crazywonderful

once upon a time, in a land closer than you’ve been led to believe, there lived a girl. well, a woman, really, though she was having some difficulty grasping this concept (and several other concepts, but that’s another story). this woman hadn’t written a christmas letter in a while, and after a couple of years laying fallow, she’d almost forgotten how.
she was convinced there was no graceful way to summarize the detours, u-turns, pit stops, jarring truths and moments of grace on the path from there to here. but she tried anyway and managed to put together a decent letter, one that came out more easily than she had anticipated, one she was quite pleased with, one that was permanently deleted from her hard drive moments later when her computer crashed (neatly summing up the kind of year it had been exactly). our quick-witted heroine then did what anyone in the face of adversity and strapped for cash or time or sanity would: gave up. after swearing a few times. very loudly.
’twas but two nights later that she was letting her brother into the parking garage when what to her wondering ears should appear but a short, round, jolly old man and – from the back seat of his car – bagpipes, which he’d presumably been banned from practicing inside his apartment. thus she found herself exiting the West-End Underground Bagpipe Christmas Carol Medley Extravaganza (ONE SHOW ONLY!) just as Silent Night began reverberating ironically around the concrete lot. this had absolutely nothing to do with her christmas letter, but it did make her smile for quite a long time afterwards.
five or six days after her correspondence had been destroyed by a fatal combination of microsoft products, dana came home from work to a stack of cards in her mailbox. from four of her favourite people were four envelopes, oversized and satisfyingly heavy and outnumbering the bills by a factor of two. they were so collectively impressive that she couldn’t start opening them – she put them beside her while she sat, full of anticipation, and (re)wrote her christmas letter.
(while writing, she was, we will admit, somewhat preoccupied with imagining how many of the cards might have pictures in them. she bet herself there were at least two.)
there were significant events to relay, including the end of the relationship she’d been in for seven years, moving downtown, changing jobs, working with her younger brother in vancouver’s financial district, turning thirty and other mind-bending, life-altering items, but what she wanted most was to wish a wonderful, merry christmas and a peaceful new year to the people who were always on her list, even when she didn’t send letters. so she did.
and then she dug into that perfect, patiently waiting stack of cards.
love,
d.
ps. as it turned out, three of the four had pictures. she was a fortunate woman indeed.
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questioning/examining:
was it my goal all along to become asha’s single mom?
grateful/relieved:
for my cat, very near.
regret/deny:
needing to pull duct tape off my towel in order to dry my hair this morning.
musing/reflecting:
looking at pictures taken days before moving out at the end of the summer from your former porch three days before christmas in your new apartment is a bad idea.
whistling/humming:
bessie smith – norah jones
absorbed in:
a blind man can see how much i love you – amy bloom
shout out to:
my brother, who told me that the cookies i baked were so good that if we passed a homeless person, he’d consider giving them one, and then he wouldn’t.