Foggy finances

Thinking back to a December memory which is about nearly a quarter of a century old:

In those days, I caught a lift to the Unitarian Church every Sunday, sometimes accompanied by elder daughter.

I don't know how the subject came up but I was telling my lift about about flying to San Francisco in my pre-child days, and my growing terror when the plane took an eternity to rise through a bank of clouds.

Elder daughter, then four, listened gravely from the back seat, and announced: "My cloud-people get cloud-money.  They get it from the cloud-bank."

Difficult December people

There have been a number of key December birthdays, in my family -- none of whom are living now.  It occurred to me this morning that my grandmother would have 120 years old today.

Heavens, she would have been annoyed!  Towards the end of her long life, she was getting weary of living, as piece by piece, like books being removed from a shelf, the things she enjoyed were taken from her: reading, knitting, music...

Mind you, my other grandmother would have been a bit over 123 years, had she lived to today, but I never knew her.  It's odd, thinking how people I actually knew, who were parts of my life, would be impossibly old now.  It's even worse for the Resident Fan Boy, whose parents were well advanced in age by the time he was born.  My late father-in-law, another December birthday would be 111.  My father, also born in December, would be well into his nineties.

Evocations of these difficult December people glow like the Christmas lights, not bright enough to read by, but strong enough to draw me to a standstill.

A few heartbeats away

 

A few blocks from home, taking the scenic route, I look beyond one of the myriad "free little libraries" that are so popular in Victoria - you can glimpse it in the lower right hand corner of this photo, and see something else popular in the neighbourhood - red hearts. 

Since the pandemic started, red hearts are everywhere in Victoria: in the letterhead of local paper, painted on the manhole covers in Cook Street Village.

With the leaves blasted off the branches of the ancient twisted trees, these hearts pop, like living things against sleeping branches.

Taurus Moon on Mauve

Not quite a full moon
Clings to a lavender sky
Outside the kitchen

An Advent apple

April may be the cruelest month, but for younger daughter, November is the loooongest month, with little to break it up but Remembrance Day which isn't even a school holiday in Ontario. Last Friday, she came home from school and rustled around furtively in her DVD collection. I heard Christmas music and realized that she had noted that it was a month until Christmas and it is now permissible to break out the holiday movies. For someone with memory challenges and a radically different sense of time than the rest of us mortals, this was huge.

This morning, to younger daughter's intense relief, the Advent calendars came out: the permanent one that we set up in the living room, with books to be read aloud, then hung on the Christmas tree (when we set that up a week before Christmas); an online one this year sent to us by an Albertan cousin; tiny Christmas-card-size ones sent by Demeter, and the morning ritual of opening the large cardboard ones, in our bedrooms.

As a child, my very favourite Advent calendars were the ones where the doors opened to show what was happening behind; a meal being cooked in a kitchen, an animal hiding a present under a bush. I haven't seen those kinds in years, although this December I have a very traditional German calendar with rabbits and hedgehogs exchanging gifts under a brilliantly lit woodland tree and huge double-doors for Christmas Eve which will almost certainly reveal the Holy Family in the stable. Door Number One was an apple, which seems appropriately Lutheran somehow. (A casserole, perhaps, for American Lutherans?)

My shopping is only partially finished, and when I think ahead to the extra cooking and cleaning, I could almost wish November back -- except when I see the glow from the corner where younger daughter is. These are the most precious days of the year, a month when she is truly happy. When December ends, we will have to let go of Christmas to allow it to return. However, for her sake, and hers alone, I would keep Christmas all year if I could.