I opened Facebook this morning to track down a link shared by Escape Into Life for a daily literary meditation exercise for January. I’d been meaning to start this on January 1, so I’m already four days behind, and to be honest that seems at least par if not better than par for these stay-at-home, end-of/start-of-year times. Don’t judge me. I’ve been filled with ennui here at the start of 2021.
Facebook greeted me, as it usually does first thing in the morning, with a memory. I looked; the algorithm-driven memories are probably my favorite facet of Facebook. Today’s was a photo of an apple—a ripe, red apple pendant on a tree—that for the life of me I couldn’t remember taking. Possibly I didn’t, because it was connected to a poem fragment I had quoted with a link:
“Medieval physicists thought gravity was love. They catalogued it attraction.”
I clicked the link to re-read the same poem, but got a different one. It turns out the one I shared last year had (probably) been the featured poem of the day on Autumn Sky Poetry. And the poem of the day for today was another one—also utterly lovely: Why I Have to Sing, by Kitty Jospé.
I read it and then found the one by John Calvin Hughes as well. What a lovely start to the day.
To top it off, I did follow that up by starting on the literary calendar for January, which fed my soul. Now feeling hopeful, I head off to start my day—first by mailing a poem/card to a pen pal (what a lovely, old-fashioned phrase) before turning my attention to the work that pays my bills.
I have so many things I want to write about today! Reading, the end of this seemingly endless year, the deer that visited our front yard overnight while we slept…
Let’s start there, with the deer.
I took this photo thinking it would be a Wordless Wednesday post here on the blog. Then I got up this morning and wrote it into my #frontstooppoetry for the day. So, words, which means not wordless.
My husband and I saw this in the snow when we opened the gate from our side yard to head out to the sidewalk for our first walk of the day yesterday.
A single deer had walked right into the branches of our front-yard lilac tree, and from there we couldn’t tell where it had gone. Right on through? Maybe, but the tracks on the other side were definitely a rabbit’s. Either a rabbit obscured deer tracks, or the deer backed out the way it came. We could see only about three hoof prints, so it’s possible this deer used the sidewalk and veered into our yard only for a quick snack. I’ve seen it happen in the daylight. I know lots of people consider deer pests; to me, they’re graceful and beautiful creatures, with whom I’m generally happy to share a garden. It brightened my day to know I had hosted one in the wee hours.
Reading out the year
Lots of my friends are tallying up the books they’ve read this year and sharing the numbers on social media. Not me. I’ve found reading difficult this year. Oftentimes I’ve found myself too anxious to focus on reading anything longer than a poem, and for a short while leading up to and following Election Day, I couldn’t even read poetry. As a friend said to me recently, my relationship with books has been a troubled one. On the bright side, I’ve actually read more poetry books than usual this year. Among the ones I finished the year with was The Abridged History of Rainfall,by Jay Hopler (McSweeney’s Press), which is absolutely super. One poem in it, Elegy for the Living, is so heartbreakingly beautiful that I was compelled to read it aloud for the Twitterverse:
My unread book pile grew the other day when a friend emailed to ask if he had loaned me a book that he couldn’t find. He had not, but I’m pretty sure I own the book, and I thought, “If I can find it and have already read it, I can just pass it along to him”—an elegant solution to get him the book he wanted and clear one object out of my too-cluttered life, don’t you think?
You can probably tell already that this didn’t work out as planned.
I, too, found that I couldn’t track down this book, which for all I know might have decided to take a forbidden vacation with its sibling of the same name from my friend’s book collection.
But in the process of looking for it, I came across three other books that I had forgotten I had and really do want to read: two murder mysteries and Joe Biden’s book about the death of his son Beau, Promise Me, Dad. So those vaulted directly to the top of my next-read pile. The good news is that I’ve just finished reading one of them. Care to guess which one?
As we’re counting down the days to Inauguration Day 2021, and I’m looking forward to change in the White House—and, I hope, the country—it seemed appropriate to end 2020 with Biden’s memoir. I took the rediscovery of this book as a sign that the time was right to get to know my next president a little better. I’m glad I did. Although, of course, I cried at the end. So be forewarned.
Next up is one of the murder mysteries, a little lightness to start the new year.
My husband’s political advent calendar
Speaking of lightness, the new year, and the countdown to Inauguration Day…over on Escape into Life my husband, renowned cartoonist Phil Maish, has created a post-Christmas advent calendar to count down the last days of the current White House administration. Each day he opens a new door to show a new cartoon. Day 25 will be Inauguration Day.
After the overnight snowstorm that revealed the deer tracks yesterday morning, we had an utterly gorgeous day today, sunny and clear and crisp. The husband and I took a nice walk, to and through a neighborhood park, and I couldn’t resist taking a few photos, including the one at the top of this post. It was a simply perfect winter day; I couldn’t have asked for a better one to end 2020. We’ll be spending our New Year’s Eve the way we like best: watching Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movies and trying to stay awake until midnight. Tomorrow’s lentil soup is already made, and the traditional Swedish rice pudding will follow it up; if I recall correctly, we started 2020 without either of those good-luck staples, and look where that got us.
One of the things I love most about holidays, especially Christmas, is remembering. Every ornament—and we have a lot (a lot)—has a memory attached, a story. Every recipe comes from someone I love. The very activity of decorating reminds me of putting up the tree with my mother, both as a child and as an adult after she suffered a series of strokes and came to live with us. She couldn’t hold and hang ornaments any longer, so I would unwrap each one and bring it to her to see on the couch. We’d remember together each one from my childhood, and I’d tell her the stories of the ones I’ve acquired as an adult.
Here’s the glass police officer we found in the bargain bin in Marshall Field’s basement on State Street after Christmas one year. Here’s the clear plastic globe with angel inside, which hung each year on the mini-tree in the bedroom I shared with my sister. And here’s one of the glitter-swirled silver balls that were among my mother’s first Christmas ornaments and that she disliked for their ancient tattiness by the time I was born, the glitter all turned dark; she relegated those to the inside of the tree, where they might add sparkle but not be seen for the ancient things they were. I hang them in places of honor because of the memory they evoke.
Our tree holds ornaments from my husband’s family, too. Here’s a favorite: a fragile, glass baby head that seems almost macabre on a Christmas tree. (We’ve given it fellowship with other, newer oddities: aliens and skeletons, Krampus, a luchador.) Wait, here’s an equally cherished relic: the faded yellow, lumpen fruit or veg with a face. We don’t even know what it is—melon? squash? clown?—but we love it dearly. There’s the fuzzy old snowman from my husband’s childhood, and scattered around are ornaments we gave to his mother, which made their way back to us after his parents died.
When we excavate the ornament boxes, we find ones we bought as a young couple, ones given to us over the years by friends, and a whole set of ornaments collected and repurposed from special occasions. These started life as table decorations at friends’ weddings, my grandparents’ silver wedding anniversary, and other life celebrations; as Christmas ornaments, they’re mementos that bring back these occasions, along with the loved ones who were there.
And, of course, my husband and I are parents, so there are ornaments our son made as a child. These keep company with two rather ugly baubles that my sister and I made as children, hand-painted and decked out with glitter. Again, the word tatty is apt, but their very tattiness endears them to me.
This, I think, is what makes holidays special: their ability to evoke cherished memories and remind us of loved ones. Perhaps it’s why we reach out to loved ones on holidays also, with phone calls and texts, cards and postcards. Our Christmas cards this year, as in many years, are drawn by my cartoonist husband, so each one we send shares a bit of him with the recipient. I make cookies and pesto and sugared nuts as gifts; he makes a drawing. We give them all as reminders of our love. They connect us with those we love, even in this very distant time.
We’re working our way through the holiday movie (and cartoon) season, and I’m trying this year to combine a mixture of old favorites and movies I’ve never seen. Last night was one of the latter, a 1940 entry called both Beyond Christmas and Beyond Tomorrow (apparently Beyond Tomorrow was the original title).
It was filmed in black and white, but I watched the colorized version, and while I’m not always a fan of colorization I have to say last night I was happy for it. For reasons I’m uncertain of, black and white seemed last night like more work than color. Even with the color, though, I can’t say I came away a big fan of Beyond Christmas/Tomorrow. It’s pretty sappy and overtly religious, neither of which win points from me. I still enjoyed it, though, possibly because of the combined accents of Charles Winninger playing Michael O’Brien and Maria Ouspenskaya as Madame Tanya, or possibly because the winter holidays are the right time for schmaltz.
Not just movies at home; also movies filmed at home
Before putting on the movie, my husband and I were glued to the television screen for a very different kind of showing. Once again for reasons I don’t know, the husband pulled the old (as in oldest—we have more than one) video camera from its bag and found in it a tape labeled Christmas 2000. Once we started looking at it, we couldn’t stop. We relived the opening of Christmas gifts with our young son on Christmas morning, his first test run on his new scooter, frolic in the park, the pre-school Christmas pageant and more. My husband was transported back to the childhood home that has since been demolished to make way for a McMansion. And by the way, who were those two young parents cavorting with my son? Just wow.
The holiday season seems a great time to relive home movies, so full of memories and nostalgia. Or maybe it’s the pandemic that makes this seem right. Whatever the reason, I thoroughly recommend it. If you have old home movies anywhere, pull one out and revisit it. Maybe get on Zoom/FaceTime/Skype with far-flung family and let them see it, too. And while you’re at it, have a latke or Christmas cookie.
I’m not sure how December happened. My last post here seems to have happened at the end of May. Where have I been?
I guess I’ve been exactly where everyone else in the United States was—or should have been: at home. Or, if you prefer, nowhere. Those days have dragged and dragged, and yet here it is December. And what have I to show for it all? So much and so little.
I have a giant raised garden that yielded towering tomato plants, though not quite enough fruits on them, plus lettuce, carrots, chard, kale and kale sprouts, and so much basil that everyone I know will be receiving pesto for the holidays. Just this weekend, I was surprised to find a late crop of lettuce volunteers and delicious carrots, weeks after the first frost. My gardening books tell me that December is a month to slow down, and the garden definitely has done that, but it hasn’t yet gone into hibernation. Some of the carrots became part of a chicken cottage pie on Saturday night, and there are more waiting to be harvested.
I’ve also started teaching myself to bake bread. I started with a fairly simple oat-corn bread, made a sweet Swedish cardamom bread as gifts for local family at Thanksgiving, and just this past weekend baked my first loaves of Swedish Limpa bread. Limpa is part of my customary Christmas, but my Swedish bakery has gone out of business. I’m delighted that I can now begin making my own. I haven’t yet found quite the right spice combination, but I’ll keep experimenting.
I’ve spent a good portion of the last six months ill-focused (anxious) and unable to read books. Poetry has pulled me through for the most part, although for a few days around November 3 even poetry seemed daunting, and I started reading cookbooks instead. If you like to cook and are having trouble focusing on reading, try it sometime. It was a brilliant solution—and started me down the path of bread making.
I’ve also been sending a lot of postcards, and have started making my own cards as a kind of art therapy. Paper crafts seem to relax me (along with cookbook reading). The banner photo up top is from one of my postcards. Here are a few others:
I’m looking forward to making more, possibly some holiday-themed ones during December. I like the creation, and connecting with friends, and supporting the U.S. Post is a bonus.
Between the primary and general elections, I wrote about 1,000 postcards to help get out the vote in Wisconsin and Michigan. That’s an accomplishment that gives me pride. I’ve also been posting a poem a day on a chalkboard on my front porch (and on social media for friends) every day since June, inspired by a friend who was doing the same. I’ve found myself largely unable to write anything long during the pandemic—witness my absence from this blog. Sometimes just a three-line poem has daunted me. But I’ve kept at it, and sometimes I think it’s what’s keeping me sane.
I have managed to have a few poems published since the start of the pandemic, though. Two actually were products of the pandemic, both of which found homes on Headline Poetry & Press. I wrote Pi Day at the very start of the pandemic, when we had just gone into lockdown and the world seemed scary but I still had lots of hope. What I Fear Most came later and has lots more angst. More recently, Back Patio Press featured two very different poems by me: RIP Munchkin, and I Like My Life, but It’s Unexpected.
Writing all this down, I feel more like I’ve accomplished something during this pandemic. Hooray!
Most people I know are having mood swings in this pandemic. On top of feeling isolated and penned in, there’s much to fear—for ourselves, our loved ones, our nations, and for humanity.
Reading poetry can help me when I’m in a funk, as can sunlight and the outdoors. I don’t think I can write my way out of a funk, but sometimes I’m able to put pen to page despite low spirits. There’s a chicken-egg conundrum to this; I’m not clear what comes first—whether writing helps me get away from the gloom, or I’m already on my way out and that allows me to give voice to my feelings. But they do often seem to go hand in hand.
Today, a poem I wrote near the darkest point of my recent funk—during a two- to three-day period starting on Holy Thursday of Easter week—made its way into the wide universe. “What I Fear Most” is published now on Headline Poetry and Press, and the editor who accepted it made my day by telling me it had struck home personally with them, voicing what they considered a common experience.
It’s gratifying and comforting to know that something positive can come from sadness. I’d rather not have gone through (or put my husband through) that 1 1/2-week funk. But having done so, I’m glad to think I might help someone else muddle through as well.
I intended this blog to serve as something of a social distancing diary when I started writing daily posts with the institution of shelter-in-place orders. Clearly that plan has crumbled, given the nearly two-week gap. But sometimes it’s hard to write, and hard to share. I’m forgiving myself.
Photos of the day
I used most of yesterday’s good photos in yesterday’s blog post. Here are a couple taken while the sun was out one day during my funk. Dogs on the deck—a recipe for contentedness.
