Christmas on the Continent's Edge

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Santa Installation, somewhere in PDX

I have spent a lot of Christmases alone, waking late in the morning after singing midnight services, walking the dogs through snowy trails, or doe-brown trails, making the batter for a coffee cake, listening to the previous year's Lessons and Carols at Westminster. Waiting for J. to come home.

Two Christmases since he was born has he been with me--once in 2015, once in 2005 when he was only 6 months old.

I have spent a lot of Christmases alone, but I have also had the grace of adopted chosen families who have taken me in Christmas eve, who've had me and J. over for Christmas dinner.

This has been the hardest year since that first year I was alone and had no idea if the future existed, but I am not lonely. J. will be home after New Year's, his face flashing on my phone screen. We are all alone this year, though I am not lonely. 

In 2007, I walked home after midnight service through Bronson park, through ankle-high snow, families strolling hand-in-hand, children playing. I came home, put Mr. Bill who was barely a few months old on his leash, and walked him back through the snow. I cried so hard I could barely see in front of me, the puppy joyfully nosing through the snow. Tonight, he happily chased a tennis ball through the living room, moving slowly and losing the ball as soon as it rolled into shadows, his arthritic legs splaying beneath him when he stumbled into his bed. He is 13 years old, mostly blind, definitely hard of hearing (though NOT for the sound of food hitting his bowl). 

Today R. and I drove along the ridge of the West Hills to Scappoose, watched a movie on the couch. Last weekend, we had Christmas, the four of us. D. and I made gingerbread cake, whipped cream. 

Sometimes the universe suspends you outside of time and you can see time snaked around itself: me at 30, Mr Bill at 1 in our little South Street apartment, my tiny Christmas tree, my heart rent because my baby wasn't home. Me, at 43, Bill 13, my boy still not here but only for a little bit, here in my dirty kitchen in Portland, a hard rain falling outside. What I have lost is a singing career in a small city where opportunity abounded; I lost a quartet where we could anticipate each other's breaths, where we knew instinctively how to modulate our voices to fit the others. But there is also this: my boy is thriving here, I am safe, I am loved. What I miss and have left forever, what I have found.

What is the world going to look like this next year, so many of us missing from it, so many of us heartbroken and all of us transformed and the world cannot be what it was--what is the world going to look like when we return? 

To be fair, this is also The Christmas The Fucking Furnace Broke (because I'm super stoked about getting a New Furnace and New Roof and Refinancing the Fucking Mortgage in 2021, but hey! I will also Pay off my Student Loans and I Have Over a Term's Worth of Vacation Saved Up!).  But it's not the Midwest, and it's raining, not snowing, and it's 40 degrees outside, not 40 below.

Mr. Bill is passed out in his other bed in our bedroom. D. is home from his mother's, the rain is still falling, and we are all, so far, healthy. At any rate, we're here, now.



The furnace clicked back on for a few hours, then decided, nah, fuck this shit and the house is barely 65 degrees again. Today on my walk with Mr. Bill in his raincoat, two hummingbirds buzzed our heads, dashed off into the bare treetops above a neighbor's house.

Here we are.

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