Moving house

I have moved here. Posts from this blog will migrate over time.

One year

How has it been a year (yesterday) already?

Mimi, you are still with me every day.

Christmas

This is the story I told at Mimi's memorial service:

In 1987 in Vermont, for midnight mass we went to the Unitarian church in the upper village. Mimi frequently attended there because it was so much closer than the nearest Episcopal church. The church is up on a hill next to a farmhouse and barn, and the farmer had a live Nativity scene for after the service.

The closing hymn was "O Come All Ye Faithful"---we started singing and filed out into the night. In the barn there were some local kids in their parents' bathrobes with towels on their heads, grinning. There were some sheep and a surly-looking goat. A cow chewed quietly, and the pony was adorable in its shaggy winter coat.

I was walking with Mimi when we left the barn. It had started to snow in big clumps, and the streetlight shone pink. We were on the final verse of the carol. She took my arm and we sang at the top of our lungs as we marched down the hill in the snow:

Yea, Lord, we greet thee!
Born this happy morning,
Jesus, to Thee be glory given;
Word of the Father,
Now in flesh appearing:
O come let us adore Him
O come let us adore Him
O come let us adore Him
Christ the Lord

One way in which my life diverges from that of a famous dancer

When I was a teenager, I went through a brief phase of loving Dr. Who. And I wanted that scarf---or, rather, a long long scarf that would trail on the ground when I walked.

(Beth had given me her old 60s-vintage dress coat, black trimmed in black velvet. Wouldn't that have been grand with a giant scarf?)

I showed Grandmom the program. "Long, like that," I said, "but with black and grey stripes."

"YOU CAN'T HAVE THAT LONG SCARF," Mom said.
"Why not?" says I.
"BECAUSE ISADORA DUNCAN DIED FROM A BROKEN NECK WHEN SHE WORE A LONG SCARF IN A CONVERTIBLE."

I did wonder about this, not being a person who ever rode in convertibles.

"Oh, I'll knit her a safe scarf," Grandmom said.

And she did: she used grey and brown variegated yarn, so it had wodges of color instead of stripes.

And she made it very, very safe.

If I stretched real hard, it went twice around my neck, with tails that hung all the way down to my collarbones.

So I'm glad to say that I did not break my neck from wearing that scarf.

So many Christmas memories!

Grandmom and Granpop went to a tiny country Methodist church up on the hill that had a Christmas party every year with Santa. Each child got a small wrapped present and one of those old-fashioned stockings containing an orange, a candy cane, and a handful of chocolates. It was way better than Santa's helpers at the mall: because there were not many children (it was a Baptist kind of town), we got pretty much all the time we wanted to babble about how very very very very good we'd been and how very very very much we wanted a pony or a chemistry set.*

The year I was 7-ish, my dad excused himself to go to the bathroom right as we were ending the singing part. "Hurry back!" I said, because Santa would be there any minute.

We stopped singing. Santa came out and no Dad! Several kids went up. My sister (3-ish) went up to sit on his lap, and she howled and screamed in fright, which for some strange reason made Santa laugh a lot. This only made Lissa scream some more, until she finally wriggled out of his lap and ran away. My grandmother was giggling as she took Lissa's present. I was worried about my daddy having tummy troubles in the bathroom, and then it was my turn.

I sat on Santa's lap and thought what a very good Santa's helper he was. He had nice eyes, like my dad's eyes. He was very jolly: I could hear him trying not to laugh when he asked me what I wanted for Christmas. I rattled off whatever I wanted that year, while my wee brain began to form a suspicion that perhaps my daddy was not in fact in the bathroom. I stopped in my list.

"Is that all you want?" the Santa asked. And that was it. This was definitely my father. I squinched up my eyes and nodded.

Back in the pew, I stared longingly at the chocolates in my stocking and worked myself into a high dudgeon. The nerve! Santa's helpers were supposed to be anonymous and from the North Pole, not your own dad.

I was, however, smart enough to keep my yap shut until Lissa had gone to bed. I was familiar with the process of hand meeting fanny and how to avoid such.

"That was you!" I yelled.
"What are you talking about?"
"You were Santa!"
"I was not. I was in the bathroom."
"You were! Grandmom was laughing and that was you."
"That kind of doubt is the kind of thing that makes Santa take presents away."

Argument ended, thank you very much. Many years later, we laughed a lot about how my sister screamed.

*Several years later, I did get a chemistry set, and I spent many happy hours turning liquid from white to purple and back again.

Making the ephemeral last

(When I went home for Thanksgiving, Mom had a bag of Mimi's clothes for us to go through, sent down by my aunts. Because I had written about Mimi's Keds, they sent 2 pair for me: one khaki, one light blue. We have the same shoe size. I shall wear them all next summer, if I can possibly do so without filling them with tears.)

Christmas 1987, when we all met up in Vermont, there was so much snow ... maybe not to a Vermonter's eye, but definitely a winter wonderland for a North Carolina girl.

We made a lumpy snow maiden outside the dining-room window, dressed in things from the dress-up box in the sleeping porch.

I don't know whose idea it was---one of the dads?---to pour a pan of water over the snow maiden, but they did one afternoon, late, just before the sun went down. We inspected her the next day and she was an absolute block of ice.

When we got to Vermont that summer, Mimi had a picture in her album of the snow maiden in April, still standing and just then starting to get mushy, surrounded by green grass.

Strangely, this was never in style

One weekend we drove up to Norwood without checking the weather forecast. We drove up Friday night, went to bed, and woke up in the morning to see our breath misting in front of our faces, and there were several inches of snow on the ground.

My brother was about 2, which would've made me 14 and my sister 10. And we were desperate to get out into the snow, with nary a glove, a hat, or a snow boot among us.

I could wear Grandmom's boots, coat, and gloves, and I had a scarf wrapped around my head. I remember grousing about not being able to wear my own jacket, but in the end, snow won out over teenage fashion trauma. Lissa grumbled too, because everything she had on was too big: she had on like 3 pairs of socks inside Grandmom's rain boots, and she could hardly walk.

My brother had a coat but no shoes to wear. We stood around for a minute, pondering, while he bounced up and down at the window making one of those toddler sounds that's most audible to dogs. Finally, Grandmom decided that we would rubberband plastic bread bags around his legs.

He did not love this idea.

But when the violent operation was over, I carried him howling outside into the snow and plopped him down in it. In 3.9 seconds he had forgotten that he was wearing food packaging. We built a lopsided snowman. It even had a carrot nose.