Pen to Paper - Reprise
January 2021
Auld Lang Syne
As I sit down to write at the kitchen table I look out the window and see the boys adventuring in the snow. They love exploring the wide world of our country property, playing in whatever way their imagination takes them. Tigie-boy stops now and lays down in the snow to make a snow angel.
So often Tigie-boy takes Mr. Pip on long meandering walks around the property, exploring or re-visiting familiar haunts. Tigie-boy is two and Mr. Pip is one, but Tigie-boy is much more able to do the walking. Still, Mr. Pip tromps along after him with all the determination a one-year-old can muster. It is hard with the snow and Mr. Pip often slips and falls. Right now they are two little shapes in snow gear off in the distance at the edge of the field, where the old garden used to be. It is a drizzly, windy, morning and strangely warm for the second day of a new year.
Now the boys have decided they want to come inside. I help them strip out of their winter clothes in the kitchen by the wood stove. As Tigie-boy pulls off his snow pants he glances up, savoring that fresh warmth of coming inside from a blustery day and says, “I love our nice warm house.” He has many of the faults common to a two-year-old, but he is an example to me of how it is good to live in the moment with gratefulness and awareness of the present.
The dawn of January is the time when plans are made for the coming year, where hope and expectation give rise to words and resolution. We welcomed our third child into the world on December 22nd, a snuggly little girl, so our household enters the new year with three children under the age of three. In this place of life a sober resolution would be, “Survive the year ahead.” The reality of caring for three little ones does not leave room for grand ambitions, much less little plans or even keeping the house clean.
There is something to be said for entering the year without expectation, opening hands to receive whatever may come and learning to see and live the life that has been given in this present moment. To live well with little ones is a great accomplishment and worthy goal. But there is also something to be said for the days of small things, the little time carved out for the steady perseverance of intention toward something more than another day survived. Beyond living well with my family in thought and deed, my hope for the new year is writing. No goal of books completed, or anything so grand. Such things are dreams, beyond the scope of life in this present season. Just the intention to write a little each week is a reach enough. In the course of writing this I rescued Mr. Pip out of the snow, helped set up a toy road system on the kitchen floor, mediated fights, changed a diaper, and watched boys fly their own imagined paper airplanes around the kitchen.
If I manage a bit of writing each week this year, I will have done well.
More memories. It is March 2020. Unseasonably warm air, and a need to get ice cream, blew me into the gas station. I was standing tiredly at the checkout while the cashier rang up my purchase. “Where do I stick this–oh, here,” I said a bit foolish, staring at the card reader right in front of me. I inserted my credit card. “Long day,” I said by way of excuse.
“Yeah,” said the younger cashier to my left. “I’m leaving work early today.”
“Well I work in health care,” I said. “With all of the corona-virus it’s been more than the usual.”
The two cashiers made sounds of fake alarm and stepped back, one covering her face with her shirt.
“I remember that,” said the older lady, a rangy woman in her fifties or perhaps early sixties. “That’s why I got out of the nursing home. I worked there and I was sick all the time. I was forty years old then, and I was sick three months, throwing up all the time.”
I gave a vague expression, half thinking of explaining that it was administrative headaches associated with the corona-virus, not issues of getting sick, which had made my day weary. But the lady continued without any input from me.
“I went to the doctor and told him I had the flu. He tested me and said, ‘Lady, you don’t have the flu.’ I told him, ‘Yes, I do. I’ve been sick a long time.’ He said to me, ‘You don’t have the flu, you’re pregnant.’ I said to him, ‘Doctor, you don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m forty years old. I’m not pregnant.’ ‘Don’t argue with me,’ he said. ‘I’m telling you that you’re pregnant.’ I went home and I was so mad. I was furious.”
I looked at her, a little uncertain, and picked up my purchase. “So…were you pregnant?”
“Yeah. I was so furious.”
People sometimes share the strangest things.