you go with friends, and one of them buys you a present behind your back.  This is the place you go with your niece, and laugh at the dachshund sculptures in the window and relax over a sandwich on a golden Friday before she moves far, far away.  This is the place X and I dream of wandering together.  This is the place where you go to the used bookstore and come away with four or five gifts and still feel like you could buy fifty more wonderful things (not all of them for others ...).

This is The Place.  One of the best around.


At Christmas - and year round - it smells beautiful.  It feels so good.  The creaking of old floorboards underfoot.  The fascination of craftsmanship.  The loveliness and liberation of:  *local* commerce.  The joy of food, entertainment - fried pickles - expensive boutiques and (far better still) the Goodwill.  Carytown at Christmas.  Excellent way to spend an afternoon.

And plus - my shopping is finished ...

Tidy

I've just written my last checks for 2011, and filled in a couple blanks in my wardrobe, and have a very clear list of things to do tomorrow.  Church first, then the grocery.  Then home, good shoes and jeans, and off to Carytown.  I need to see some men about some horses.  Then wrapping will be the major hurdle remaining.

No housecleaning today, but the place is tidy.  I ought to change the sheets, but laundry probably won't make it to my list.  There isn't much in need of washing right now, and there are enough clean it's not worth doing a whole load for the sheets.

A fresh deadline question about work cropped up in my sore head this morning, but if I've missed it, worry won't help.  With or without that, this week should be quieter than last, and that one ended, at least, if painfully then on a good note.

Tonight, a trim of the bangs and a wardrobe-pull for church, and I will be done.  In the meantime, Clovis has given me a little to do, and no trouble about it.  The dog is wondermous.  Life is quiet.

Upstairs ... Up ... Lit ...

12/14 is the anniversary both of the night my family used to always put up (*and decorate ...) the tree, and the first date Mr. X and I ever had.  Last night would have commemorated 48 Christmases between my parents, and was nine for their daughter.

Last night, I got as far as bringing the tree up, putting it together, and shaping the branches a bit.  This evening, I've gotten it lit.  Something like eight strings of LED lights still doesn't illuminate like the old fashioned big bulbs - but it is a pretty, bright sight.  I've brought dad's ashes in to sit with me.

And now, it's time ... to pull out some of the ornaments we used to have as a family ... to hang the ones given me by friends, neighbors, coworkers, employers ... to choose where the bell will go so it can chime when Siddy brushes by - and hang the glittery Santa ball near a light so it will glimmer.  To breathe.  To change this house.  To think of Christmas.

To be alone.  And think of nights that would have been ... unimaginable.

Gimme Gimme

Year before last, my step father bought me the Asus on which I am working right now.  Last year, mom (hilariously for so many reasons) got me an HP printer.

What is it I want for Christmas?  A kitchen timer.  A copy of "Up".  Maybe a baby gate or even two.  Maybe.  Earrings.  I want to see Siddy enjoy something as much as she loves her doggie blanket, the gift of the YEAR that mom got her last year.  I die of the blanketed, cuddly, cozy cuteness constantly, thanks to that like $8 gift.  Everything my nieces have ever made me is awesome in its own right, PLUS because it was made for me.  One of those giant peppermint sticks like I used to buy for my daddy, and which he dutifully consumed every dadgum year.  Something X drew.  Something his kids drew, with the art supplies I gave them some years back.  Scented candles.  Books for my research, from the Amazon Wish List.  Books NOT for my research - same list.

Extravagant gifts are amazing.  This laptop has changed my life, literally.  It was the tool I used to get my job.  It's where I finished the novel.  It keeps me in touch with those I love.

But extravagance is unfamiliar to me.  Two years running, I have been humbled by it.  This year - I don't think anything like that is in the offing.  And that makes me so happy.

The kitchen timer, though.  I seriously want that.  (Bro, don't forget to remind mom ...)

Truly Good Gifts

A friend of mine, two years ago, gave me one of those ceramic Christmas tree decorations with the little plastic "lights" under which you put a chandelier bulb to illuminate it.  She painted it herself.

Both my grandmothers had trees like this, and this little gift makes me *so* happy, every year.  It's a pretty decoration, but it reaches back to memories of Christmases with family, and does a little something more than simply sitting and shining.  Plus, a truly beloved friend made this just for me; it is the sort of gift that rather literally keeps on giving.

I just put this tree out (the "real" tree waits for the anniversary of my parents' wedding, which is also the anniversary of my first ever date with X - and was always the evening, growing up, my family decorated for Christmas), and am just sitting and looking at its bright little plastic points, and grinning and enjoying the first small surge of that silly thing we call "holiday spirit".

I hadn't planned on bringing any decorations out, but have sort of made a few bits and bobs part of the house cleaning today.  Very pleasant.

X looks at pictures of this place, a place he thinks of at "home" in a way unlike his hated domicile, the city of his residence, and both warmly and wistfully describes it as "cheering".  I've never especially thought of myself as a person of "cheer" as such - and yet, when he says that, I see it as he does.  This home is cozy, and comfortable, and warm in more than one way.  I hope it is welcoming.

This tree is cheering.  It is the talisman of a friendship I like very much, and symbol of a holiday which, spiritually, means more to me every year.

What a great gift.  I will thank her - again - soon.

Heck the Dolls

Just finished mixing a double recipe of bourbon balls ... mmmm. Next stop: two batches of fudge.

Spirited

I entitle this post this way not to indicate my trip to the liquor store, of course, but that has been one part of my social life today. The post office took up most of it, where I made a friend in line and he told stories and amused himself and made the line a nice enough place to have to spend time. Then the grocery, where the darling young bag boy amused this old woman by being tired, with seven hours left to go in his workday. (To underscore my old-ness, may I say, "Oh me, when you can fit seventy-two dollars of groceries in two bags, it seems a bit much.")

Then to underscore my youthfulness, off to the liquor store. One can't make bourbon balls without it, and bourbon balls - that's Christmas! Also a bottle of Stolichnaya, because Stoli is just pleasing to say.

Finishing off at the drugstore for one prescription, now I am done, and have a few hours before my friends come over. Yay nachos!

Everyone seems to be in nice-mode today, and the leftover snow, the grey day, and the relenting of the very-cold-ness is so pleasant. I had an enjoyable time.

And now I shall have an enjoyable aspirin, and a short doze on my Queen's Chair, before getting ready for later. Fortunately, it will be a relatively easy get-ready, as these aren't friends who will note nor care whether I have simonized the basement or detailed the dog. Good friends, that.

Tomorrow, most likely: church, and then baking and fudge. Yum. Loved ones always welcome.

Home Place

For all the almost five months I have worked at my new job, which happens to take me so close to the streets I grew up on, I have had posts cogitating and fermenting slowly in my little brain. "I grew up in a swamp" many of them start, and go on into how long it was before I saw water in the wetlands, or how archetypal this place still is for me.

The thing is, it's all perfectly true, but it's all really a load of dingoes' kidneys as far as my specific actual awareness of it went. My swamp was backfilled and suburbanized, smoothed over with lawns and little explored by me. I knew what lay behind the houses just across the street - and, because of that, I never went beyond those backyards. The most interesting frontier was the drive in backing up to our neighborhood; the legends about sitting on Havenwood, watching forbidden movies without any sound. I think "Saturday Night Fever" played there and some middle school kids saw it, at a distance, through the trees.

The lowlands surrounding us - that was my brother's deal, exploring them, knowing them. I scarcely saw them.

For me, the geography of childhood was all about the Avenue - the longest road in the world, I thought. Still a remarkable expanse, a perfectly-straight stretch of four lanes (then, as now) underscoring my entire understanding of the universe. It was the south end of my experience. Everything sprouted off it, just a hair to its north, for the first few years of my self-aware existence. When I was very young, the trip to the grocery down in that sunken parking lot - now, it seems so close to my old home - was the limit of life itself. When they built a grocery store closer to home, it was New and Exciting - and still manages to carry that feeling somehow.

I am a Virginian. What can you do. What is thirty-five is fresh; innovation.

When I was first learning to understand the world, I built a cosmology as incoherently formed on the line of the Avenue as my physical experience and geogrophy were. If you took that road over its straight hills toward the country - toward the west, as it happens - eventually, you would find Old Time ... and kings and things ... Jesus ... and ancient things. Guys in white wigs and velvet breeches - that's where they lived. West on the Avenue.

Eastward now; was it coincidence - some pediatric intuition - that east led perhaps to the future? I had no concept of the future, but if the past were physically available, as of course it was to someone with no concept of "time", certainly what was yet to come must be as well.

Yet to come I could not have conceived of, beyond - "I want to get big" and knowing life consisted of waiting, that magic thing taking forever, they called growing up.

I still have no conception of yet-to-come. And in some ways, I can still reach for the past in a physical way.

Of course, I started reaching east, when I took Clovis for my text.

But I have always been affectionately fascinated by the cosmology I built for myself before having one intentionally taught to me. I can still see, in my imagination, the way those hills gave over ... to sunlight ... to heat ... past Buckingham, past the end even of the Avenue, into some mythical desert where Bible people lived. Where Jesus was breathing, just little, just like me. How he could be a man too I never cared to comprehend. He was small. In a manger. He was on the same line as I was, and so many at once, too. It didn't all have to coalesce, back then. Trinity was just a word churches used. And the nature of things wasn't something I had to consider.

I still prefer not to, frankly.

But my swamp - that is Christmas. My icy, wide, expansive swamps. Rich in water now; and in ice I can REMEMBER; the black crystalline chips glinting in wide fields of lumpy soil. Beautiful mud. I can see the patterns of the freeze; in those puddles. In the feathers on our car. In the tiny snowflakes my eyes once could see, even naked.

I said I didn't look; wasn't conscious. That doesn't mean my swamps aren't still in my DNA.

I recognize them every day.

I love them. I love the way these places have - miraculously - little changed. I love Virginia, its low places, its country, bordered by suburbs - and, yes, even its suburbes, bordered by country.

Once, long ago, Dr. C., our pastor back then, said, "The color of Christmas is black" and he explained about the night. About the cold. About the uncertainty, and the void into which light shone.

The color of Christmas is the color of a puddle, frozen crystalline into the soil of my swamps.

It's the white of the snow and the grey of those trees, today.

It's the white of the tree we used to decorate our front door; lights buried in chicken wire, glowing in hundreds of tufted tissues, forming a triangle on the front door of a little ranch house in the burbs.

It's the color of my dad's gloves.

It's the black of early nights.


***


I grew up in a swamp.

And the swamp still, somehow, grows with and within me.

Santa's Little Helper

Dad was, for years, in his baggie in a beautiful box upstairs, quiet, but generally far from me physically. When I found him his box, I kept him in the guest room for a while, afraid of knocking the lid off, and frankly not knowing where to put him. More recently, I put him in a niche in my bedroom; a quiet and fragrant spot where he would be unlikely to be disturbed.

Today I brought him down to help me decorate the tree.

I want him down here; where it is warm, where life really lives. Not to be displayed, not to be a trophy. Somewhere safe.

The bookshelves would be appropriate, but are not yet ideal to my mind. There is a drawer he could stay in, unseen, central, safe. Something like that. Ever present. As he is.

For now, he's helping deck the halls. Soon I'll know where he should stay for a while.

Almost a Year

My stepfather gave me the laptop on which I'm tapping away almost a year ago now. He didn't know then (and I never told him nor my mother until after the layoff) how incredibly fortuitously timed a gift it was, as I embarked on the search for a new job, wiser by far than my previous employers as to my fitness for their expectations, and more prescient than myself even in doing something about it. I try not to have bad feelings toward my exes - but that employer ranks low on my list in terms of my sustained respect. Ah well.

Just as important to me, if not perhaps as "practical" by the standards he might hold, or even my mom probably does, is the ability this little machine has given me to (a) finish, and (b) query my novel(s).


The keyboard shows inevitable signs - every keyboard I have used in the past twelve years or so has; since hardware manufacturers began depending on decals for their letter labels, rather than those old, fine, putty-colored keyboards which had embedded contrasting plastic extruded, formed right in, and indelibly present to deliniate the poor N which seems to suffer most from my typing-with-my-nails style - of my typing-with-fingernails method of getting things electronically done.

Otherwise, though, it's as clean and pristine as the day I was gobsmacked to open the laptop box, December 25, 2009. The case is a gorgeous mahogany color, almost - but, elegantly, not *quite* - black. It does bear one single scratch, which I affectionately forgive, because I almost certainly sustained it on my trip to see my family on the West Coast. But it is still new. It is still neato. It is still a pretty whizbang little box to report in to most every day, to waste time on, and to work on.

I'm still a bit eye-blinking about the gift.

Makes Christmas tricky - but mom did give me a great idea. So that is a good thing. I can show him some gratitude.