*My tiny clay pot has a Christmas tree growing in it.  Who knew that a stately Christmas tree begins slender and smooth as a blade of a grass?  That that slender blade bursts into a cluster of needles at its top, new-green and wild?   But how should I, quite skeptical of any produce from the planting, avoid being surprised at what grows?  Surprised and glad.

*There is a degree of coldness which makes me feel as though I have ice instead of bones in my hands.  This, though certainly a quickening sensation, is not my favorite thing, especially when I am driving and have forgotten my gloves.

*”Where are my ribs?”  This, from a brown-eyed first-grader, who had proudly announced, a few minutes before, that she knew how to tell time.  I suppose, even in the beginning, there was time before there were ribs, but I never thought it until today.

*I yesterday saw a frozen fountain.  In some parts of the world this is, no doubt, routine, but I am not in the habit of seeing sheets of ice hanging where water generally falls: it was exciting.

*George Eliot, via her novel Romola, has been a pleasant companion lately.  I like her way of saying things.  This, for instance:  For the human soul is hospitable, and will entertain contradictory opinions with much impartiality. Just now I exemplify the statement, entertaining at once the contradictory desires of sleeping and writing.  My impartiality results in compromise: I have written; now I will sleep.

Cold, cold day, as days go in Mississippi.   Snow drifted down the grey sky all the morning, making the otherwise sharp air seem a kinder thing.  Though no snow stuck on the hardening mud, it was still somehow consolation for toes and noses over-chilled.   And down along the driveway, in brown curls of leaves, tiny mounds of snow collected and remained – as though some prodigal with a sugar-bowl had passed there – to be discovered on my afternoon pilgrimage to the mailbox.  

Ah, behold, it was very good. 

“A family of [thirteen] children will always be called a fine family, where there are heads and arms and legs enough for the number.”  -Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

Miss Austen said “ten children,” but it suits my purposes to say thirteen, as I will soon be amongst such a family, wherein I am thirteenth of the forty-six grandchildren born to the thirteen children.   We must certainly be called a fine family, for we are duly possessed of all proper appendages, however well or poorly we may employ them.   We are all, however, well endowed with an awareness of the distinction of belonging to such a family. 

Traditions cannot be very numerous when there are such large numbers to keep them; nonetheless, in two days we will gather for the traditional pot of potato soup and the traditional roasts and rolls, the traditional sittings for the annual snap-shot of each family, the traditional ripping of wrapping paper, the traditional noise of many children, and the traditional passing of babies from hand to hand.  There will be those who know everyone’s name, and those who only remember their own names, those who will not stop talking, and those who will not be made to talk.  Some will enjoy it immensely, and some will not.  But none will leave without being a bit astonished, I suspect, at our numbers; all must certainly realize that there is a certain importance in belonging to such a family.  I hope they will be glad; I intend to be.

Playing a piano arrangement of “What Child Is This?”  For me the flow of the melody always joins with images of shining things among evergreen branches, scents of wood smoke, peppermint and cinnamon, the glow of stained-glass in a red-carpeted sanctuary.  In my mind, its words also play, mingling and overlapping with the words of “Greensleeves”:

What Child is this?  You do me wrong!
…
Greensleeves was my heart of gold,
The Babe, the son of Mary.

In a library book of folk songs from the British Isles I years ago read that legend attributes “Greensleeves” to Henry VIII; it was written for one of his mistresses, perhaps for Anne Boleyn.  Though stating that there was slim proof for that story, the book indicated that the original lyrics were not, perhaps, the cleanest.  The Lady Greensleeves, whoever she might have been, likely wasn’t the most lady-like of ladies.

And what was Mary?  A virgin?  With child?  There were some who knew and believed that to be true, but the rest, no doubt, esteemed her to be a fallen woman, looked down upon her more, than the English court would have looked down upon Lady Greensleeves.  “Why lies He in such mean estate?” certainly!  The King of kings comes bringing salvation, and He comes already bearing this smut of supposed immorality?  Really?  Would we not have imagined the salvation-bringer coming in purity and splendor?  What Child is this, born into scandal and poverty?  We would have given Him untainted followers, new songs all His own, but here He is, with a train of made-over prostitutes and tax-gatherers and demoniacs, to be hailed by a made-over song of amorous intent.

Ah, yes, but they have been made new!  All of them ran after other objects, none were pure or righteous or good, but now — now, they are His!  And, in so far as their pasts are remembered, it serves only to highlight what He has done: they who were dirty, full of unclean passions and vices, now point only to Him who has made them otherwise.  Nails, spear have pierced Him through, the cross been borne for their transgressions.  The love of the Word-made-flesh has covered their sins.

This, this is Christ the King!
[For whom but my lady Greensleeves?]

gladness

*A lovely meal and lovely friends in a warm apartment.

*Firewood loaded on a truck and stacked beside the house this morning:  satisfaction of good work having been done.

*Tiny Christmas-wreaths crocheted.

*A college literature class attended: a now-rare delight.

*Tea with my mom beside a crackling fire.

*Cars washed — in 40 degree weather: fun as a novelty.

*Friends in the Student Center at Belhaven University.

*Student Missions Fellowship: singing, hearing of missions in Japan, seeing old friends.

*A drive over dim roads.

Usually, I don’t get to do all of these things in the space of a single day — many of them are very rare indeed — but today was made quite full by the list above, and other things.  There is something excessively wonderful about going back to a place once called home and finding it still to be home.  Oh, welcoming smiles, and grins at jokes shared across a room, and people who still make me laugh delightedly, though I don’t see them every day any longer!  And then the steady comfort of the home where I live, and of family! 

All this, in the time that is passing away, all this, and only seeing in a mirror dimly … when the perfect comes, and this partial is done away, oh! how shall it be then?  Gladness is a word too small.

cultivating Christmas trees

A friend recently gave me a grow-your-own-Christmas-tree kit.  I added water to the condensed pellet of dirt and watched it grow to fill the tiny clay pot.  If the tree had grown at such a rate, it would be nearly large enough for lights and ornaments by now.   Well, but it didn’t.  I carefully followed the directions: interring  five tiny seeds in the moist earth and setting the pot in a sunny place.  Currently I have a lovely little pot full of earth, and the hope of a tree sprout sometime in the future, perhaps.  So many things are like that: instructions followed perfectly, all conditions and stipulations met, but the ultimate result utterly beyond our direction.  And so we sit and stare at the clay pots and wonder if we’ll ever see the bit of green for which we look …

It being December now, I feel I may safely type another Eliot Christmas poem.  (I did it last December, for those of you who read this then.)   Last year, this poem didn’t make sense to me, but it’s been growing on me since then.   Inspired by my recent tree-planting, I read it again recently, and have been waiting for December to share it here:

The Cultivation of Christmas Trees

The are several attitudes towards Christmas,
Some of which we may disregard:
The social, the torpid, the patently commercial,
The rowdy (the pubs being open till midnight),
And the childish — which is not that of the child
For whom the candle is a star, and the gilded angel
Spreading its wings at the summit of the tree
Is not only a decoration, but an angel.
The child wonders at the Christmas Tree:
Let him continue in the spirit of wonder
At the Feast as an event not accepted as a pretext;
So that the glittering rapture, the amazement
Of the first-remembered Christmas Tree,
So that the surprises, delight in new possessions
(Each one with its peculiar and exciting smell),
The expectation of the goose or turkey
And the expected awe on its appearance,
So that the reverence and the gaiety
May not be forgotten in later experience,
In the bored habituation, the fatigue, the tedium,
The awareness of death, the consciousness of failure,
Or in the piety of the convert
Which may be tainted with self-conceit
Displeasing to God and disrespectful to the children
(And here I remember also with gratitude
St. Lucy, her carol, and her crown of fire):
So that before the end, the eightieth Christmas
(By “eightieth” meaning whichever is the last)
The accumulated memories of annual emotion
May be concentrated into a great joy
Which shall be also a great fear, as on the occasion
When fear came upon every soul:
Because the beginning shall remind us of the end
And the first coming of the second coming.
-T.S. Eliot, 1954

So many things I’ve wanted to write, to trace their connections, to somehow combine the bits of thought together into some useful whole.  But the thoughts fall and scatter and lie in disarray like the pine needles outside my window: some layered atop one another, some sticking straight up out of the grass.  We raked the needles up a few weeks ago, and spread them again in flower beds.  It took time, many stoppings to clean the rake of a tangle of needles; I acquired blisters at the bases of my thumbs; my back ached … Oh, writing is not for the lazy one, and I have been lazy of late.  The grass of my mind is blanketed with fallen thoughts and I hardly know where to begin raking them up and moving them elsewhere, let alone burning them, as we did to the leaves we also raked from the yard.

Tonight I have neither time nor wakefulness for such a work, and so shall content myself with sharing autumnal poetry.  This is the first Hopkins poem I ever read; it was printed — unlikely thing! — on the back of a Sunday school handout.  I loved it, and it later became the topic of one of my first college essays.  I’ll spare you — and myself — the essay, but here is the poem:

Spring and Fall:
to a Young Child

Márgarét, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Áh! ás the heart grows older,
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed.
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

-Gerard Manley Hopkins, Poems, 1918

“Don’t be led away by those howls about realism.   Remember, pine woods are just as real as pigsties, and a darn sight pleasanter to be in.” 
–L.M. Montgomery, Emily’s Quest

Thank you, Maud Montgomery!

“‘ The time will come — the time will come,’ said Cousin Jimmy encouragingly.  ‘Wait a while — just wait a while.  If we don’t chase things — sometimes the things following us can catch up.’”
–L.M. Montgomery, Emily Climbs

In case you have questions about my mental context for this, here’s what I had in mind:

“Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done and what I had toiled to achieve, everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind; nothing was gained under the sun.”  –Ecclesiastes 2:11 (NIV)

“Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me
all the days of my life,
and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord
forever.”
–Psalm 23:6 (ESV)

looking

Today I drove past the road-reflector-sticking crew: a truck with flashing lights pulling a very ordinary trailer on the corner of which crouched two men, one with a tar gun and one with reflectors.  The truck drove very slowly, stopping every so often for the tar-gun man to squirt a spot of tar and the reflector man to put a reflector on it.   Imagine doing that for miles and miles of road!  Ah, but tonight there were the reflectors, like a string of stars winding with the road, and if any of the reflector crew happened to see it, I’m sure they were glad.

After the reflector crew was left behind this morning, I drove past an old man in a blue plaid shirt and straw hat, who seemed to be hunting treasure in the highway median.   As I came along he bent and picked up some small something and put it in his pocket, and then straightened himself and walked placidly on, just as if he were in a field on his own farm instead of in a median.  Under his hat, the sun reflected off his glasses.

The medians and ditches are striped with the brown remains of last week’s mowing.  On a kudzu-covered hill, I saw a little mowed green path climbing up and disappearing into the trees, and I wanted to follow it.  Where trees overhang the narrower roads, leaves come spinning down and down with the smallest wind.  They lie on the road, enticing feet to come and crunch them.

Everything is picturesque in the fall.  Faded things fit with the tone of the landscape; even a declining strip mall matched the mood today and seemed neither ugly nor dismal.   Yellow cautionary signs and the center lines on the roads no longer stick out as man’s impositions on the scenery, but instead seem to have grown out of nature’s color palette.   It is a world wherein tips of tree-branches are tinged with rust and the moon is a large yellow gibbous in the blackness above blacker trees.  I am glad.