modern woman

on the list of things to do today:

- shower, get dressed in business-appropriate attire 

- make coffee

- review materials for client meeting and make notes

- start a sewing project

- send off invoice for previous writing gig

- gather things into classy attache for meeting

- go to said meeting, discuss a series of four newsletter publications

- rush to mother-in-law's house and wrap all of her Christmas gifts for her

- eat dinner

- drive home

- pour a glass of wine

- finish sewing project

- sleep

the annual christmas gathering

In bed at 3 o'clock in the morning for the second night in a row and am feeling just as alert and wide-awake as I did this time yesterday.

Tonight my best friends came over and we drank mulled wine and ate way too much food. We gave each other Christmas gifts and baked treats and little handmade treasures. We talked and laughed until late. Our old jokes are still successful, but we continue to add stories, share experiences, and find common ground to string our decades-long friendships out even longer, year upon year. I sometimes think that we are not at all the same people we used to be -- that we've all learned and moved forward (or sometimes backward) and adapted to be a completely new set of people. And we're still friends, even now, after all of that adaptation. It's like being part of a family in that you really have no choice but to accept and rely on these people. It is a love we will always share.

After the food had been eaten and the presents had been given, we all gasped and gathered around the living room window to look out at the street as new snow fell out of the sky. After we'd just had a discussion about how disappointing it will be to have a brown Christmas this year. It felt like we were in a movie.

And now the dishes are all done (a miracle I had the gumption to do them tonight and not leave them until tomorrow, a mess of crusted-on remnants and wine-stained china mugs), and I've unplugged the lights on the Christmas tree and the strand I'd draped across the top of the piano. I've brushed my teeth and put on my coziest pyjamas and have crawled into bed.

It has been a most excellent winter's night.

the day before a christmas party

Today while the dog comes in and out of the room sighing, I am attempting to be productive. I ploughed through 40 work emails, managed to have a shower (a special delight, I know). Now I'm going to try to clean the whole house, all at once -- a task I have never been good at accomplishing.

pre-christmas malady

After a weekend of fighting it, I've succumbed fully to the flu.

Meanwhile, the dog is restless -- she wants to go for long walks and have me scramble around with her in the yard, but I can't do those things until I can get myself out of bed. Even at this second, she is licking my fingers while I type and nudging my hands with her nose. And her long tail is curled around my feet like a snake.

And the house sits in disarray and the emails pile up in my inbox.

The sun is shining on the snow in the yard, though. If there were any birds to sing, they'd be singing, I'm sure.

also, today:

I watched the newer Pride & Prejudice. I did it while starching snowflakes (which, by the way, is an entirely too long and involved process and takes much more time than you'd think).

The landscapes in that movie are breathtaking. Eric came home halfway through and sat with me and didn't make fun of me when I mouthed some of the dialogue along with the actors. And how I kept narrating like my dad does during movies.

But it was lovely and makes me think back to sitting in a cafe in my little hometown, devouring the second half of the book in one afternoon. That was the first time I'd read it, and the first time I'd ever been served a real coffee with latte art. And I sat by the window, drenched in sun, drinking coffee and reading for hours. What a perfect memory.

update on a little to-do list

things accomplished december 9th:

- finished crocheting the pink scarf
- starched three snowflakes
- purchased Christmas tree

and a bonus: took the dog for a two-hour walk through a neighbourhood I hadn't walked through yet.

so the day wasn't a bust.
and I'll try again tomorrow for all the other things.

an honest list

to do on friday, december 9th:

- respond to all of the work emails and all of their associated tasks
- make a test batch of vanilla-cinnamon candied nuts
- finish crocheting the pink scarf
- starch four snowflake ornaments
- clear off the desk
- read the National Geographic impulse-bought at the gas station
- purchase a Christmas tree

abandoned farm

Yesterday I took my horse on a ride (or rather, he took me) through a new winter landscape. A countryside we haven't explored before. Winter this year has come on gently; no parka, no scarf wrapped up to my eyeballs. And the snow -- it's different this year. The stubble of last year's crops rises above its soft surface. It only lies deep where the forest protects it from the wind (and we rode through there, too).

I kept looking around and thinking about how things lie dormant. How they never really die, they just close themselves up and wait. There is nothing more patient than winter trees. They know the verdant life they hold inside of themselves, and they close it up and hold it tight and wait. They hold in their crooks the brambling nests of hawks, empty -- abandoned. The forest waits in silence for a season it knows in its bones will come again.

Unsure where to go in this unfamiliar wood, we followed a fence line, which took us past an old farm. The house was small, but two stories, and had at one point been painted yellow. The windows were all dark, some smashed in. Everything looked broken and warn. The shed had a collapsed roof; the big red barn had collapsed from underneath itself: the loft and roof were still intact, but the base of the structure was gone. The snow in the farmyard was undisturbed.

I looked at this scene and imagined who might have lived there. A family, in the house they built themselves and painted yellow. A clothesline, a dog. Kids running out to the barn to do their chores. Pioneers. Hard work. Their prairie lives, like the one I lie awake and think about late at night. Forging a home through the wilderness, through a stark winter with only a wood-burning stove to warm them. Only their determination to make things work.

Where did they go? Why did they abandon their life on this farm? Everything looked so right. Like it had once been idyllic. Can it ever return?

I wondered if someday someone would come across my own home and wonder the same things about the place we've left behind. What will they know about my life?

tread softly

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths,
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

W.B. Yeats (1865-1939)