ON EGGPLANTS HOLDING US HOSTAGE, DOG FARTS AS WRAP-UP-THE-LETTER BELLS, AND WAKING UP TO JANUARY
Friday November 26 2021
Dear Sarah,
In the relaxed post-holiday aura of the day after Thanksgiving, I am thinking today about putting less pressure on myself about all kinds of things. I have been planning to get some cards printed to send out as Christmas-New Year cards to folks, and I am running behind on my self-set timeline (as well as the firmer printer’s timeline). The other day I felt stressed about the card project; the designs were almost where I wanted them to be, but needed perhaps a bit more attention; the files needed to be prepped for the printer; and it all felt daunting in the last week of November, getting ready to host Thanksgiving. (So many dust bunnies hiding around the house!) M said of the cards project, You don’t need to worry about that. So simple! He was fine with the idea of sending cards or of not sending cards. Maybe we will, maybe we won’t! It was one of those things that gets added to my personal list of “making a successful holiday season.” But no one else really cares either way; people will hear from us when they hear from us; this is a project I fabricated for myself. I am thinking back to earlier in the fall when we were still picking up our CSA boxes and one week we received an eggplant, and the eggplant kept hovering over my spirit; I didn’t want to waste the eggplant but also didn’t particularly want to prepare it. M said something similar that time, too: it didn’t matter if we used the eggplant, didn’t matter if it rotted in the fridge; it wasn’t something to worry about. I was letting the eggplant hold me hostage, and for what? What a relief to let the eggplant go. (We did end up making an eggplant parmesan, as you’ll recall, but with the stressful bits of the planning process thrown to the wind.)
Last year I felt particularly excited about the holidays, and I felt ready for the holidays, because 2020 was a long year of lockdowns and pandemic fear, and the holiday season felt like a tradition and a balm. This year the holiday season feels out of time for me, or I feel out of time with it; I don’t feel like I have mentally yet arrived at the end of the year, and so I am not quite ready to participate fully in this year’s holiday vibes. I am not ready to enjoy the holiday season and then to wake up to January again. It’s going to happen no matter what, of course; January isn’t waiting for me to feel ready for it. I may not re-make the fruitcake I made last year. This is nothing big to mourn, of course, but last year I thought to myself, new tradition? I am thinking that this year’s tradition will be to slow down and not worry so much about making all the things I thought I would make, ticking everything off the to-do list because it’s that time of year. Perhaps if I am able to slow down a bit, my spirit will catch up to this time of year and we will move together into the new year, instead of one part pushing on ahead as fast as possible, the other part dragging its feet.
In addition to last weekend’s challenges as I was coming off my covid booster shot (yay! but ugh!) and then what appeared to be monthly hormonal fluctuations, a tiny thing that is conspiring to further disorient me is that my Chrome browser is no longer playing nicely with my operating system upgrade, so to keep things moving this week I switched over to using Safari, but things are just different enough in Safari-land to shift my workflow: doc and interface layouts look slightly different, pages occupy the screen differently, and it is causing me trouble! It’s as if all my clothes were suddenly fitting wrong, just barely too tight or too baggy.
Last week I was fascinated to read in your letter your description of temporarily putting all of the people in my life clambering for things from me under a giant upside down glass. I like this visual and I wonder how it would work for me? I think I might like to leave all the tiny people there under the glass indefinitely!
Anyway! Thanksgiving itself was lovely and all the foods were delicious! In the spirit of taking it easy I’m going to close this letter here and wish you and your pals a (continued) lovely long weekend!
Until soon!
Yours,
Eva
November 26, 2021
Dear Eva,
We are headed into very dangerous letter territory at this early evening hour on a post-Thanksgiving Friday. I have opened this blank document to write you, and I have not a single note written down from which to draw. Meanwhile, the children have started a movie after a dinner of pie with just a touch of leftovers to make it respectable. Today has been one of my laziest days in recent memory, at least according to my watch that tracks my movement. We did actually make it out of the house today, which is better than yesterday. We ventured out to a bookstore I wanted to check out, called Semicolon, and then grabbed some appetizers and beers at a nearby pub. Other than that, however, the past 48 hours in Chicago have been spent within the walls of our friends’ home. It has been a true delight! The kids are old enough to largely run amok without incident or supervision, so we spent about 8 hours of the day yesterday prepping and cooking (and drinking). It was a slow, pleasant cooking experience without even the slightest hint or pressure or deadlines. We ate a veritable feast around 6:30 PM, followed swiftly by scrumptious pies. I was in pain the rest of the evening and still have yet to recover a proper appetite. This is my kind of Thanksgiving! How was yours? Did you enjoy the Hasselback potatoes as much as I did? I dare say the thought of them are giving me the tiniest pang of possible hunger feelings, which is a surprise. I thought perhaps I would skip a dinner meal and go straight to pie tonight. Maybe I’ll make it potatoes and pie, and call it good.
This is one of those weeks where there has been very little time for thinking, just lots of time for being. That means it has been a perfectly lovely few days but I feel like I am running a little low on the sorts of thoughts that make good fodder for letters. Only 5 letters left to follow this one! What will life after the letters be like, Eva? I want to know! I know there will be aspects I miss, and I need to be ready for that. Will there be anything about the absence of the letters that feels good? It is hard to feel positive about the absence of something, unless that something was either burdensome (it wasn’t) or its absence creates space for something that previously got squeezed out (maybe it will). It is up to me whether I fill the empty letter space with something new and generative, or whether I let the time drip off my hands like water. Speaking of which, you mentioned last week that perhaps we should think again about what form these letters might take when the pile of them is complete. I very much agree! I can see promise in all of the ideas you mentioned—a book, a visual exhibition, some new types of writing. I realize that picking everything is the equivalent of picking nothing, but I want to do it all! The book form seems almost effortless, assuming we are not intent on getting some big-time publisher to take on the project. At a minimum, we could put them together in our own self published hard copy format of some kind. This feels like something we should definitely do. I love the idea of holding the full girth of the letters in my hands, putting it on my shelf for the rest of time. It has been a weighty, life-changing project and it deserves to hold at least a bit of literal weight in the world. I also remain intrigued about the exhibition possibilities. One of my early 2022 projects will be to sit down and generate ideas for this. Maybe you can do the same, and then we can peer at our lists and see whether there feels like there is a there there. And if there is, let’s take it forward and find a space and a date and work toward it. I am in the mood to put things into the world, to follow through. (I will note that I just searched and found some old letters about putting frames on ideas and reading that I had a similar must-do attitude at the end of this year last year just makes me a little sad. Am I just echoing my same creative cycles from year to year? Do I have anything to show for my pre-2021 creative gusto? Sigh.)
I have a snoring dog next to me that just audibly farted. I am taking this as a sort of wrap-this-letter-up bell. I have managed to write many words after all, thus avoiding a letter catastrophe in our 165th week.
I am anxious to read about your festivities in Minnesota. Your letter awaits, and I shall wait no more! I hope you have a wonderful weekend, perhaps with a little celebratory ‘nog!
Sending good cheer and warm wishes,
Yours,
Sarah