Small Wonder
If you live long enough, which I have, luckily, you reach a season in which holiday traditions or rituals come to their natural end. Time, heartbreak, death itself—they're all agents of this change, which we mightily resist when we know that moving on leaves something cherished behind.
My nuclear family, for example, no longer goes caroling in Victorian costume and four-part harmony because we’ve been missing the bass line, sung by my dad, since his death in 2016. (Damn cancer.) This year, my daughter and I are missing home-spun holiday concerts we’ve performed in for more than a decade, having relocated far from the community we called home for as many years. And this Christmas morning she will wake far from me—it’s not my holiday this year—and we will open gifts to each other, in our bed head and pajamas, over FaceTime, instead of in a joyous flurry of wrapping paper on the living room floor.
I guess that’s what we get for pouring so much heart into one place, right? That’s what we risk?
And so, I’ve been holding this month’s mindfulness prompts in my thoughts, day by day, listening around corners for those that speak to this sadness, this necessary departure from what was.
I don't want to distract myself from the loss I’m grieving (with retail therapy, overcommitment), and I don’t want to let rumination fester (by avoiding others, because merriment contrasts with my inner reality). There’s no cure, it seems, for knowing we can’t have what we once did.
I’ve found, though, through stubborn practice, that there is still wonder, all around me, if I take moments to notice it. This doesn’t replace what I’m missing, but it’s here now, with me, and I with it.
For example, my neighbor, an older woman who others say has retreated almost completely from public life since the passing of her husband, before I moved here, has some fragrant perennial thing blooming in her well-loved yard. I bask in its heavy scent when I walk by, after dropping my daughter at the bus stop in the still-waking light of morning. It’s citrusy and woody and floral and....insistent. Every morning I puzzle through it, peering over her fence line, stubborn about figuring out what it is, until there comes a day when I can casually ask her in person.
And just yesterday, I received in the mail a collection of hand-turned wood rings made of tree species native to my former home in Iowa. Their maker, Jon, is an easy-going, earnest, and very talented former mechanic and postal route driver. He and I are seasonal acquaintances, as we really only talked at length at the after-party of an annual holiday concert we each performed in, but we are kindred spirits in small wonders.
He calls his retirement gig Nut Job Earring Co., though he makes pendants, brooches, and rings, too, in his home workshop, in a shadowy glen so deep in the Driftless region cell reception can’t reach it, and snow plows take several days to prioritize the gravel road after big storms. Since I’ve requested a ring to wear as a conversation-starter, far from that place where I put down so many roots, I’m now an honorary N.(e)R.D. (Nut Job Research & Development), Jon writes. I’m supposed to wear his creations daily and send notes on how they hold up to hand-washing, how the water-based lacquer does or doesn’t prevent chipping and cracking. And anything that breaks, I should send back for mending.
My favorites are made of cherry burl and oak burl, respectively. Jon picked their origin wood for its unusual grain, for the way it lusters under a Dremel’s polish and hand-rubbed sealant. As I took off the cherry to wash my face before bed (I know, I’m tampering with the R&D variables!), I remembered: trees may form burls when they’re trying to grow around, smooth over, or close in injury (by insects, bacteria, fungi, freeze damage, or lightning strike, according to Google). The resulting prized burl grain is often wholly unique: disrupted, scrambled, curling around and through itself in fits and starts but growing nonetheless. It’s a portrait of change, marking loss, living anyway.
Wondrous, in fact.
