My hostas have survived construction. Also the hydrangea, the big white ones with blooms the size of basketballs. I carefully dug the hydrangea up and put them in pots, covered them with straw and watered them off and on. The hostas I transplanted, neglected and hoped for the best.
Both seem to have weathered the winter, big old work boots and harsh treatment and I expect them to make a full recovery.

The house is almost done, or done enough I had friends over for a quick viewing. They were only allowed in new part of the house, since the rest of the house looks much like I imagined Ebenezer Scrooge’s storeroom–dark, dank, dusty and covered in cobwebs. Nine of us from our girls’ group made it to town for lunch on Monday. Only Patty, vacationing in Hilton Head, or making her way back home to Florida, missed it. Linda came from St. Louis, Julie from Bardstown, Janet came from work.

The rest of us gathered at Ruth Ann’s and talked over each other, ate, and ate some more, enjoying her new digs — so much more put together than mine — and I swear it felt like a holiday. I think it may be the first time since COVID and our various retirements from employment that we have gotten together in an impromptu fashion. It was fun.

And then, our old high school pal, Kathi, joined us for a little bit, since she and Nancy drove down from Louisville together. Kathi spent a couple of days with her sister while Nancy stayed with me and cracked the whip. It was awful. Productive, but awful. Home organization is never my strong suit, so I have sat, overwhelmed, with the chaos, and Nancy took charge and helped me put stuff back where it belongs, she folded clothes and made me sweep.

I have other gifts. I was able to come up with all sorts of really cool things for the house as it was being renovated–a charging station in a drawer, heated bathroom floor, night lights in all the right places, even a fancy spa bidet toilet seat, with so many features it comes with a remote, which look like a gaming control. As impressive as it is, I can’t help thinking it looks a little like something you find in a “hospital supplies for the home” emporium.

But, regardless, I know a few of my pals checked it out, even though they did not admit to it.

Poor Kathi, who has not be subjected to all of us since high school, managed to survive the last hour or so of our visit when she came to pick up Nancy for the ride home. I had to create some makeshift seating, since I have only a sectional in the new big room. But we worked it out.

At one point, I think, I hopped into my new bathtub to demonstrate how I could actually get in and out of it, no small consideration. Fifteen minutes later I am still dry docked in the tub and I count five of us sitting and standing around in the bathroom chatting as usual, and not a one of us thinks it odd.

Well, maybe a little odd, but we kept on chatting anyway.

What started as lunch became late afternoon, and reluctantly the party broke up, but not before Kathi mentioned her niece, Stacy, is a faithful reader of this column. I had Kathi repeat this story to Margaret, who can barely stand to hear these kinds of compliments about me and my writing, so I go out of my way to make sure she hears them often. She squirmed and rolled her eyes while Kathi repeated it, and all our needs were met.

So, while there is still much to do here, I have hosted my first overnight guest, had a little impromptu gathering, and got complimented in earshot of Margaret. Stacy — forgive me if I have not spelled your name correctly — thank you for that, and I told your aunt, the next time she is in town, we will go to lunch.

It comes about so gradually, just about five minutes before totality, when we get a sense the world is darkening, but not like dusk. It is a flat, eerie kind of darkening, without dimension because there is no slant of light and shadow. A new experience altogether. It is noticeably cooler, the birds and insects make noise, almost frantic, and then fall silent.

We nestle in the crook of a split rail fence, a thing to remind us we are in the park of Lincoln’s boyhood home. Two cows and two horses graze in the low field just beyond it. As minutes tick toward totality the animals move lower in the field, settling under a tree. The horses stand nuzzling each other, one cow lies down, has been like that for a good half hour before the sky changes from day to night, and she stays down for thirty more minutes as the moon moves toward the far edge of the sun.

We sit in lawn chairs in this quiet lane, preferring it to the hubbub of the visitor’s center. We chat, someone plays with a colander as she tries to catch half-moon shadows on a white piece of paper. Off and on we don safety glasses and watch the black moon bite perfect arcs out of the bright gold sun. I try to photograph the image, so pristine and exact, but I never quite manage it and give up all together.

My record of the eclipse will best be kept inside, a memory to savor, not some far off glimpse of an image, should I ever scroll past it on some future phone.

When the moon finally covers the sun completely, the “diamond ring” shows to brilliant effect. We take off our glasses and stare for the only minute or two it will be safe. Then, it just seems dark, like evening has fallen, but not like the darkest night. There is a golden, almost red glow hovering at the horizon, and not only in the West, but all around.

As darkness descends, we hear in the distance a swell of whoops and hollers where the crowds have gathered in the obvious places, parking lots, rest areas. Like cheering the home team.

Totality only lasts two minutes, then the world–not the sky–but the earth from the ground up, begins to lighten. The quality of light is odd, and then it doesn’t seem odd anymore, as if this will be the wattage of the sun from now on.

A bulb that has dimmed.

Maybe it is because all the anticipation is gone, or now we know what we are looking at, so it isn’t as unsettling as before. Even so, something big has happened, and the world seems off for the rest of the afternoon.
Some find it humbling, a sense of insignificance, the way we are small.

Perhaps I felt that in 2017 when I first experienced the darkness of a total eclipse, the way the moon obliterated the sun and the light with it. And yet, the moon is tiny compared to our sun. It is distance that gives it stature, makes the eclipse possible. No, I feel a kinship with this big thing, a sense of purpose of what my job is here. And that job is to do nothing but open up to it. Protect my eyes, look up when it is safe, let a sigh or a whisper escape my lips. Keep the right distance. Check on the cows.

x

It has been a strange Christmas week, not my usual with baking and flipping through my grand-mother’s recipe box, when I wonder, yet again, how may jam cake recipes might one woman need. 

So many, apparently. 

I have passed along the egg nog and ice box cookie recipes to my sister-in-law.  I may commandeer a kitchen this weekend to make candy, but then, again, I might not.  Everything is upside down this Christmas.  Not in a bad way, just in the most normal of ways when children grow up, have children of their own, when there are new wives and husbands and significant others to accommodate and welcome into the family. 

Maybe that is why, when a beautiful stray turned up at my house, my entire family converged to see the visitor, to take care of her, to make calls and plans for who might give her a home if the owner can’t be found. They are all animal lovers, but they seemed especially fierce about it. She stayed an afternoon, limping a little and content to sit on the porch and look through the door at us between napping.

A few hours later and she was gone, but I kept water out for her, and food.  My neighbor, Darlene, gave her chicken and said had seen her on her deck a few days earlier.  We wanted her to come back, although we didn’t say this.  She was thin and needed brushing.  Was aromatic, and not in a good way, and we agreed she had the whiff of neglect about her. 

I drove around over the weekend looking for her, although I would have told you I was just out for a joy ride, but I had old towels in the back of the car in case I came across her.  She had been spotted, Legion Park.  Breckinridge. But I never saw her again. 

My friend, Pat, said if she shows up for a second time, then she is mine.  She has chosen. 

I liked the idea of that.  That with persistence comes connection.  Or commitment. Or perhaps something more nebulous, but important, big.  And we don’t have much choice about it. 

Like families.  

My mother gave us the lesson of acceptance, and I don’t think she ever shamed my siblings into coming home for Christmas, attending every Thanksgiving or birthday.  She understood that families have a strong but flexible band around them.  She wasn’t going to be the nag.  It helped we all lived close by and she saw us often, but even so, she didn’t meddle into the particulars.  She worked around them. 

This year the twins and Cy will have Christmas a day early, because their dad works on Christmas Day.  Since the babies don’t own calendars, they won’t know the difference.  As yet, no plans have been made for Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, but I imagine we will end up together, somewhere, for a few hours and some cups of Christmas cheer. 

My most memorable Christmases have been impromptu and magical.  A Christmas Eve answering  the phones on the HELP line in Bowling Green,  Most of the calls were from regular clients, our phone number and our voices their tenuous connection to the world.  They called to wish whoever was working a Merry Christmas, and there were all in a big way, spreading season’s greetings.  Another Christmas Eve I sat in Colby’s with my friends, Jim and Fernando, watching the afternoon fade as big snow flakes fell. 

They ran us out eventually, but it was the calmest, sweetest time I can remember. 

So, I will keep food and water out for my girl should she decide to spend the holidays with me.  I’ll wander over to see what Santa Claus brought the babies.  I’ll stand at the expanse of the new windows in my house and wish, and wish for snow. 

Here, gone, to come again, Christmas, the day, is over. We watched the sleepy two-year old work to process the toys under the tree, toys that weren’t there when he went to sleep the night before.  Next year he might have a thread of memory that teases him when the talk turns to Santa Claus. By four, he will have some sense of anticipation.  At five, he will be sick with excitement.  We can’t decide if that is a good or bad thing to do that to kids. 

I fall firmly on the side of enchantment.  Little ones live in a magical world as it is.  The way they hide behind curtains, peeking out to see if you can see them. You can look them right in the eye and ask, “Where is Cy?” And he collapses in giggles because, of course, he is right there, and you don’t even know it.

The magic fades with time, and they begin to understand such things as accommodation and conservation, the manifestation of which means it dawns on them they can’t fit into a drawer when playing hide and seek. While they never try to actually hide in the desk, when you pull open a small drawer and ask if they are in there, they solemnly shake their heads, knowing they aren’t there, but might have been. 

There comes a time when they will say, out loud, even though it spoils the game, “I can’t fit in a drawer,” and the game, and the child, are changed forever. 

New kinds of magic emerge. Passing an exam you thought surely you failed. 

Windfalls as small as a dollar bill on the ground, an unexpected gift, dodging metaphorical bullets when the car makes a gruesome noise and it turns out to be a small fix, the disaster of disease that goes into remission, or goes away entirely.  Logical explanations for all of this, of course, but also, small magic, an enchantment, just around the edges. 

It is a secret of mine, the way I prefer enchantment to a cold hard fact. My nature is to understand the world, not control it, so I spend a great deal of time reading and wondering and wooling things over.  I arrive at working theories, but flexible ones, always open to new information.  But first, always first, I think it is magic at play, or at the very least, serendipity. 

I gave up resolutions years ago because I talked too much about them and somehow all that strutting took the wind out their sails.  This year, as odd as the past few months have been, with family additions and home additions and everyone run down and tired and worried for the world and the grocery bill, I cast about for some magic, some enchantment to pull me into the New Year. 

Because I have decided to embrace enchantment.  Just now, as I write these words, I realize how it has gone missing.  Enchantment is defined as a great feeling of pleasure and delight. Surely this isn’t too hard to find, even in the everyday.  I was enchanted Christmas Eve, out for last minute shopping. Rushing around and pushing my cart, I caught a snippet of conversation between a father and his children. 

As they passed around a bottle–perfume, bath oil, I don’t know–the dad said, “Your mom likes to smell this”  and I was enchanted.  All of them out to find something to please her, the intimate way he knew her, her desires, even in the simplest thing, a lemon balm bath oil, or was it lavender, no matter.  He knew.  The children agreed. 

I kept that image for the rest of the day. 

And it gave me pleasure. 

So.  No resolutions, then, but a different sort of paying attention. An opening up, even on hard days, gray days, the simple joy of finding a certain kind of magic. 

My earliest, fondest memories are these, sitting at my Granny Opal’s round kitchen table, she with a steno pad in her hands, as we solemnly brainstormed the menu for Thanksgiving dinner. 

I might have been four.  And while it may be that I can’t remember being four and at her tables, it is a memory firmly set regardless because it happened every year in my childhood, just this way. 

The menu rarely changed but it was the ritual of taking notes, of planning, of preparing for the family that we loved. I’ve taken it as my job ever since, even though my family isn’t the compact little unit it was when I was a child. Then, it consisted of two grandmothers, my parents, and whatever siblings I had at the time.  Even when it was just my older brother and me, it felt like a party.

Now, I sit with my notepad and try to plan for Thanksgiving and it is hard.  It isn’t even true planning, more like wishful thinking with paper, because we are on the generation four times removed from that 1950s kitchen on Triplett Street.  It is a true party now, when we are all together, although this happens so seldom, it is sad to think of it.  

There are challenges this year. My house is still upside-down, and clearly not ready for company, and my sister has a bum shoulder so she is benched for the duration.  The babies are likely to be no-shows because their dad has to work and their sleep schedules have finally taken hold and their mother isn’t ready to mess that up for a piece of turkey and a slice of pie.

Katie is exhausted, besides, and I suspect the idea of just chilling at home, Thanksgiving just another day, may be more a draw than a fifteen minute meal.  And you know it’s true, all that work, all that planning, and some slob polishes off two plates of food before the hostess has sat down for her first sip of tea. 

Other nieces and nephews are with their families, either the McDonoughs or their in-laws, and that is just fine, too.  We will get together soon enough, for birthdays and Christmas, but it leaves me with a notepad full of doodles instead of grocery lists.  Which is not to say I have been idle.

I cleaned out my freezer and found a turkey, one bought a while ago, and an off-brand at that, but I decided to do a test turkey, using Gordon Ramsay’s promise of the perfect holiday bird. 

As bombastic as he is, he is still a great chef, and he has a sweet Christmas video of preparing at home for the holidays.  I dug in last weekend and tried his bird.  

What a mess.  Let’s start with the bird, frozen too long to be very good, but still.  His process was involved and included draping the bird with bacon and cramming it full of butter and garlic, onion and lemon.  All I can say is, what a waste of good bacon.  It wasn’t bad, just not Thanksgiving.  In his video he makes an interesting cranberry chutney which I am happy to give a go, but I am back to brining my bird in a Gott cooler, and I will not be persuaded otherwise. 

Every year I sprawl, exhausted on my couch, avoiding the mound of dishes in my kitchen, wondering where my leftovers are–oh, yes, still at my sister’s, never to be seen by me again. This year it might not be such a bad thing, a quiet, small Thanksgiving. 

I am not writing Katie and the babies off just yet.  I can imagine she shows up mid-afternoon, knowing something is going on without her.  That would be fine.  No fuss, no expectation, babies in their everyday duds, pie and dressing and mashed potatoes all in a jumble for her partaking.  And if not, well, then, an excuse to see the babies, anyway, as we fight over who takes them food. 

I have had quiet Thanksgivings before.  I always pout about it.  But then, something magical happens.  The day arrives in serenity and quiet.  The afternoon unfolds with naps and pie, and naps again.  We can hear ourselves think.  We can hear each other talk. And the dishes practically wash themselves. This, too, a reason to give thanks.