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This season I feel like I am constantly vigilant against consumerism; I feel always on edge as I try to maintain my children as not totally entitled and spoiled. I was adamant that Christmas not be too much about things this year, and it was not, which was lovely. But that was hard work! With impeccable timing Catarina sent me the following passage about children and money (from an article about allowances, which is a topic I feel I need to figure out shortly). Thank you, Cata, I love this:

I want my children to thrive without being acquisitive, to have enough prosperity that they can be generous, to feel self-sufficient enough that they may never be bought. Let them be sensible enough to care for themselves – and one day, perhaps, for children of their own.

Listening to Christmas music (to be fair, I do so all year, but this is the brief window where it doesn’t make me a Crazy Weirdo) driving today and this seemed apt for right now:

It was snowing all weekend. And it was so beautiful! And SUCH a pain! My God. I went to Target on the 21st in the middle of blizzard #2 and it was the parking lot was an absolute horror. Everybody had cabin fever by the end of Sunday. I kept putting the kids in their snowsuits, sending them out into the back yard (“yard”) with such exciting implements as wooden spoons, and not letting them back in until they were soaked to the skin and turning blue. Throw all the snow gear right into the dryer to dry it out. Repeat. Ad nauseum. Seriously I think I dried the snow gear 3 times on Sunday alone. I know, not very green. But, these children! Like caged animals after an hour or two at home.

In other exciting news I finally caved and went to see the doctor about this cold/cough I cannot shake. Since my dilated-pupils, leaning-on-mantel showing at the Laughlin Christmas party on December 5th I have had a cough I cannot get rid of. I love my doctor: she combines a commitment to holistic, alternative approaches to health (she was the original person who planted the idea of seeing a midwife, which I proceeded to ignore for 30 weeks of pregnancy) with a willingness to bring down the hammer of Conventional Medicine when necessary. Yesterday we agreed I would not go on antibiotics but she gave me an inhaler for what she deemed asthma-like “reactive airways” post-cold. This morning I still felt shitty, maybe even worse, so I went back in to see her and she quickly wrote me a scrip for the z-pack.

Am now attacking what may well be a run-of-the-mill cold with both an asthma inhaler and zithromax. Am hoping I will be ready to scale Everest in a day or two.

I just finished this beautiful, slender book that Lacy sent me at the end of the summer. It reminds me of so many things, most of all of Lacy who is already in my mind at this dark season, in this melancholy, slightly bruised moment of every year. Lace, whose words have so many times been a balm for me, whose silent support is felt every single day. Lacy: thank you! My gratitude that you are in my life is beyond words (for verbose people like us, this is the true statement).

But also Doerr’s words reminded me of my own memories of being little abroad, of my own brave mother taking two small children to a foreign country where she spoke not a word of the language. It reminded me of a now-faded, washed-out photograph of the four of us, Hilary in a stroller, standing in some square in Paris. My own memories are intertwined with the rounded-cornered photographs that Dad so painstakingly put into albums, his unmistakeable fountain pen scrawl captioning each one.

Doerr’s description of the papal conclave reminded me of those days of pomp and arcane tradition, of unfamiliar words (holy see, interregnum, camerlengo) rolling around in my mouth. I remember being at Dunkin Donuts in Newton with Christina, Charlie, and Grace when the news stations announced the white smoke. White smoke! We have a pope! I will never forget that. For some reason the whole drama of it all fascinated me, and I’ll never forget that moment, when history collided with my very mundane modern life.

As I must, I close with some of Doerr’s passages that I loved the best:

Having a baby is like bringing a noisy, inarticulate foreignor into your house and trying to guess what he likes to eat.

A good journal entry – like a good song, or sketch, or photograph – ought to break up the habitual and lift away the film that forms over the eye, the finger, the tongue, the heart. A good journal entry ought to be a love letter to the world.

The space is both intimate and explosive: your humanity is not diminished in the least, and yet simultaneously the Pantheon forces you to pay attention to the fact that the world includes things far greater than yourself.

We are simultaneously more happy and more worn out than we have ever been in our lives.

You find your way through a place by getting lost in it.

Henry and Owen see more images in a day than Pliny saw in a lifetime, and I worry their generation will have to work a bit harder than every previous one to stay alert to the miracles of the world.

Whoever says adults are better at paying attention than children is wrong: we’re too busy filtering out the world, focusing on some task or another, paying no attention. Our kids are the ones discovering new continents all day long. Sometimes, looking at them, I feel as if Henry and Owen live permanently in that resplendent, taut state of awareness that we adults only reach when our cars are sliding through a red light, or our airplane is thudding through turbulence.

This year has been composed of a trillion such moments; they flood the memory, spill over the edges of journal entries. What is it physicists tell us? Even in a finite volume, there are an infinite number of points.

I wonder if the same thing is true for this Roman light: If enough of it enters our eyes, if we look at something long enough, maybe we incorporate it. Maybe it becomes part of us. Maybe it flashes around inside us, endlessly reflecting, saturating everything.

all from Four Seasons in Rome, Anthony Doerr

Toward the Solstice, 1977

The thirtieth of November.
Snow is starting to fall.
A peculiar silence is spreading
Over the fields, the maple grove.
It is the thirtieth of May,
Rain pours on ancient bushes, runs
Down the youngest blade of grass.
I am trying to hold in one steady glance
All the parts of my life.
A spring torrent races
On this old slanting roof,
The slanted field below
Thickens with winter’s first whiteness.
Thistles dried to sticks in last year’s wind
Stand nakedly in the green,
Stand sullenly in the slowly whitening,
Field.
My brain glows
More violently, more avidly
The quieter, the thicker
The quilt of crystals settles,
The louder, more relentlessly
The torrent beats itself out
On the old boards and shingles.
It is the thirtieth of May,
The thirtieth of November,
A beginning or an end.
We are moving towards the solstice
And there is so much here
I still do not understand.
If I could make sense of how
My life is tangled
With dead weeds, thistles,
Enormous burdocks, burdens
Slowly shifting under
This first fall of snow,
Beaten by this early, racking rain
Calling all new life to declare itself strong
Or die,
If I could know
In what language to addrses
The spirits that claim a place
Beneath these low and simple ceilings,
Tenants that neither speak nor stir
Yet dwell in mute insistence
Till I can feel utterly ghosted in this house.
If history is a spider-thread
Spun over and over though brushed away
It seems I might some twilight
Or dawn in the hushed country light
Discern its greyness stretching
From molding or doorframe, out
Into the empty dooryard
And following it climb
The path into the pinewoods,
Tracing from tree to tree
In the falling light, in the slowly
Lucidifying day
Its constant, purposive trail,
Till I reach whatever cellar hole
Filling with snowflakes or lichen,
Whatever fallen shack
Or unremembered clearing
I am meant to have found
And there, under the first or last
Star, trusting to instinct
The words would come to mind
I have failed or forgotten to say
Year after year, winter
After summer, the right rune
To ease the hold of the past
Upon the rest of my life
And ease my hold on the past.
If some rite of separation
Is still unaccomplished,
Between myself and the long-gone
Tenants of this house,
Between myself and my childhod,
Between the childhood of my children,
It is I who have neglected
To perform the needed acts,
Set water in corners, light and eucalyptus
In front of mirrors,
Or merely pause and listen
To my own pulse vibrating
Lightly as falling snow,
Relentless as the rainstorm,
And hear what it has been saying.
It seems I am still waiting
For them to make some clear demand
Some articulate sound or gesture,
For release to come from anywhere
But from inside myself.
A decade of cutting away
Dead flesh, cauterizing
Old scars ripped open over and over
And still it is not enough.
A decade of performing
The loving humdrum acts
Of attention to this house
Transplanting lilac suckers,
Washing panes, scrubbing
Wood-smoke from splitting paint,
Sweeping stairs, brushing the thread
Of the spider aside,
And so much yet undone,
A woman’s work, the solstice nearing,
And my hand still suspended
As if above a letter
I long and dread to close.