New Year, Snow

Tonight, we celebrate, ready ourselves. We hope, plan to do the things we wish to do, to not leave things undone. It is chancy. Some years, we know, are better than others.

I celebrate this past year--celebrate having been able to do some of the things I wanted to do all the way down in my toes. I wish for more of that spirit, luck, for us all in the year ahead--the spirit that has us toiling toward the things we want to do deep, deep inside. The one that grants us eyes with which to see them once we get there.

It snows, has just begun to snow, painting everything grey and white. A fresh start, in the cleanest, truest, thickest sense. So. A muffled, snowy walk. A glass, filled with bubbles, raised. A snippet of T.S. Eliot's "Four Quartets." The rest can wait for the new year.

For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice.

Happiest of new years to you, dear reader.
Cheers and cheers and cheers to you.

{Photo, Me}

Boxing Day, Tights

As far as I am concerned, the days following Christmas are some of the best of the year. We eat leftovers. We read books, make lists, wear our Christmas tights. The paperwhites bloom, there is nowhere to go. We enjoy the decorations we creased by hand, hung with care. We prepare to clear them away, pour champagne, consider traversing new shores.

{Photo, Me}

Calm, Bright

It has been a big year for this milkmaid. It is time to spend some time near a tiny rosemary tree with a stack of satsumas and another of books. There are naps to take. There are littles to kiss. There is laughter, and there are warm toes and thick socks. There is crisp air and a little bit of snow underfoot. It is all of it wonderful, more than enough.

I will be back, rested and restored, around the new year. Thank you, dear reader, for being a part of this splendid community, and for offering such a bounty of good. I wish you cheer.

Happy holidays.
Be calm. Be bright.

{Photo, Me}

Wednesday Words: Fruitcakes, Kites

For the sweet-smelling days leading up to Christmas, this bit from Truman Capote's perfectly rendered A Christmas Memory. Listen to Capote read it (abridged for radio at 21:10) here or seek it out for inhaling in book form, hanky in tow. And many thanks to you, dear readers, friends, for connecting me to worlds beyond my own.

The black stove, stoked with coal and firewood, glows like a lighted pumpkin. Eggbeaters whirl, spoons spin round in bowls of butter and sugar, vanilla sweetens the air, ginger spices it; melting, nose-tingling odors saturate the kitchen, suffuse the house, drift out to the world on puffs of chimney smoke. In four days our work is done. Thirty-one cakes, dampened with whiskey, bask on windowsills and shelves.

Who are they for?

Friends. Not necessarily neighbor friends: indeed, the larger share is intended for persons we've met maybe once, perhaps not at all. People who've struck our fancy. Like President Roosevelt. Like the Reverend and Mrs. J. C. Lucey, Baptist missionaries to Borneo who lectured here last winter. Or the little knife grinder who comes through town twice a year. Or Abner Packer, the driver of the six o'clock bus from Mobile, who exchanges waves with us every day as he passes in a dust-cloud whoosh. Or the young Wistons, a California couple whose car one afternoon broke down outside the house and who spent a pleasant hour chatting with us on the porch (young Mr. Wiston snapped our picture, the only one we've ever had taken). Is it because my friend is shy with everyone except strangers that these strangers, and merest acquaintances, seem to us our truest friends? I think yes. Also, the scrapbooks we keep of thank-you's on White House stationery, time-to-time communications from California and Borneo, the knife grinder's penny post cards, make us feel connected to eventful worlds beyond the kitchen with its view of a sky that stops.

Middens, Cheer

The Saturday before Christmas, there was snow. Snow after truffle toast at 'ino, after running into three lovely ladies. Snow after a pumpkin tart and a present tied with rough twine. After the snow began, there was walking to the nearest park to hold my hands palms up, turn in circles, lick the sky. And then there was quiet falling of snow and snow and snow.

The Sunday before Christmas, a city of tiny snowmen sprang up in Central Park, the children drunk--just drunk--at the prospect of snow, determined to carry armfuls of the stuff home with them long after their parents began calling. There were snowballs. There was a sweetly sung holiday concert with a dear, funny friend. There were snow-softened lights. And there was a walk home in the crisp, snowy night, all galoshes and middens and wonder and cheer, us intent on bringing them home.

Snowflakes, Twine

It is nearly Christmas. It is very cold.
They say it is going to snow.

{Photo, Me}

Copper, Green

I love wrapping packages as much as I love anything. Silver bells jingle ever so gently. Chocolate coins (found, at last) tuck under ribbons. Tea steams. This year, tiny Eiffel Towers are tied in place with green ribbon, rough twine. And then everything disperses, is sent on its way, leaving bits of real ribbon and paper behind.

It is my first year mailing most things. I tie packages with twine for carrying to the post office with the least amount of struggle. It is very cold. I pass cut trees on the street. Everything feels copper, everything green.





{Photos, Me}

Tuesday Poem Wednesday: Deacons, Hills

This week and next, some of my favorite holiday words. Today, a bit from Dylan Thomas' A Child's Christmas in Wales--one of the beautifullest things I know. It is my habit to read it aloud nightly in the days leading up to Christmas, staring at Ellen Raskin's sweet wood carvings and fingering the square pages and trying to fit my mouth around the orbs that are all of those wide, yawning vowels.

Years and years and years ago, when I was a boy, when there were wolves in Wales, and birds the color of red-flannel petticoats whisked past the harp-shaped hills, when we sang and wallowed all night and day in caves that smelt like Sunday afternoons in damp front farmhouse parlors, and we chased, with the jawbones of deacons, the English and the bears, before the motor car, before the wheel, before the duchess-faced horse, we rode the daft and happy hills bareback, it snowed and it snowed. But here a small boy says: "It snowed last year, too. I made a snowman and my brother knocked it down and I knocked my brother down and then we had tea."

"But that was not the same snow," I say. "Our snow was not only shaken from whitewash buckets down the sky, it came shawling out of the ground and swam and drifted out of the arms and hands and bodies of the trees; snow grew overnight on the roofs of the houses like a pure and grandfather moss, minutely white-ivied the walls and settled on the postman, opening the gate, like a dumb, numb thunderstorm of white, torn Christmas cards."

{Photo, Me}

Shiny, Crisp

The funny thing about Christmas in a new city is that I do not know where to find things. Chocolate coins that are not gelt, for example. Fran's salted caramels. The chewy, bulk gingersnaps I love from Whole Foods (no bulk cookies here). A candy thermometer that costs less than $20.00. When I got home after a work trip to Boston last week, I realized that I wasn't sure where to buy the kind of ribbon I buy. I had some ideas, mind you. And I know this is no great tragedy. And I found the ribbon, eventually. But not knowing where to go for anything has me thinking about what is important, and what is not. And about running around. In December. In the rain. And about whether, indeed, we need to try so hard.

I bought a little rosemary tree, and I'm being choosy about the ribbon. I bought clementines and planted paperwhites. And I'm stocking up on gelt and eating thin ginger cookies. It is enough. It is more than enough. The gelt is shiny, the cookies, crisp.

{Photo, Me}

Christmas in New York: Compendium, Ice

I am home. I am home and it is Christmas in New York.
My first Christmas in New York. A week ago, I was not so sure about being home.

But this weekend, it was Christmas in New York with my mother. We rose early to beat the crowds. We peeked at holiday windows (Bergdorf's Alice in Wonderland-inspired "Compendium of Curiosities" windows take the cake, coupling ostriches and plaid, walruses and scarves, with clever, clever copy. I plan to take up residence in this particular window later this week.) and subsisted mostly on scones. We ice-skated. We wrapped our scarves tightly and hooked arms in the snow. We giggled through the Rockettes. We visited the Met's splendid, splendid creche. We drank tea. We went to the movies. We soaked each other all up and compared noses and grinned. And then I felt home for reals.

{Photo, Moi}

Paris, Home

It is cold in Paris this morning, and I am sad--sad to leave my little Montmartre apartment, with its brass bed and copper pots, and sadder to leave Paris. But leave I must. I am told that there is always Paris. Many, many thanks for all of your kind words over the past six weeks, wonderfullest, sweetest of readers. It's been the very nicest journey, and simply splendid having you along.

And now I must fly. I mean to hunker down in New York with a pair of good scissors and some velum and work some serious snowflake magic. I mean to enjoy a Christmas-in-New-York visit with my wonderfullest, sweetest of mothers. I mean to unpack, slowly, inhaling the scent of lavender, savoring every last Paris moment. I'll be back blogging next week.

{Photo, Moi}

Tuesday Poem: Star, Clock

A bit of translated Baudelaire for my last full day in Paris. I'm not messing around with photos today. I must get outside! And be drunk on Paris loveliness! Enivrez-Vous (Be Drunk):

One should always be drunk. That’s all that matters; that’s our one imperative need. So as not to feel time’s horrible burden that breaks your shoulders and bows you down, you must get drunk without ceasing. But with what? With wine, poetry, or virtue, as you choose. But get drunk. And if, at some time, on steps of a palace, in the green grass of a ditch, in the bleak solitude of your room, you wake and the drunkenness has already abated, ask the wind, the wave, the star, the clock, all that which flees, all that which groans, all that which rolls, all that which sings, everything that speaks, ask what time it is; and the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, and the clock, they will all reply: “It is time to get drunk! So that you may not be the martyred slaves of time, get drunk. Get drunk, and never pause for rest! With wine, poetry, or virtue, as you choose!”