A Light Meal After the Feast
Prairie shadows on a warm post-Christmas hike.
Poetry
Here’s “December Night” by W.S. Merwin
This festival time is full of food and people and also the almost undetectable hum of the liminal, a subtle loneliness that stirs around the edges as we wait for the end of the old and the beginning of the new. Rather than give you a long piece to read through right now, I thought a couple of short pieces might be in order. Here they are:
Journeying
Donut
The bakery air is sweet and damp. She’s standing behind the glass counter, her black apron smudged with frosting and flour. “What can I get you?” she asks. “I’ll take that chocolate cake one.” “Oh, that’s a good one!” She smiles and slides the case open reaches in with black plastic tongs. She slips the donut into a white paper bag and hands it to me. “You know, this reminds me of my grandma,” she says. “She used to dip a donut in her coffee.”
My grandma Ruth sits at the kitchen table, her forearm tucked between tabletop and prodigious bosom. The other hand holds a very hot mug of black coffee, slim fingers circling the handle. “I like to sip it,” she says. A plain cake donut sits on a dessert plate between coffee and bust. She picks it up with thumb and forefinger, chest dropping a couple of inches. She dips the donut, lets the coffee soak the cake, takes a careful bite. “My grandma did that too,” I tell the woman. Her face brightens with shared recognition. “Thank you for that,” she says.
Nighthawks, Nebraska 2025*
I don an olive-green trench coat over a pair of sweats, slip on my son’s old crocs, no bra. Flip the porch light on so that I can see down the front steps to my car. It’s late, but I have no one’s schedule to keep. I need peanut butter and bananas. Because I live on them. Five minutes later in the grocery store parking lot, a car alarm blares. The blue light flashes on a police surveillance trailer. It’s late October, and the air has bite. I walk to the south door. It’s locked and blocked with shopping carts. No entrance on this side after 9pm. I walk around to the north door. I don’t need a cart or a basket. The grocery store smells like old socks and disinfectant. I walk to the back. The meat, the kind you get cut and weighed, has disappeared from its display cases. No butcher after 6pm. In the peanut butter and bread aisle, someone has abandoned a cart with two cans of pinto beans, Velveeta, lemonade, and Goya brand Maria cookies. I choose a jar, crunchy with oil on top. In the produce section, the fluorescent lights fizz and flicker over what’s left of the zucchini and out of season asparagus. A woman with black hair and thick eyeliner carries a large cloth bag draped over her forearm. She drops in a green pepper, then checks her paper list. I select a bunch of bananas. No brown spots, not too much green. I’m picky. At one of the self-checkout stations, a six pack of Budweiser sits abandoned. A woman returns to stand next to the Bud and dig through her wallet for cash. I think about spotting her the difference, but don’t. The blond woman next to me holds a conversation with the automated voice in the checkout machine. It says, “Please remove all purchased items.” She says, “I hear you. Just give me a minute.” Another woman wearing heavy gold earrings lounges on a motorized shopping cart near the door. She’s talking to the man next to her, whose groceries are already paid for and bagged. She says, “If I can just hang on” and laughs.
*After Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks.
Gardening and Making/Mending
Tree with precarious angel and oblivious nutcracker
Is putting up a Christmas tree considered gardening? If it is, I’ve done some. Or rather, my kids have. My family always gets a live tree, but this year no one was home to pile into the car, head to the tree lot, and haggle over which one was best. I figured that the trees at our local nursery would be sold out by the time there were people around to rate them, so I went alone. I took about five minutes to locate a sufficiently tall and narrow specimen, one that would fit into the corner next to the front window in our small living room. I also bought an Amaryllis and three Paperwhite bulbs for forcing. I find the sweet smell of Paperwhite’s rather nauseating but love their fragile blooms in a January windowsill. Once home, I pulled the tree from the top of the car, carried it into the house, and set it in a mixing bowl of water, where it remained, leaning against the coat closet, until my kids returned just before solstice. As you can see, it is properly festooned now, along with the rest of the house.
Sweater in use and the beginnings of a hat
And here I am wearing the sweater I’ve spent the last couple of months knitting. I like it! Post sweater and shawl completion, I endured a few days of restless, purposeless hands while badgering my daughter, who was in the midst of semester finals, to pick a legwarmer pattern for me to knit. Then my husband asked, “did you knit my brown hat?” “Yes,” I replied, slightly offended that he didn’t remember. “Well, I lost it,” he said sheepishly. “Seriously?!” I admonish the recipients of my knitted gifts NOT to lose them, and yet they do. And, in an act of poetic justice, I, the knitter, also regularly misplace my creations. One particularly beautiful hat, knit from the wool of sheep living on the abandoned Scottish island of St. Kilda, has, I expect, become compost for the prairie plants in a nature preserve in northwest Iowa, where I lost it five years ago. I’m still in mourning. Anyway, after a few moments of both frustration and grief, I agreed to knit the same hat over again. The yarn will be different, but the product equally warm. And my hands will be busy.
