ON FAT LITTLE SQUIRRELS, DROPPING A REINDEER LIKE A HOT POTATO, AND BEING AS DENSE AS THE FRUITCAKE ON THE COUNTER
Thursday December 3 and Friday December 4 2020
Dear Sarah,
I am tired this day, this evening, but I’ve just had a nog and am listening to carols on the radio and it’s not yet time to sleep. It’s time to write my letter to you! Today I felt like my head was made of a solid block of wood. On multiple occasions I had normal communications with people, about normal things, that I simply could not understand. I found myself needing to ask clarifying questions again and again. Was I hungry? Was it hormones? I was as dense as the fruitcake that I am aging on my kitchen counter!
Today a squirrel tried to work its way through the plastic baffle under our bird feeder, wrestling with a clamp that holds the clear disc of plastic strategically elevated off the ground, and somehow the squirrel injured itself, scraped its little right wrist, and I saw it sit back on its haunches and nurse its wrist in its mouth, then try to work the baffle again, leaning on its other three legs and favoring its fourth, letting the injured paw hover free of the effort. It tried this again and again. The squirrel slid back down the feeder pole like a little fireman, nursed its wrist, climbed again, then slid down again, and, perhaps a bit tuckered out, flopped on its back on the landing, rolled over onto its paws to stand again and nurse the wrist. I felt for this squirrel all afternoon, its little raw, red wrist in its mouth. It didn’t seem gravely injured — I don’t think the squirrel was in any immediate danger of bleeding out — but still I felt the act viscerally. I know the squirrel wouldn’t let me get close but I wanted to go out back and turn its little paw, examine its little wrist, put a bit of salve and a bandage on the scrape. I love the fat little squirrels at this time of year, their pale bellies and the way they clasp their paws in front of their stomachs like ladies in skirts.
I loved your letter last week, your glorious outdoor Thanksgiving, the kid-style hangovers and chapped cheeks! I also thought your tree-trimming tradition sounded lovely! I think it’s possible that I have visited when you’ve had your tree up, this sounds familiar to me too. Thank you for inviting me to be irritated by your absolutely inexcusable killing and trimming of a tree… but I honestly have no problem with this! Perhaps I should have a problem with this, I thought as I read your letter, but I am wholly on the same page about the joy of the smell of pine in the house. Artificial trees are not special… unless they are very special. I suppose cutting down trees for celebration is “wrong,” but we cut down trees for all manner of less pleasant or celebratory reasons (I’m thinking of paper and all the junk mail I receive), which does not necessarily mean we should cut down more trees, but enjoying trees at the holidays is a nice part of the season. M and I have been going for monthly walks in the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum, which is run by the University of Minnesota and is set up as a kind of research and learning landscape, with clusters of different kinds of plants and testing of varieties. My favorite part of the three-mile walk that wends through the arboretum is the Pine Walk, which always smells lovely. Once upon a time M’s parents intended to be Christmas tree farmers but in the end the work was harder than anticipated (or perhaps it was just more time consuming because one had to wait for the trees to grow?); I say buy your tree from someone who’s grown them for this purpose and enjoy it! I think it’s going to be a while before the population at large gives up live trees in our homes at Christmas time, so relinquishing your single tree a year probably won’t do much to turn the tide on the tradition. Savor the scent and the ritual!
I’ve been a bit more compact in my words this week than of late, but I think it’s time to send this letter off to you! Happy weekend as we make our way through this last month of the year! Until soon!
Your friend,
Eva
December 4, 2020
Dear Eva,
I am going to take your words (or technically Edith’s words)—start before you’re ready—and run with them on this Friday afternoon with my thoughts in a jumble. Perhaps this will finally be the week that I use the “hello, goodbye” free pass we have both been threatening for some time now. My work day is winding down, and it’s been a hectic one, leading into a weekend that will close with a 4-hour board meeting on Sunday. But before that, I plan to fully unplug into some pure Christmas-related glory!
Tonight we have “tickets” to a livestream of a Miracle on 34th Street production put on by our local community playhouse. After that, I plan to drink some bourbony eggnog by the tree while we play some online party game with a couple of friends and friends of friends.
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My work day reappeared, and I got pulled away for a couple more hours. Now I’m REALLY in danger of using my free pass! But I have so much I wanted to reply to in your letter!
First, on living in the now and the perception that doing so might be boring or quiet. I agree about that perception, but what is that about? I suppose there must be some strange notion that planning for the future expands our lives into some bigger frame, and as ever, we tend to mistakenly equate bigger with more important. The joke is on us, of course, because it is usually within the smallest frames that the most meaning is packed. We have talked before about how Anne Lamott says you should strive to write what you can fit in a 1 inch by 1 inch picture frame. This is writing advice, but it seems to be good life advice, too. It is in the more specific that we can find the universal. It is in the more closeup and personal—the now that we can see and feel—where we can find the most meaning. I am feeling as I write this that I am repeating a theme I have written about before, but such is life.
It is now several hours later, and the kids are in bed (though by the sound of the banging I hear coming from upstairs, they are not yet asleep). My body budget is running low at this point in the evening, and I am reaching the point where even stringing a thought from one to the next, or following a thought to its logical end, feels taxing. So bear with me here because I am not, in fact, going to take your advice to finish before you’re ready. Instead, I want to tell you a little about Rudolph. We ended up turning off the community playhouse livestream after about 25 minutes because while it was a valiant, earnest attempt at a socially distanced, face-shield-equipped production, we lost one child to his toys after just a few minutes in and the other admitted he, too, wasn’t really understanding what was going on when we finally asked. So we turned it off and fired up Rudolph, and we were all happy. But good grief, I had forgotten just how disturbing the story line of that show really is! Parents, coaches, friends, even Santa all ready drop this little reindeer like a hot potato just for having a shiny red nose? And a beautiful little elf given the boot from his job just because he dreams of attending to his fellow elves’ dental hygiene someday? It had me thinking about my own familial elevation of conformity. That is not normal, my dad would often say in a wide variety of contexts. It isn’t a compliment. We have a standing joke about how my dad talks about nearly every novel and film he watches by saying, It started out just so weird! I wondered what I was getting into.. And then he will recount how the story ended up hooking him in despite its oddities. I assume perhaps the love of normalcy in my family stems from my parents being raised in a small Iowa town of about 350 people. There can be many lovely things about small town life, but there can also be a lot of social pressure, particularly when most of the town population is similar. Anyway, over the course of some time, I have eventually come to affirmatively reject this idea that being normal is something to strive for. Rudolph, I would have been singing your praises from day one, gosh darn it!
My little Rudolphs (no red noses, but surely many quirks making them delightfully non-normal) were particularly endearing tonight with their brand new matching Star Wars Christmas pajamas on while we all huddled on the couch for our Christmas viewing. Here in my quiet little 1x1 inch frame, the now is/was good.
Now for some eggnog! I hope you have a wonderful weekend ahead, my friend!
Yours,
Sarah