There were no fewer days on the calendar between this recent Thanksgiving and Christmas than there were the winter before. I’m certain. I checked, several times. But this year, the extra daylight-savings hour somehow got lost in a relentless gale of obligations. It blew ahead just out of reach, elusive from when the time changed straight through the last week of December. I found myself in a constant sprint, grasping at its tail, forever two steps behind at each rotation of the clock. After several days of cold, continuous rain, the holidays arrived at their appointed dates. Not magically decked in the snow, but bringing at last a festive, peaceful end to the chase.
Momentum is a lost cat on the other side of Christmas. It wanders, petered out and aimless in its wake, no other goal except a warm, dry place to rest its weary head. Several days like this and far too many star-shaped sugar cookies later, a good friend comes to visit. We sit together by the fire, winding wool and winding down. If peaceful contemplation has a sound, it is the gentle click and slide of knitting needles on a winter’s night. The intermittent tap and snap of burning logs in the woodstove and, tonight, our words gently bridge the shrinking gap between the year just packing up to go and the new one knocking at the door. What to leave, and what to take? Our conversation in the aftermath of a season so consumed by excess centers around making space. Clearing out the old to give room to the new, both in their figurative and literal implications.
