The adults on my side of the family are in a quandary about Christmas gifts. We don’t see each other very often since I am the only one not on the east coast. Some of us love the spirit of the thing, and love the connection of everyone giving something to everyone. Some are concerned about the cost. Some of us live carefully edited lives, either by choice or by circumstance (i.e., a tiny NY apartment). Some of us don’t edit, and therefore have too much stuff.
What to do? If any of you have come upon a nice solution beyond simply exchanging names, please offer your advice. Lest you think we are keeping this to the last minute, we are.
But we’ve been debating since last year.
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Today’s gratuitous dog photo:
He has an itchy nose.
By the way, it can be complicated to comment or like a post here. But if you sign up for WordPress and/or get their app, it is much simpler. Just a thought.
Dad’s upstairs reading for an important interview while I read a novel and snuggle with dogs. By midnight Auggie will be squashed up against me as close as he can be. This is new. He was traumatized by the hospital kennels. Nothing in his life before prepared him for being separated from us.
My niece and her husband—both executives at a big company—run a paperless home. They don’t write notes on paper; they receive and pay their bills electronically, and, well, I don’t know what else, because I cannot imagine living that way.
This is not a criticism. It is a confession.
My husband and I are writers. But while we both use computers most of the time, we do regularly make handwritten notes. When I need to download information for myself, I find that the simple writing of lists in a notebook is somehow refreshing to my mind. My notebook sits next to me now as I write, and on my bedside table at night. I carry it with me into the grocery store and prop it up on the seat of the cart. It often sits on the passenger seat in my car. It travels with me, so I can write on the plane when electronics are prohibited. I will use my phone to make notes if I have to, but I always prefer paper.
My preference for paper extends to a preference for a particular notebook, which seems no longer to exist anywhere in the world, but of which I have an extensive backstock. Occasionally in an idle moment I still search for them, but my hope is gone.
I like pens, too, and I am particular about them. This is not to say that I prefer anything expensive or fancy. The office cheapo store has perfectly fine pens. But they have to feel right in my hand, and they have to move across the paper in a certain way. When I had a day job and traveled often, there was a certain luxury hotel in Washington D.C. whose conference room pens I absolutely coveted. I still have two, and try to spare them for special occasions. The truth is, I love office supplies of every kind, really. Since childhood I have enjoyed a leisurely meander through the aisles of paper, pens, and whatnots. I have always been drawn to those bound accounting books, even though I have an absolute horror of accounting. I don’t buy them, but I eye them speculatively. I am also drawn to boxes of crayons.
But the thing is, we are drowning in paper. Most of it comes in the mail, and it is of no interest whatsoever. That’s easy to get rid of. But aside from the advertising stuff or the solicitations for donations, much of it—despite its unimportance—is unsafe to throw away. It has account numbers, or personal information that you really don’t want floating around. I used to have a shredder, but after a few iterations the shredders went the way of my robot cleaners: Fun while they’re working, but that’s not for long. And so the paper sits around on my kitchen counter, and later slithers out of the bonfire burn bag in the closet and escapes under the door, making a mess in the back hall. You know why I can’t wait for snow? So I can have a big bonfire and get rid of it all.
You will have to believe me that a magnificent buck was outside my window this morning. I looked away for a moment, and when I looked back he had melted into the camouflage of leaves and bark, still, invisibly, there.
I have come to believe that the invisible things are often the most important. These are the things we feel intensely and sense around us: maybe passion, maybe tension, maybe danger, maybe the proud buck in the trees.
Advent is an invisible thing, too, covered in mystery and in the deepening darkness of the earth. I don’t think it’s contradictory, or even surprising, that in this time when the earth stands sleeping we should await, with hope, the promise of light and new life. Because whether you accept the theology or not, those things are coming, literally and visibly.
But it is the invisible that beckons, that clutches the heart and draws us deeper.
And as winter comes, that silent moving of the universe is the darkest, deepest mystery of all. What is eternal? Can some part of us be eternal, too? What is this thing that I am, that wakes, and dreams, and sees the stars, and speaks to the souls of the trees? Why am I here, this small thing, trembling at my mortality while soaring out to meet the edge of sky?
The human soul has seasons, and the earth, wheeling through darkness and light, prepares us for them.
We live in the country. So, when the temperatures dipped into the teens this week, of course, that brought an influx of mice.
Mice are a houseowner’s horror. They are destructive, filthy, and carry disease. But—and I know how this sounds—I cannot bring myself to kill them. I see their big black eyes, and their tiny feet, and they are so frightened and vulnerable. They are like very tiny puppies.
By the way, did you know that mice sing to one another?
So I buy humane traps, bait them with the dogs’ freeze-dried liver treats, and early each morning load my catch into the car and drive out to a cornfield a little more than three miles away. It must be three miles, because, apparently, mice can find their way back over any smaller distance.
Yesterday I caught three. My 13 year old grandson willingly accompanies me because we stop for a doughnut afterward, and he then gets a ride to school. It’s a bit of an adventure.
Last night I set three regular traps, and something new: a bucket trap, with a little ramp and a trap door. I filled the bucket with dried leaves for a soft landing, and smeared the top with peanut butter with dog treats stuck into it. Although I can’t be sure whether anyone is in there this morning, there is a hole in the center of the leaves which suggests there might be. I’ll know when we get to the cornfield. When I dump out the bucket I will be sorry to lose the cache I’ve saved of dry leaves for soft mouse landings, but it can’t be helped.
I don’t know whether the farmer has noticed a car stopping by his field in the early mornings, but it’s a nice field, with corn stubble and lots of kernels scattered in a mouse-friendly way. I have some minor concerns about whether the mice are too cold, but I am doing my part. They are on their own now.
A friend and I went to a local greenhouse to make Christmas decorations with greenery and red trimmings in big outdoor pots. It was a lot of fun, and felt like the beginning of something both old and newly sweet. In the spring and summer, the seven greenhouses overflow with plants and flowers, but now everything smells like balsam and spices, and there are poinsettias, and garland, and wreaths, and hanging balls made with evergreens and sparkly things. It struck me sharply how much we need the presence of green things amid the darkness and cold of winter.
The family who own the nursery are fifth generation in the business, and the current manager told us of her great-grandfather who had been buried alive in World War I, and survived in an air pocket, eating the shoelaces of a dead comrade. He came home to his wife who had been told he was dead. Together, they began nurturing growing things, which seems both beautiful and significant.
In my family we have keepsakes: furniture, Persian rugs, silver, an ancient Bible, paintings and photos. And we have common threads, too: a love of learning, of literature and art, a passion for freedom and an expectation of basic decency. But I think about what it must be like to be upholding the family’s work in such a particular way, with all the significance and restrictions, resentments and pride that must come into the mix. All the generations–male and female–were represented at the nursery; they all seemed skilled and cheerful: laughing while disagreeing about the right way to place the boughs in a planter, teasing one another, singing along with the corny Christmas music, putting floral stakes and tape on pine cones and big shiny ornaments, and helping us create the right shape for our arrangements. They worked well together.
As we were leaving, we stopped to look at this old stone building next to the gravel parking lot. It was a poignant reminder of a family’s history.
Writing bad poetry is a pastime shared with youth and age. I will spare you mine, but intense emotion always draws it out of me, and I hide it as if it were an addiction to drink or pornography. I am so grateful that Auggie is home. And he is back. This is not redundant.
His stitches are out; the cone is off; his obsession with balls is unabated; he is romping nearly at full speed, and he seems to have a new appreciation for home, and bed, and snuggles. He is insatiably hungry; all I do is feed him. I don’t even need to tempt him. He is healing and his body needs to rebuild.
We almost lost him more than once, and we are so grateful to have him back, whole in every meaningful sense of the word, and sound. But he seems to have muted just the smallest bit, noticeable only to those who know him, and suddenly he is no longer young and immortal, but middle-aged and vulnerable like the rest of us.
We took him in for a check-up and sat studying the veterinary wall chart on dog sizes and lifespans. At six, Auggie is now well into middle age, and his life may be more than half over. His family have lived to twelve and fourteen. While that makes me vulnerable to hope, those ages are not common for big dogs, and Auggie is a lean 112 pounds. Mortality lingers in the background for all of us, but dogs have those first sparkling years, and then the slow sadness creeps in too quickly.
I used to scoff at people who said they couldn’t endure the pain of losing another dog. Now, I’m starting to get it.
But meanwhile, here they both are: vibrant, restless, and ready to run. I’d better go.
A few months ago a new book came into the world without much notice or fanfare. That’s on me. It came during a month-long houseful of family, amidst all the cheerful jumble and chaos that entails, and also as the final process of signing and shipping and accounting from the previous book was wrapping up. This wasn’t a first book, or a last book; it wasn’t even an author’s first kind of book. And so, like so many middle children, it has had to make its way along with not much help or notice. But now, as I am settling into the coming winter, I look back with clarity at the season past, and there it is: alone, abandoned, but not un-loved.
It is, like my last book of essays, Reflections on a Life in Exile, a very personal book, written mostly amid the ennui of the pandemic. Some of it is funny, some is melancholy, some of it may be slightly mad–a bit like living through the pandemic itself. In whatever mood, I hope you find it companionable.
You can order it from your favorite bookseller ( some of mine are here, here, here, and here ) from Barnes & Noble; from Target; or from the guys in Seattle. Or you can visit your local library and ask them to add it to their shelves.
In any case, I hope you’ll look for it, and if you like it, you’ll leave nice reviews in various places. And if you crave to be the first, no one seems to have ever purchased it from Target.
And, once again, if you still occupy the world formerly known as Twitter, please share with my tag @audacityofgoats.
J.F. Riordan 