It’s not exactly light when we leave the house in the mornings now, but it’s definitely dark when I’m coming home. After a month of sunny autumn beauty, fall is sliding into winter in real-time. When the skies are clear at night, they look like black, black velvet, diamond-studded and pure, another world high overhead. When they’re overcast, the darkness is impenetrable; coming down around on all sides, a blanket fort. A grey heron flies across the road, his kink-necked, sword-billed head ridiculously far from his feet. The trees have dropped their summer pants, they look silly and half-dressed. The birches have no shame, they’re already stripped down and waving their bare arms overhead. The blood beech has turned over a new leaf: from ruby-black-red to a run-of-the-mill orangey-green. You can practically see the chlorophyll slurping back up into the branches, sucked through the straw of winter.
I’ve discovered over the years that the best way for me to deal with the darkness is to look beyond it. In about 2 months the worst will be over and the light will be increasing again. I can make it. I spend an awful lot of time these days brooding about mortality and inevitable aging, and the dark doesn’t help. It’s too conducive to brooding. The problem with looking beyond the darkness is that I’m unconsciously speeding through the time that I have. Do you see the problem? I tend to do the same thing at work and with my calendar-scheduling at home as well. I’m always looking ahead to what’s coming up and forgetting to live in the now. This leads to a lot of “Good lord, it’s Christmas again ALREADY??”-type exclamations. Or maybe time really DOES speed up as you age. Either way, it’s a good thing I have choir and singing to distract me because it leads me back to myself, and further back too, sometimes.
We’re singing Christmas songs at choir practice, several in English. Eva keeps asking me to read lyrics aloud so that everyone can hear how to pronounce things correctly. I think about all the different versions of White Christmas I have sung in my life, while I’m adding the newest one to my repetoire. 6 concerts are already planned for the end of November and beginning of December. I’ve pestered her thoroughly to add my favorite modern Christmas song to the program, and she’s promised to look at it again, so hopefully we’ll be singing it next week. I haven’t sung it with a choir since I was 17. Humming it to myself in the stairwell and belting it out in the car, my eyes are blind to my surroundings; they’re back in 1982 re-living good times with my extracurricular choir. There, Darkness, take that!
Really Great Writing Out There Right Now: It Was Wicked
Cake-filled, Candle-Blowing, Present-Wrapped Birthday Wishes to vember!