December 24.21: Coping

My world is little

as is my tree,

yet there’s a world

inside of me.

The thing to do,

I cannot doubt,

is turn my person

inside-out,

and hang that world

with due aplomb

upon this little

tannenbaum,

and then to watch

the tree grow tall

— not so little

after all.

The world within

is mighty crowd,

kaleidoscopic,

teeming, loud,

overlapping place

and year,

mix of music,

laugh and tear.

Mishmash? Yes.

But life is that:

it isn’t neat

and folded flat.

The world inside,

the story of me,

sparkles on

my Christmas tree.

 

Whatever your traditions, your rituals, dear reader,

may they bring comfort this year,

and may they keep the story of you.

 

December 23.20: Coping

Little fingers

leave a trail

made of paper

bent and frail;

older hands preserve

the mystery

of taped and crayoned

family history.

 

 

December 18.20: Coping

Live trees with their fragrant cachet

aren’t meant for a feline sashay,

but when Willis the dog

gets the cat all agog

the tree can’t get out of the way.

 

 

Thanks to photographer Eugenia Roche.

Disconnections: December 25.18

 

Do you remember, dear reader, two Christmases ago when my big beautiful tree fell flat on its face, ornaments and all? And we (my son) had to wrestle it across the room and tie it to the bannister with twine to keep it upright? Here it is again. More or less. Well, definitely less. This is the top part.

As you know, this has been the year of The Downsize. The tree is a little shorter, and so am I. We hold a million memories anyway.

Our tinsel might be tarnished,

our limbs a bit askew

but we wish a merry Christmas

and peaceful heart to you!

 

Maureen

 

 

Connections: July 24.17

Maybe you remember

my Christmas tree mishap

when it toppled over

and flattened carpet nap.

Family ingenuity

perhaps aesthetics-free

brought it back to standing

with pragmaticality.

And now my poor tomato

bowed by wind and rain

lists like my old tree

risking break and sprain.

So whether Yule tradition

or heavy-laden vine

when the question comes from listing

the answer comes from twine.

 

 

 

 

Connections

Connections: December 21.16

You may recall, dear reader,

when last you saw my tree

it was prostrate on the floor

Christmas gang agley.

The ruins have been salvaged

my firstborn saved the day

the tree is standing upright

with minimal crack and fray.

A festive touch, the Christmas twine

functional, albeit

a rarely-used adornment

please pretend that you don’t see it.

Connections

Connections: December 13.16

Ah, the poor infirm!

What a way to start the day

my Christmas tree

splattered

fainted dead away.

Connections

Connections: December 10.16

I will agree

quite amiably

that there can be

discrepancy

between what I see

and reality.

Thus my quandary

re verticality:

is it the tree,

or is it me?

Connections

Vagaries in Gestation: December 6.16

Thus does the middle-aged dad (aka, my firstborn) demonstrate to his eleven-year-old apprentice (who is not easily impressed) how the core of the fake Christmas tree can be fake-played as a guitar.

Christmas is obviously underway. This tree was bought by my parents long ago and has seen over thirty Christmases. It always leans, but it wears its generations of ornaments proudly.

Amid a torrent of abusively dumb eleven-year-old-boy jokes, the tree went up, twisted limb by twisted limb. My grandson sipped apple cider from a plastic Christmas cup dating to his dad’s boyhood. Grit from the garage made its annual path through the kitchen. Tradition reigned.

Then came the phone call. My daughter-in-law and granddaughter had been in an accident. Everyone reading this blog knows that life can change in a blink, so I’m not here to tell you what you already know. My daughter-in-law and granddaughter are shaken but all right, and that is what matters.

But so suddenly did family goofiness change to intense family anxiety that the suddenness got to me. It was whiplash of a sort. There are certainly times in life when we feel as though we are on the end of the crack-the-whip line, and right now I’m that kid that goes caroming off in zig-zag trajectory, trying not to end up flattened on the blacktop. I think it was easier back when the Christmas tree was new.

 

 

 

Vagaries in Gestation

 

 

A place called Me

I’ve had a most interesting exchange with a writing mate. I asked her about home. She asked me back. Home has been on my mind recently, so I’d been thinking about it but I hadn’t put anything into words. You know: words. Those bothersome markers that make a thought visible, graspable, kickable. But they are also the stepping stones. When I lay down the words, I lay a path.

And so it was this morning that I wrote my thoughts on home and began to put down the path.

I grew up in a home. It was authoritarian, cramped, explosive, stable. Sometimes hilarious. My parents had deep roots in the area and those attached to me. So I knew home then.

But not so much in my adulthood. Those things that were the nature and aspect of home for me — marriage, faith, family, house — dissolved, and so I was required to re-define home. Or to admit I would never have it again.

Do externals define home? Yes. The smell inside the old breakfront, the lopsided Christmas tree, the wooded Indiana backways, stories that begin “When I was growing up” — the seeing, hearing, touching, smelling of geographical, architectural, hand-me-down place.

But what about the internal place, where the senses work only in memory? Isn’t that my essential home, and if I don’t know home there, will I know it any place else? And if I do know home there, or, rather, here, inside me, do I need it any place else?

I am 72. These questions have might for me. The path I write will not be straight, cannot be long.