behold, how good and how pleasant

*Two letters in the mailbox yesterday, where I didn’t really expect one. 

*A fire that flames up in the fireplace at night when there is no spectator but an inscrutible black cat — and my occasional self standing in the shadow at the end of the hall and regretting the firelight that no one sees.

*Wild and outlandish shoes on a sale rack — no, I didn’t buy any.

*Books that hold my attention and insist I keep reading: Leif Enger’s So Brave, Young and Handsome for one.  Read it.

*Books that have held my attention so many times that I don’t have to read the words on the page: for instance, Eric Kinkaid’s Book of Nursery Rhymes, which I received for my first, and also for my twenty-first, Christmas.   I’ll read it to you, and you can look at the pictures.

*A little girl who runs up to me after church to show me her new American Girl doll and explain its many outfits and its turquoise eyes.

*A family who always heat the water for my cup of tea when they hear me stirring in the morning.

*Pictures from far-away friends, and all of the things I may imagine around the pictures.

*Being ranked, in one list of authors, with Dickens and Shakespeare. 

*Also this, which will not be ignored, and which all of the above things drive home to me, though I do not want always to remember it:

As for God, His way is blameless;
The word of the Lord is tried;
He is a shield to all who take refuge in Him.
~Psalm 18:30

towards christmas

Today a pine cone fell from a wreath and knocked our string of olive-wood camels down from a high shelf into pieces on the floor.  The olive-wood camels — three of them in graduated sizes, chained together with a donkey leading – have processed along some shelf or other every Christmas in my memory.  Somehow, seeing them splintered across the oaken floor, I felt Christmas itself had been thus cast down — and by a mere pine cone!  They will be glued. 

I haven’t had time to formulate thoughts for general digestion of late, but the camels reminded me of  the following poem by T. S. Eliot, which I like better with each reading:

Journey of the Magi

‘A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.’
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation,
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness
And three trees on the low sky.
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no  information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you might say) satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

myself, at home

Wood-smoke-scented.  Surrounded by wrapping paper.  Vying with a black cat for the best seat in front of the fireplace.  Baking wondrous things which the family may not taste for they all go promptly into gift bags. (The antecedent of “they” is “things” not “family”.)   Looking out of large windows at a rain-soaked world in shades of rust-brown and gray.   Playing carols at a familiar little piano that sounds always loud in a big tiled room where ornaments shine on a real Christmas tree.  Stirring and blowing on coals in the fireplace, watching the dance of flames, wondering about things that have been and things that may be.

dappled

Two words of summation for myself today: pensive and vicissitudinous.
And as I engage in deep thoughtfulness about my variations, this comes to mind:

Pied Beauty, Gerard Manley Hopkins

Glory be to God for dappled things -
  For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
    For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut falls; finches’ wings;
  Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
    And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
  Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
    With swift, slow; sweet, sour, adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
                   Praise him.

“ … the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation, or shifting shadow.” James 1:17

When I go outside, I can feel the cold air inside my head.  And it makes coming in entirely nice – warmth, and Christmas decorations, and everyone alive in perhaps a different way than usual because it is cold and this is finals week. 

A week ago, or more, someone sat in the rocking chair under my window and sang Christmas carols at midnight.  “Silent Night,” to the squeak, squeak of the chair.  She didn’t know, I suspect, that I could hear her. 

I asked someone at the copy machine today to exchange a nickel for my five pennies, but she gave me a dime and refused my coins.  Which was nice of her.

All the library books I’m not supposed to be reading right now exert an irresistible force over me.  But I don’t mind it much.

I finished Housekeeping, but before we leave it entirely, this: ”For why do our thoughts turn to some gesture of a hand, the fall of a sleeve, some corner of a room on a particular anonymous afternoon, even when we are asleep, and even when we are so old our thoughts have abandoned other business?”  What are all these fragments for, if not to be knit up finally?” -Marilynne Robinson