My Not-Enough Year
The phone feels odd. Too small. Boxy. When I hold it in front of my face, it doesn’t unlock.
I’m in a slipstream of cobbled streets and Dickensian waifs. Of course the waifs are Dickensian. It’s Christmas Eve. My liminal state dissolves. I’m on my husband’s side of the bed; the phone in my hand is his.
Across the bed, my phone — slim, sleek, new — sits in a wireless charger on my nightstand. The lamp, hand lotion, and a coffee mug bristling with pens occupy part of the surface. Jenga towers of books and notebooks take over the rest.
His nightstand is spare: Bluetooth speaker, charger, lamp, and the diffuser and small bottle of lavender oil I’ve put there as soldiers in my battle against insomnia.
It strikes me that I’ve conflated Lewis Carroll with A Christmas Carol. I’m in a thin gray space between the familiar and the foreign, huddled against The Ghost of Christmas Past —
No, it’s my cat, pushing her head against my shoulder. I’m late getting her breakfast.
I’ve baked seven dozen cookies. Peanut butter blossoms and Snickerdoodles are so easy, I shouldn’t need a recipe. But I do, because seven dozen is about one-half dozen for each of the years since I last baked cookies.
Breadcrumbs are softening in milk. I’m looking forward to adding them to raw ground beef and pork, dropping in an egg, squeezing the cold slippery mixture with my bare hands and rolling it into Swedish meatballs. On the back burner, red cabbage simmers in bacon grease and cider vinegar, currant jam and caraway seeds. I’m making latkes with pre-shredded hash browns, saving the russets to peel, boil, and mash. I’ll hold off on the wild rice casserole. Pot roast tomorrow? Better rethink that, since I haven’t bought one.
Ode to Joy, my ringtone, sounds from the living room. It’s my daughter.
“Mom, is it okay if I skip Christmas Eve? And just come over tomorrow?”
“Sure, hon. Is something wrong?” Something’s wrong.
“Just tired.”
“Anything else?” There’s something else.
“Just . . .” I hold my breath.
“Tired.”
When I had a flip phone, I set Ode to Joy as my ringtone. I changed it, briefly, to “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun,” but that was amusing to one of my friends and no one else. So Ode to Joy, again, delivers the tiny dopamine thrill: Oh, joy, a phone call!
This time, it’s my son.
“Hi, Mom. I guess we’ll be going to her parents’ house tonight. What time do you want us over tomorrow?”
In-laws. I get it. After all those years of negotiating holidays and hurt feelings, before one generation died off, and —
Your dad, I want to say.
“I understand,” I say. But I don’t. I don’t understand.
It’s the warmest, wettest Christmas on record in Minnesota: 54 degrees with steady rain. The entire year has been unsettling. The weather is only part of it. It feels as if a global Christmas truce was declared, then ruthlessly violated. A troubling miasma obscures the names of the combatants and the nature of the conflict. The New York Times notes: A Record-Breaking Warm, Snowless Winter Confounds Midwesterners.
I look at the comments. Climate denial, climate alarm, nothing in between. Not one of the respondents is confounded.
A word rises from the murk of my fundamentalist Christian background: tribulation. Maybe it’s the Tribulation. The perplexing question for me isn’t: Who’s to say this isn’t normal? Why, I remember back in 1962 . . . or, How do I tell my child Frosty the Snowman’s dead? It’s: Why did my husband get raptured, and not me?
That, more than the weather, is what confounds me.
It’s Christmas Day. Unhappy about yesterday’s false start, I’m a little behind on dinner. As I peel potatoes, the meatballs bubble in the oven. I have to keep an eye on the red cabbage, because I let the first batch get a little burnt and had to toss it.
“No, I have not yet fixed the drain,” I tell my son. “Please empty this in the back yard.” I gesture towards the sink.
The drain basket in my kitchen sink has been leaking into the trash bucket underneath it since Thanksgiving. I could fix it with a You Tube video and a trip to Menards. Instead, I set an oval roasting pan - the black speckled enamel one I cooked the turkey in — under the faucet to wash things that aren’t dishwasher safe and to catch cooking liquids.
He looks at the pan full of hot, soapy, starchy water, and then at me.
“Go feed the chickens,” I tell him. “Like your great-grandmother did.” I don’t have chickens. “It’s a figure of speech, son.”
He goes out into the rain and pours the water off the back deck, as I’ve been doing for four weeks. Because of the Tribulation, I don’t have a skating rink. I have a head start on a healthy, well-fertilized lawn.
He returns the pan to the sink and puts his arm around my shoulder.
“Mom, I’ll come over tomorrow. This isn’t” — he pauses — “ideal.”
I don’t give a damn about my lawn. I want my husband back. During the forty-three years of our marriage, we never had to hire a plumber, electrician, carpenter, or handyman. It’s magical thinking, I know, I know. If I don’t fix the sink, he’ll get so mad he’ll come back and do it himself is what my grieving brain keeps telling me.
“Thanks,” I say. “You’re a wonderful son.”
He hugs me, and I lean into his chest.
I’m reaching across the sizzling pan of latkes to stir the mulled wine, when the front of the oven door falls off. No problem! Design flaw, two screws holding the door handle AND the door, yes it’s ridiculous, Phillips is in that drawer right there.
Inside, I’m raging. He could have bought me a new stove. Put it on a credit card. Debt erased on death.
Four burners going. Hot oil. Three dishes in the oven, and the door falls off.
Hahahaha.
After the cookies, after my daughter-in-law’s Pavlova, it’s time for presents.
“I haven’t wrapped them,” I announce. “It’ll only take a minute.”
You have to leave? Now? It’s not even eight o’clock. You said you wanted to do puzzles and play games. You said, Mom, do you still have games at your house?
“You don’t have to wrap anything. It’s fine.”
It’s not fine.
My daughter and I sit at the table, each with a cordial glass. She gave me a lovely pink hibiscus-infused gin. It’s from a craft distillery near the North Dakota border, in the Red River Valley.
“The Red River flows north,” I say. “More than five hundred miles, into Lake Winnipeg.” It’s been a long day.
“Messed up like the rest of us,” she says. She’s sitting very straight in her chair, facing forward. Avoiding my gaze?
No. My gaze is not what she’s avoiding. I watched her bend to remove her boots when she got here. It was like watching her tear the bandage from a wound.
“Speaking of messed up,” I say. “Did you hear about that Cessna that crashed through the ice trying to land on a lake?”
“Yes. Crazy. They were rescued, though.”
“They were.”
If I canceled his phone line, I could cut my bill in half. Then there’s the landline. Four streaming services I rarely watch. Household memberships that could be one-person. I need to start saving for the trip I just now decided we're taking.
I hold up my glass. “Skol,” I say. “We’re flying to Norway this summer.”
Her great-grandmother, who kept her chickens alive during the Dust Bowl years with water from her sink, came over as an infant from that cold, beautiful land. The story is — who knows if it’s true — that her father’s sleigh fell through the ice as he was rushing to see his newborn child. He was not rescued.
My daughter’s eyes fill with tears. I reach for her hand.
“To the Midnight Sun. And to Dad.”
But I’m not toasting. I’m praying.
Mary, this is the most gorgeous, heartbreaking essay on grief. I’m sending you hugs. If we could all express ourselves so eloquently, the world would not be the equivalent of scorched cabbage. It’s unsettlingly warm here in Kentucky—at this rate if I plant spinach and chard now, I’ll have a bounty crop in eight weeks. I won’t but you get it. Cheers to your Norway trip, and your loves. I hope your 2024 is filled with peace, joy, and safety. And perhaps it’s not too much to pray for snow either.
Set moving piece, Mary. All the best in 2024. . .