First Snow

Snow fell last night and this morning the roads and sidewalks and the old cemetery behind my house were all white. It’s pretty much all gone now --- just drizzly rain at the moment --- but there is something lovely about that first snowfall. Especially because I work at home and don’t have to go out in it.

It’s actually sort of funny to even refer to this as snow. Over the weekend I watched Smilla’s Sense of Snow which is one of my favorite movies and worth watching just for the scenery filmed in Greenland (a misnomer if ever there was one!) I’ve watched that movie half a dozen times. Julia Ormond is lovely and has the most gorgeous wardrobe I’ve ever seen in this movie --- well, to my taste anyway. It has an outstanding cast including Richard Harris, Robert Loggia, Vanessa Redgrave, Tom Wilkinson, Jim Broadbent and the ever-luscious Gabriel Byrne who does more for black turtleneck sweaters than seems allowable. The scene where he and Julia Ormond are snuggled up the-morning-after and she is teaching him words in Inuit just melts me. She says a basically unpronouncable word and then tells him it means “a shipwrecked person” and he says “you’re not shipwrecked” and --- whew --- snow doesn’t stand a chance.

So, even as I type this the snow is disappearing and rain is falling. It is a cold, dreary December day and I have a lot of work ahead of me which I am grateful for. I have hot coffee and warm toast and Thomas Tallis on the CD and am wearing a newly-finished handknit lace sweater in a deep ruby red that is warm and cozy.

I have a love/hate relationship with December. I love the weather in November and December because here it is usually cold and clear with gorgeous late afternoon sunlight and the color of the ocean is almost surreal. But I also am prone to Christmas blues and that is a thing that mystifies me. When I was young Christmas was a very big deal but as I entered my teens I started having problems with it that I’ve never really understood. For years I coped with it by becoming over-zealous --- going nuts with presents and decorating and all that stuff. I’d fly home to Pennsylvania or spend the holidays woth a group of friends somewhere else. It always winded up being exhausting.

Then a few years ago I stopped doing that and focused on doing lovely things --- going to concerts, planning lunches with friends, attending lots of parties. But often I found myself pushing myself to participate in those things and I don’t know why. Last year I avoided the entire season by packing up my stuff and relocating to Walker Hancock’s beautiful old studio in the woods behind Lanesville. I built a fire in the woodstove, made tea and soup, I spent endless hours working on the manuscript of The Old Mermaid’s Tale, I walked in the woods and threw stones in the quarry and was a complete hermit. It was great.

But this year I want to stay here and just face the holidays on my own. I’m knitting presents for a few people that I will send off well in advance. And I am going to a couple parties. But mostly I just want to watch movies and write and read and be quiet and accept that it is just fine to not go crazy with stuff and activities and all the things that so many people think are the point of the holidays. I’m at the point where I can honestly say I’m just too old for all that carrying-on.

This has been a strange year. Losing my father in February meant half the year was somethig of a blur. I know I am still not over the sadness of that. For a lot of years I drove back to Pennsylvania just to be with him for a few days. To cook and talk and read and watch old movies together. We always watched To Kill A Mockingbird, Mogambo, and The Quiet Man. I can never see those movies without thinking of him. He chose my name after Maureen O’Hara’s character in The Quiet Man.

So the first snow has come and pretty much gone while I wrote these words. I miss my father. I want to be quiet and alone in my lovely, December world and write. I have a right, at this point in my life, to meet the holidays on my own terms. I am not shipwrecked.

Thanks for reading.