pull up a chair

been burning lots of late-night kilowatts ’round here.

then, when the lights do go out, when the last ooze of lamplight is snuffed from the crack under the bedroom door, is snuffed from the last three steps up to where i try to sleep, i lay awake in the dark, worrying.

oh, don’t pity me, that’s not why i mention it. it’s a mama’s job, after all.

it’s just that what with all the late-night whisperings ’round here these past many days, well, i’ve been thinking an awful lot about this mama business. how it never quite eases. doesn’t let up.

seems the worries get bigger and deeper. what’s at stake matters more.

i remember back to the early days when the only thing keeping me up was the crying that some nights wouldn’t stop. the soft little lips, hungry lips, that nursed till the wee, wee hours.

and then how it was the run-away train, the one that charged through the darkness, came out from the corner, and in through the skylight. scared the wits, yes it did, out of my no-longer-little one, back when he was a boy.

and then, not so long after that, it was rough-and-tumble sorts of ordeals that, when you are the mother of a child with a tender heart, come only with tears. lots of tears.

these days the worries at my house come, at once, in two sets of sizes.

i go from one bedroom where the stories at bedtime are all about the boys who are teasing, singing lyrics ’bout boyfriends and girlfriends. where the whole class laughed along. and the substitute teacher did nothing. and the boy telling the story tells how he was near tears, but no one there noticed. and now, hours and hours after it all, he wants me to know. wants me to come to his rescue.

and i will.

because that’s what mamas do.

and, anyway, all week, he’s been watching me run through the house with my cape. the super-ma cape.

which, when you’re a grownup you know is a cloak of futility, though it looks supercharged, maybe, to a boy who’s gulping back tears. who doesn’t yet know: there’s only so much a mama can do.

though she can try. oh, she can try.

all week, i’ve been putting out fires. and lighting a few. trying to make sure, as best as i could, that a whole school was safe. and a boy i don’t even know. and a boy i call my own. a boy i love with all of my might.

what happened is, just like i said, worries come in all sizes. and last week, a big one arrived. the boy i love, the taller one, walked in the door and told me quite plainly that someone at school didn’t much like him. but that wasn’t all. he’d started a group, a hate group, he called it.

now i don’t know about you, but those there are words that explode in your head. you see great bursts of light. hear popping sounds. feel your arms, your hands start to shake.

you call the school. you tell them, in quite certain terms, that you are worried. and rather afraid.

you find out that, while once upon a time kids sat in classrooms, passed notes back and forth, nowadays they keep tabs on you, without even knowing you, from what you put on your internet page. they don’t like your politics, or your pictures, don’t like how you think? kaboom. they start up a hate group.

i’ve got a bit of a grasp on this now, after all of these days. but i tell you for a night or two there, i was worried as hell. couldn’t stop thinking, seeing scenes in my head. i’d been told a few facts, connected some dots. thought of columbine first. and then laurie dann, the mad gunwoman who burst in a school, killed a child and finally herself. right here on this very shore, north shore. leafy shore. shore that’s all dappled, shadow and light.

as if to hit me hard over the head, in case i’d not gulped the stunning fast-forward from baby-sized worries to ones that alarm every cell in your body, it so happened that the day all this unfolded was the day whole boxes of baby things were due to arrive, boxes from my house to far off in maine. where a baby is coming, where all will be pure, as it should be. as it was.

i couldn’t help thinking all that long day, just how quickly it changes. how one day you are worrying about diapers and colicky tummies, and then, in a blink, you are moving along, now thinking of kids whose scars you barely can fathom, how this is a world, frankly, that too often deals in what i’d call unfettered depravity. the vilest of words and of pictures.

i have a friend whose 7th-grade daughter got a note from a boy. he wanted to rape her, he wrote. this is the language.

just a month or two later, my firstborn comes home. tells me a story, tells me the words that were used. hate group and murder, the ones that alarmed me–and the school–most disturbingly deeply.

some nights when the dark settles in, i tiptoe from door to door of the bedrooms. i put my ear to the frame. i hear the sheets rustling, the pencil marks scratching.

it’s all i can do, really, to keep my two children safe. to stand there and listen and love them and pray.

some nights i wish i could lock all the doors, and keep out the bad guys. they come in all sizes, big ones and little ones.

they shake this house from rafter to rafter.

shake me too.

but i am their mama, so i tie on my cape and i lay there awake. i’ll not let a bad guy shatter the dreams of my children. so i’ll lay there all night, keeping watch on their doors, keeping worries and bad guys and run-away trains far, far away.

so help me, dear God.

are you, too, shocked by the stories our children bring home? are you afraid of so much that comes at them so soon? how in the world can all of us turn back this trash? i am taking a long hard look at what floods the lives of our children, what comes in on the internet, the language, the pictures. i’m lucky, perhaps, i write for a newspaper where i can dig for the truth and lay it out there for readers, in hopes that much comes out from the shadows, and we as grownups can begin to grasp what’s unfolding right under our noses. and what too often we don’t know, till the damage is done. time to wake up, i think. before too many sleepless nights pass us by.

i waited, of course, till a day so bitterly cold i needed an arctic parka to climb into the attic. but it was time, so i climbed.

the baby is coming.

the baby i’ve believed in all of these years. the baby i loved long before she was even two cells or a clump of cells, or a wee beating heart. i loved her back when she was simply an idea, a wisp of a dream ballooned into hope.

all these years, despite the groans of the attic floorboards, as they took on more and more weight from all of the boxes i stubbornly clung to, despite the urgings from my mama to give it away, to not hold on to things i no longer need.

i ignored the groans and the whispers. defiant, i was. believer, i am.

i knew–i hoped–some day that baby would come.

and now she’s two months away.

and so it was time, time to poke through the attic, to search through and find the box after box that held every fine thing you’d need for the start of a life with a baby.

there were diapers and burp cloths and wee hooded bath towels. wash cloths and socks the size of a match box. onesies and undershirts that tie with a ribbon.

there were blankets all soft and flannel and easter-egg colors, and ones that were woven and white and thick for a night that is chilly.

there was the one blanket, a patchwork of swatches, i wrapped both of my boys in, for the long drive home, three miles at best, from the place where they’re born to the place where you’re left all alone to figure out babies.

there were hats that had never been worn, and booties too. and the chair, checked and italian, that was the one place, besides my chest, where they’d sleep.

there were jammies so little they still make my knees go weak. and box after box, filled with fabric and stitches that all told a story.

took a long time, the corralling of baby things, the collecting of dreams. nearly each one i held and remembered. remembered the hot summer day, or the cold winter morn, when a round little bottom i slipped in those pants, or the bald wispy head i snapped into that white droopy hat.

wasn’t long, though, before i’d slipped into some sort of a trance, an auntie trance i suppose. a meditative prayer and a poem, a tai chi of memory and muscles, as i sifted through boxes and dreams, got ready to ship the whole load from my house to the one where she’s coming before the robins return.

i would have if i could have, slipped my whole self in those boxes, as i climbed down from the attic and dove into the laundering, the rinsing, the starting out fresh. the purification, a ritual unnecessary but wholly essential.

i bought a new box of dreft, just for the baby. hadn’t had reason to use it in quite a long time. and the scent from the box, the powdery softness of clean-baby pureness, well it filled up the washer, and all of the dimly-lit basement besides.

when it came time to fold and to pack, i remembered one final time, maybe. some of these things, i’ll not hold again, chances are.

each one of them, i’d known a very long time, since the days when my own dreams were born. even before.

and, at long last, there i was in the laundry room, letting go of my baby things.

but because i was packing for baby–we call her baby L, L is for light, among other ideas–i didn’t feel a pinch in my heart, well, not much of one anyway.

filled five boxes by the end of that fine afternoon.

each box i filled as if a holy chalice. lined the bottom with soft tissue paper. tucked baby soaps and powders and lotions, all in wee little bottles and paper-wrapped bars, into the stacks and the layers, so each box would, by the end of the trip, be a trans-continental sachet.

by the time it gets up to maine, why, it’ll smell just like a nursery should smell. the barest whiff of baby and sunshine, with a smidge of the honey of beehives.

on top of each box, as if a christening, i sprinkled a handful of dried peony petals, the palest of pink and the deepest of fuchsia, ones i’d saved from my garden back in july, when i couldn’t bear to let the blooms go straight to the compost heap.

and then, whispering blessings, i taped and addressed each box. marked one or two with very big hearts. finally hauled every one off to the shipping place.

oh, if i could have, i would have climbed right into one of those boxes, been there on the other end to keep watch from a corner.

see, i won’t be there every day for this sweet blessed baby. i won’t get to know which finger it is she most likes to suck on. or just how she stretches her arms. or pokes her bottom into the air when she sleeps. i won’t hear her coo, or hiccup. won’t watch her take in her very first butterfly or snowflake or daisy. won’t see her wrap her thumb ‘round my brother’s.

it aches me to think i’ll be only her faraway auntie. for she is, in so many ways, the answer to so many dreams. a bundle of so many chapters of love.

but i will, in my own folded-up way, get to be there, tucked on the shelves of the changing table, and slid on the shelves of the cabinet my brother is building from ash and from cherry.

i will be there as her mama slips on that white floppy hat, or slings on the backpack the color of glow-in-the-dark pumpkins. i will be there in the burp cloths, and maybe just maybe when she’s rubbed dry from the bath.

i saved all those treasures for all of those years. because i knew some day, i believed, there’d be a baby.

and i didn’t want to not be there at every burp and cry in the night. couldn’t bear to be merely the faraway auntie.

that little girl has my heart. i packed it up in one of the boxes. it’ll arrive with a thud on the doorstep any day now.

once we were a people who all hunkered down in the very same village, raised our children together, a dream my brother and i once shared, long long ago. now, we live whole land masses away. so we sift through our lives and find threads to connect us. do you have babies growing up far far away from your every day? how do you dwell in their midst?

don’t have a cow. or even a henhouse.

darn it.

don’t have a half acre even.

i can hardly call this my farm.

ah, but that doesn’t stop me.

you should see me, these soft snowy mornings. i climb into my boots, my big yellow rubber ones, before i climb into my clothes (oops. hold that image there. erase what you might see in your head, please, the skinny old legs, naked, goose-bumped, slid into floppy ol’ boots as bright as bananas. quake not, friends, i do wear my jammies outside).

back to the boots and where i go with them.

i make the rounds is where i go, make my way, clomp-clomp-and-more-clomp, through the drifts and the mounds as high as my shins.

i make like a farmhand out tending her flocks.

which, actually, is just what i’m doing. just minus the farm is all.

my flocks, though, aren’t peacocks or hens, not araucanas, those blue-laying beauties. my flocks are not geese or ducks. not even a rhode island red, though i long for one, and plot ways to wriggle ’round the village code.

my flocks are winged, all right. and feathered as well.

my flocks live up in my trees. or under the eaves of my roof.

my flocks come in red and in blue and in plain common brown. they line up like ellipses there on the wires that run into my house, from out in the alley. they chirp from on high, from on places i can’t seem to find, though i stand and i look and i look, till the chilly-cold tears run down my chilly-cold cheeks.

my morning rounds unfold thusly, early each and every cold winter’s day:

once the galoshes are on, and the snowcoat and mittens, i reach for my old coffee can and fill it to spilling from the bin i keep near the door.

as i step into the cold, feel the whoosh of the air down my lungs, i open my heart, call out to my friends, “g’morning everyone!”

i yell it loud and sweet enough to make the neighbors think i must have minions sleeping in my bushes, little people who curl up under the branches, wrap up in blankets, come out for morning gruel when i holler.

i shlop (that’s the sound the yellow boots make sucking through the snow) from trough to trough. shake out the snow from overnight. dump in the seed. look up, heavenward, to catch whoever’s watching.

quite often i find mama cardinal looking down on me. i suppose she’s checking out the menu, deciding if she’ll fly in the youngins for their breakfast.

sometimes, and this makes me quite proud, i find a brave little feathered one, one who doesn’t bother flitting at the sight of me.

i like to think they’ve come to know me, not mind me so much. they know that i’m the kook, the one in yellow boots, who comes bearing succulent sunflower and shelled peanuts and cracked corn. who sometimes comes with cranberries. or a fat chunk of suet from the butcher shop.

when i’m done with all the dumping, and the smearing of the peanut-butter paste that never fails to draw the downy woodpecker, i shlop back into the house to begin my water rounds.

i fill an old gallon jug with fresh warm drink from my kitchen sink (i only wish i had a well and i could pump it, creak by squeaky creak). i haul that sloshing load back to where my birdies bathe and sip and fluff their wings.

then, if it’s not too, too cold, i crouch and make like i’m a yellow-rooted bush. i stay still as i can stay. and i make not a sound, ‘cept for the fluttering of eyelids and a gulp or two, when the birds come down, when my flocks return, and i watch them partake of the communion i’ve put out for them.

it is a holy thing to tend the flocks.

doesn’t matter much if it’s a flock that’s winged or hooved, or wearing shoes, for that matter. a flock that bays, or clucks. or even talks behind your back.

it’s why we’re here, to tend the ones around us, most of all.

and these feathered ones bring me mighty close to God, is all i know.

i hear the whoosh of their gentle wings as they come in for what i offer them. i watch the papa bird feed the mama, drop seed one-by-one down her wide-open beak.

i watch the snows tumble down, and all my flocks huddle on the branches at the dawn. they wait for me, because they know i come.

that’s called faith, i do believe.

and it’s a two-way equation.

they believe i’m on my way, me and my coffee cans of sustenance, just as soon as the nightfall lifts and the morning light creeps in again.

and i believe, as i fill the troughs and, every morning, my very heart, that as i tend my flock, my sense of oneness with the gentle world, the world of ever-turning tide and clock and slant of sun, draws me and them, together, to a holy place called peace just beyond my windowsill.

do you have a daily ritual, a peace-filled round, that roots you, makes you feel like you belong, have purpose, on this holy blessed planet?

and speaking of purpose on the planet, i must note that any day now our beloved slj will be a bride, and walk down the aisle into the arms of her true love. it seems right for all of us who’ve been pulling up to this table for quite a while now to send much much love to the ever-wise, ever-heartful slj.
and while we’re at it, please shout or whisper a prayer for blessed jcv whose sister-in-law is fighting what might be her last battle with a stubborn leukemia.
and finally, oh, yeesh, dear susan is in the hospital as i type, an emergency surgery on saturday night.
seems there’s need for many prayers here.
and please don’t forget hh who just last week buried her sister-in-law, a champion for the poor of chicago’s rogers park.
anyone else?
xoxox, the chair lady

oh, i know christmas is all but tucked away. at our house, sadly, the tree’s outside now. its branches, harbor for the birds.

the ornaments, once again, are bedded down in tissue papers, some as old as lord knows when. the box, though, the one in which the christmas fixings doze till december comes again, it hasn’t made it to the attic. waits now on the upstairs landing, for the day when finally we’ll tire of stepping ‘round its torn, unruly flaps, the cardboard ones marked “merry christmas. lites, ribbons, ornaments & mistletoe.”

but there’s one last bit of christmas i cannot put away.

it’s sitting here beside me. crumpled. splattered with a spot or two of cocoa.

looking more or less like afterthought. a page ripped from someone’s long-lost journal.

which, actually, was quite the point.

it begins, “dear theodore,” and there’s a story to be told. so settle in, while i spin one last yuletide yarn.

twas the night before christmas, really it was, when for the first time ever i invited in my manchild-now-verging-on-man-of-6-foot-1 to the santa stirrings.

told him, with a drumroll in the offing, that what i was about to utter was truly a passage to be marked.

while his papa snoozed upstairs, as he nearly always does on any night when snows are blowing, or the day goes dark (meaning it’s a regular habit, this going to bed well before i click off the lights and trod the stairs), the boy who would be man was asked to take on his papa’s long-held, behind-closed-doors, night-before-christmas task.

might he, i wondered, dropping low my whisper, take some nibbles from the cookie plate, gnaw off a bite of carrot, make like the fat ol’ elf and all his flying herd had whirled right through the family room?

and so the man-boy had at it. puffed his chest in the way a papa would (at least on some old black-and-white ‘50s flick). the glint in his grey-green eyes went to super-glint.

he headed straight for the plate. nibbled. gnawed.

then went well beyond the dental portion of the ruse. why, he made like no santa i had ever known.

he sprinkled crumbs in a path of certitude. left a chunk of cookie on the hearth. and a peel of clementine besides. as if the old elf was rather sloppy, multi-tasking, scarfing, climbing up the chimney.

it didn’t stop there.

next i knew, he was yanking wide the glass-paned door, letting in the bitter cold.

i looked askance, in that way that mothers do, seemed to wonder without words, what in the world was that young elf up to?

he replied, as if he’d heard the very thought: “tossing out the carrot bits as if the reindeer dropped them. you know, flying off the roof, they leave a trail behind.”

still more: “hey, mom, do you have a piece of paper?” he inquired.

whatever for, i asked, ripping one from off my shelf.

“santa’s writing back,” he said, as if he did so every night, then launched into his loopiest, most arctic cursive, apparently.

“dear theodore,” he began, before going on to thank him for the sweetened fuel, the cookies, the orange, for being “quite the thoughtful young lad.”

before signing it, “regards, s. claus, giftgiver extraordinaire,” he even penned a pair of hoof prints from the carrot-dropping reindeer.

apologized for their messy habits. even excused himself for not polishing off the cookie plate, “mrs. claus made me a hearty dinner, you see.”

the words though were only the start.

he began to crumple. then asked for a match to singe the edges. i suddenly wondered how far he’d take it, might we soon be deconstructing santa’s sleigh? leave runner bits littered on the lawn?

grinch, alas, i knew i had to be.

so at the match i drew the line. shook my head, no way, young elf. this is not a pirate’s treasure map, nor a cowboy ransom note.

and besides, i added, i can see it now: the smoke alarm will go berserk, wake the house, and upstairs sleepers will clamber down the steps and find us, you and me, standing here, making like incendiary santas.

and thus, thwarted before the night turned smoky, the would-be man merely laid the letter down amid the cookie crumbs. and i shooshed him from the room.

twas time for doings he wasn’t yet old enough to witness, never would be, i told him as i shoved him up the stairs, needing just a moment to myself as i myself turned into santa dearest and strewed the few fine things we’d gathered for this humble christmas.

he’d have to wait till dawn, like his baby brother did, to see what spilled from st. nick’s pack.

i must admit, i nearly missed the treasure that the would-be elf laid out for all to see. hadn’t even seen it in the making, when i was lone witness to his work of heart.

next morning, in the hustle of the post-dawn pouncing, santa’s letter wasn’t found till shortly after the basketball jersey was permanently affixed (a week later, the little one hadn’t yanked it off his skinny little chest), and the hovering helicopter ripped from its see-through box.

but when the little one discovered the crumpled, hand-penned page, there beside the cookie plate, he held it, rapt. then turned and simply said, “santa wrote me back.”

i could have sworn the child glowed.

i saw of course that he read it very, very closely. i saw how he returned again and again that christmas morn, to read it once or twice or thrice. maybe just to hold it in his fingers, to rub his skin against the very spot where santa’s hands had held it firm.

i couldn’t quite believe he hadn’t seen right through it. i’d been so sure it was boldly overdone. a teenage folly that couldn’t be pulled off.

oh, was i the fool. i nearly missed the bliss of unstained innocence.

it wasn’t till the next day that it all came tumbling clear, that i realized just how much his big brother’s fussing to make it all just so had really truly mattered.

we were out, the little one and i, browsing through an after-christmas sale, and a clerk behind the counter leaned in and asked him if santa had been good, and in that way that assumes young children always get a haul, she asked what he liked best.

and with his little-boy eyes he looked up and said quite certainly: “the letter from santa.”

and right then and there i felt a tear spill down, from out of nowhere, i thought at first. but really, from out of somewhere. from that place inside my heart, that place that leaps before it ever looks.

it was, more than any other bit of christmas, the crumpled letter in the curly cursive his brother strained to make so santa-like.

it was the one thing no one bought, or paid for.

it was the finest unwrapped anything. maybe ever.

it was, he’ll some day know, a big brother’s best gift to the one who, at 7, teeters on the blurry-edged brink of belief versus doubt: plain, clear proof that believing comes to those who hold it in their hands.

twas a fleeting frame of christmas magic captured. and i’ll not forget its fine pure face.

nor will either deep-believing brother.

do you have a tale to tell of a little bit of christmas magic? or any other brand of magic?

my mama tells me every day’s a blessing. and i know that. of course. usually take my birthdays like a skier takes to snow and mountainsides combined. schuss right down those slopes, delighted. don’t mind the face fulls, nor the frosty air. not one bit.

but not this one. not this birthday that’s about to come. this one i take with murky soup of gulps and trepidation and not a shallow sense of dang, that was way too soon.

you see, i’m turning the age my papa was when he no longer lived.

nearly long as i can remember, 52 was trouble. 52’s a hump. and i can’t quite see to the other side.
it’s a mixed-up thing.

i’ve had my eye on this a long, long time. years and years ago, i figured out just what day would be the day that i’d live longer than my too-young papa did.

i know, to the hour and the minute, just when my life begins past his.

i remember, 28 years ago, all the clucking ‘bout his age. 52? they’d ask. oh, God, that’s way too young. too too young, they’d cluck.

and now, after all these years and years, one tumbled ‘top the other, here i am. just days away from 52.

i’ve a sense i’m not alone.

oh, not in that my birthday’s right around the bend, but that the dread that comes with this one, is a dread shared by all of us who’ve lost a parent way too young.

too suddenly.

when one minute your papa was on his way to a tennis game, and the next minute he was gone. and the doctor mumbled something ‘bout, he’s so sorry. and you had to ask out loud, there in the chilly hospital hallway, you mean he’s dead?

when the undeniable hole in your heart sears you in a way that won’t be shed. never does lose the scab.

when, while you do get on with living, do learn to laugh again, there is forever a piece of you that’s marked.

oh, lord, you’ve walked the aisle, birthed babies, rushed a broken child to the ICU. you’ve done all that without your papa at your side. but you’ve never ever stepped beyond the frame of time that once was his.

it’s a knot that won’t be loosed. it is a truth as deep as any shred of DNA buried down inside you.

your papa lived till 52, how will you live longer?

it’s a piercing sort of question. in some ways, fresh-trod snow. in others, a trapeze without a net.

there is certainly a dash of, is it fair? and lots and lots of thinking, this was almost his very end. did he feel finished? did he feel as new at this as i do?

there are, truth be told, some days when the weight of it feels like a rock dropped on my shoulders.
if i’ve the gift of extra days, how will i live each blessed one?

as i type here, i see a string of question marks.

i suppose, like the brink of any year, what’s to come is all unknown, uncharted, still to emerge from the mist ahead.

it’s only that this year, the year i reach my papa’s end, the questions stir more deeply, and they come in cloak of deep, deep sadness.

more than ever i do know this: my papa didn’t live nearly long enough at all.

forgive the sadness. forgive the shadows. but this table comes with dark and light. and even though the candles burn, they drape their black-lit silhouettes on the slab below. i wonder, those of you who’ve lost a mama or a papa younger than you are, did that one singular birthday pose a steep steep slope? or, for those of you who aren’t there yet, does that one stark number loom larger than the rest?

i wish for christmas, for you and for me, i wish that the angel of christmas come tap at your door. or maybe, just maybe, she’ll come to the pane of your window, there where the frost frames the sash.

i wish she slips in when no one is looking, or maybe only just you, maybe you see that she’s come because you find by the sill a feather or two, dropped from her wings, or the fat raggedy satchel she drags close behind, the one she stuffs with all of her blessings.

i wish for you that you know that she’s come because all of a sudden, out of the mist, out of the hustling, the bustling, the forgetting the point, you are suddenly melted with the heart of it all.

i wish for you, and me too, i wish to be bathed and dunked and baptized quite simply in the story of christmas, the story of birth. the story so earthly and holy, at once.

it’s a sweet baby someone, all sticky and wet and covered with blood from his mama’s hard pushing, birthed in the straw of a barn, a barn likely dingy, not swept and not washed.

born amid baa-ing and moos and a hen that was clucking, perhaps.

born by the light of a star and a moon. a birth in the still of the night. a birth that shuddered the world, and stirred wise men, it did, to come on their camels.

it’s a story so pure we tell it again and again.

as the world’s cloaked in darkness, as a chill comes in from the north, we turn to the words of the story. we turn to its undying truth.

and, if the angel of christmas surely does come, if somehow she slips into the room where she’s needed, we suddenly, deeply, feel the whole of the original story.

we make room in the inn of our heart.

we shove aside all of the worries, and all of the noise, maybe for one short window of time, but still we’ve made room.

we usher in the story of birth and a babe and a barn and a heavenly dome of star upon star.

we hunker down in our homes. we leave the troubled old world at the door–just long enough to let the story sink in. to sip from the cup, to break off a chunk of the story that feeds us.

we make christmas within.

we set the table for christmas. put out the plates that come from the shelf just once every year. we pile the clementines into a bowl. we pop out the seeds of the garnet-jeweled fruit, the fat pomegranate that’s waited for christmas.

we kindle the flame, in the tapers of beeswax, in the logs on the grate.

we turn out the lights, except for the ones that are strung on the tree.

we curl in a chair with arms that can hold us.

we let go of all thoughts and all worries and doubts.

we soak, for as long as we can, in the sweet holy syrup of christmas at last.

there is, if we consider the babe, consider the hope born in that barn, much to anoint us in this one star-lit night.

i wish, for you and for me, that this holy christmas, you find the one treasure that came to that manger.

i wish for the great gift of peace–true peace, peace like a pond that only just ripples–i wish for the rare gift of christmas unwrapped to settle quite deep in your heart.

merry blessed day of deep birth.

may it linger and last till the darkness is lifted, and the star shines again in the east, and the north and the south and the west…

i haul them out every year, and every year i wince.

they are my godawful bows. squished. old. tied, perhaps, by someone tipsy–or at least you’d think so, judging from the odd knot there in the middle and the strands that fly like hair in need of hair-goo.

they are my trademark red-plaid bows.

every year, when all the ancient ornaments are hoisted to the bough, when the red-feathered cardinal is twisted to the tippy top, when all the wooden cranberries are strung, i reach for the old stride-rite shoe box. i lift the lid, and there they are: a mash of tipsy bows.

a hundred years ago, just on my own, in a fit of my-first-christmas, i stopped by the nearest ribbon rack and bought a roll or three of red-plaid strands, and another one or two of bright red velvet. i picked up some skinny green wire, too, long as i was at it.

then i sat beside my tree and tied and tied. in fact, i was making up for lack of ornament. when you first start out in the christmas department, you’ve not got a lifetime of ornaments to call your own.

not got the little wooden nurse, the one once given me by a beloved pediatric patient. not got the sequined pine cone dipped in glue and glitter by my once-upon-a-three-year-old. not got the sweet red pocketbook–the size of a dolly’s and clutching a lucky penny–once handed me by my brother’s long-lost girlfriend.

and back then at the beginning, lest i subscribe to some naked christmas club, in which the ol’ evergreen was bare but for all the twinkly lights, i had to fill things out with the gobs and gobs of bows.

year one, it worked. so much so i barely went to bed, if i recall, just sat there all night long, admiring the heck out of my knack for tying knots.

but ever since…well, see…

every year, come, oh, february, when i get around to dismantling that old tree, i unhinge the bows and stuff them back where they belong, in the shoebox that never was quite roomy enough for all that red-plaid overabundance.

this then would be some 29 years later, which means those bows have spent the better part of 319 months utterly squished and rather cramped besides.

problem is, when you’re a bow, no one hears your cries for help, and thus you are simply stranded.

so you do what any self-respecting bow would do: you protest. you get a little cockeyed. you unloose your knot. you decide you’ll do anything but act or look quite like a bow.

you decide, after all those months in darkness, that you’ll subject your captor to a little taste of what she so surely deserves: you will humiliate the heck out of her, should she be so tone-deaf, so tasteless, as to hang you out in public.

ahem.

you now know, i suspect, why all the trees in the lot cringe when i walk by. you understand, i suppose, why at my house the fir is cowering in the corner.

it’s the godawful bows causing all the trouble.

if only i’d give ‘em up and spring for new ones.

but, geez, don’t they get it: you don’t just up and dump all that history.

why, those bows have seen it all, apartment after apartment, chapter after chapter.

the little house where i was tucked upstairs, with the downstairs landlords who stuffed me in their pickup truck and drove us to a far-off farm so we could chop a spindly tree. never mind that they were all dead, the trees, once we got there.

the old victorian where both my boys were born, where each one–barely old enough to wobble without flopping–got plunked on the couch so i could plug in the lights and watch their eyes go gaga.

heck, those red-plaids even made the move from the gritty city to out here where it’s all leafy and so not-urban.

thus, despite the cries of protest from my boys, the ones who claim they’re ashamed to call that tree their own, the bows come out, year after year after year.

and do not pass this around, but even i’m a tad embarrassed. even i deduce the need for a dash of christmas sprucing.

matter of fact, i was all alone this year when it came time to do the bows. and, even though i didn’t see another soul around, i heard the words, “godawful bows,” come out of someone’s mouth.

so now they, too, know the awful truth.

somehow, though, i find it fitting that mine’s a tree that’s far from picture perfect. and therein lies in truest beauty.

do you have something unsightly that, every year, is part of your tradition? something that perhaps is all the dearer for its odd shapes, and bumps and bruises?

as we move now into “year three, the chair,” i’ve not quite decided just what my routine will be. till i figure that out, i’ll keep writing on wednesdays. but perhaps, i’ll switch to fridays. no matter which, you know the table’s always here, so it doesn’t much matter, most likely.

it’s a pair now. a twinned set. there was one. and now, two.

for two swift years this little black place, with the alphabet in white, it’s been a nook, a cranny, a cove of my heart.

some days it’s the place where i curl up in a ball, but keep typing anyway. some days it’s where i let rip my ball of kite string, and hope to lick the clouds.

two years. day upon day, week upon week, laced together by the ebb and flow of seasons, tumbling leaves, cresting moon, the stars, the birds, the growing child.

life passes, i reach out and grab it by the fistfuls, put it down in words. take snapshots. suddenly, there are volumes, I and II. not bound. not tucked on a shelf. but here to read and read again. to remember.

that’s the point, after all.

to hold up each and every day, each moment, as if the holy blessed communion host on the altar, in the church, when the priest in all his robes takes a simple chunk of bread, of wafer, and with a sweep of arms and silken vestment, raises it up, holds it still, so we the people in the pews can behold it, drink in what it means.

so it is with life. and days. and hours. and incidental moments.

we hold them up in words, in snapshots, so we can gaze and think and study. so we can understand what might not be so evident the first time by.

it is why writers write. we write to think, to feel, to absorb, make real.

and so, two decembers ago, a chilly day, like this one, a bright one, too, i set out to start scratching in the sand. i had an inkling. i was breathing life into each and every syllable the way a kindling log needs bellows to turn to flame.

over time, and with each passing paragraph and page, i found, in part, what i was groping toward: a voice, a whisper, a deep still sense that there are those of us who hear and feel and partake of the same soft stirrings.

we don’t much believe in noise, not for the sake of sound alone. we prefer to stitch our hours and our hearts and our homes with knots of grace. and beauty, too. defined not by magazines, but by eternal spirit. what was and always will be a light divine.

it’s what i look for every day. it’s what i hope to harvest, bring home in little bundles and bushel baskets, maybe.

to each of you who has joined me here, who has pulled up a chair, even only once in a long while, i thank you.

it’s been a lonely year, a long year, in some everlasting ways. but whenever i tiptoe back to the table, and find you’ve been here, left a word, a story, or a simple nod, well, i am filled more than you will ever know.

it is a fine thing in this world to know there is always a safe place to come home to, a gentle place, a place where love surely reigns.

bless you, so very much, for making this humble table so deeply alive. you’d almost think, some times, that it was real. and not just a figment of our computer screens.