If ever there were a Christmas that felt like anything but, this is it.
We awakened early, shortly after 6:30; Wings headed downstairs first to build the fires. Before I got downstairs, I could hear him calling me, but I couldn’t quite visualize what I was hearing. He said the flor was covered with water.
He wasn’t kidding.
We have had far colder nights than last night. I did not forget to leave the taps dripping slightly; indeed, they were all still dripping steadily this morning. But something in the septic line froze, and everything backed up into the house.
There was an inch of standing water then; it wasn’t until much later in the day that I realized, based on the water staining of the plaster walls above the baseboards all around the house, that it must have been much deeper some hours before we awakened. The living room rug in ruined; countless towels are ruined; the grandkids’ gifts, tardy courtesy of other pressures over the last two weeks, but so carefully wrapped and beribboned? Ruined.
I would have wept, but there was no time.
Of course, last night saw the wrist of my dominant hand dislocate, so I was far less help than I might have been. Wings did the really heavy work this morning. We had the floors mostly dried out by shortly after noon; most thoroughly scrubbed a couple of hours thereafter. An emergency plumber? Here, on Christmas Day? No chance. But Wings is nothing if not persistent, and we believe that he isolated the problem at the very end of the afternoon. Tomorrow, he will try power-snaking the cleanouts and we’ll go from there.
But it doesn’t fix everything that has been destroyed.
And yet . . .
The cold outside is bitter, but an early moon rides high and bright, and there are fires blazing in both stoves. Dinner is in the oven, and we’ll be able to eat — an abbreviated version, but dinner all the same — within the hour. There are still gifts to be exchanged; oddly, our own to each seem to have survived, having been stacked atop the larger boxes for the kids. The tree is lit once more, and if it doesn’t feel like Christmas night, at least it feels warm and largely comfortable.
And we recognized, throughout the day, just how truly fortunate we are.
That, of course, is a bit easier to do when there is so much death and destruction, so much wanton genocide and incalculable loss, in the news every moments now. Neither of us can read the headlines related to Palestine, to Congo, to Sudan without realizing that today’s events, in the scheme of things, are a very small complaint. But those headlines also point up why we both rather expect that this would not have felt much like Christmas anyway: When a tradition’s holiest night of the year, in the very place where the deified object of that tradition was born, a Palestinian Jew of origins so humble that his birth occurred in a stable and his first crib was a manger, sees that place invaded purely as a show of genocidal force and its people wantonly slaughtered?
No, Bethlehem’s butcher’s bill last night is nothing like Gaza’s, but it’s an atrocity all the same.
There is nothing of peace or love to be found in such events, save for the solidarity of the survivors.
Such developments cannot but cast a pall over days of celebration, at least for anyone with a working heart and soul and conscience. And while Christmas Day has long been one of those that we observe as much in the breach as in fact, this day has been drastically different . . . and not only for the standing water all over the house in the middle of zero-degree wind chills. For all that adults are counseled to appreciate that special moment or two that sneaks upon one as the true gift of the day, today’s such moments were several, and very, very different.
The subject of this week’s Monday Photo Meditation, the image above, dates back eleven years almost to the very day: one of Wings’s extended series of phtos caught at the end of the very first day of the new calendar year in 2013. The dwarf blue spruce in the foreground was indeed tiny then; now, it’s much taller, its twinned tips reaching to the top of the latillas behind it. There is snow on the ground still — a little — but none falling from the sky this evening, although late afternoon unexpectedly brought new ground cover to the tops of the peaks. The sun, though still shimmers, if not quite with the magic that snowfire presents us, and moonrise this evening was unexpectedly clear, bright, and breathtakingly beautiful.
All of those are such moments.
Sacred moments and an ornamental snow, a beauty that no tinsel could ever touch accompanied by a little joy, a lot of awe, and a sudden deep feeling of gratitude.
But there were other such moments, ones birthed in the repeated realization that today’s inconvenience was just that: an inconvenience, nothing we haven’t already faced together, and nothing we didn’t manage to handle in near-perfect unity this day. There were others, too, moments of sadness, of deep mourning for those under siege, for those whose lives, ended far too soon, will never know another chance to see such beauty as this world can provide.
And there were moments of renewed commitment, to what we know to be right, to what weknow will be required of us, to a revolutionary solidarity and generosity together, to the seeking of wisdom and the practice of deep, deep love.
Maybe this was the real Christmas after all.
~ Aji
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