So this December has been a gift of sorts. The week of Thanksgiving it poured, and poured, and poured some more. One day a record was broken and reset. And I thought, I am not entirely convinced that I have what it takes to endure five, six, seven, eight months of this. The morning after Thanksgiving I bolted out of here and caught a bus to a credit union branch that’s not too far from my house and where I have deposit privileges, only to find that the place was closed that day. My irritation lasted only a second or two. It was clear and cold. The sun was bright and the sky was blue. I went back to the corner to wait for the next bus for downtown, where I had some business to tend to, and thought: I’ll gladly wait here all morning. I even smiled and waved at a few vehicles as they sped past, roaring toward the mall named in honor of an interstate highway.
Sometimes when I blink my eyes I see little shooting, comet-shaped slivers for an instant afterward. Sometimes I enjoy this so much that I blink more rapidly than usual. Usually these slivers are sort of gold, or silver with a heavy dose of tan, or beige, or cream. Over the Thanksgiving weekend I sat down on my couch to read one afternoon. Two of the windows in my living room face south, and the sunlight pouring in as I sat there, the brilliance of the blue sky punctuated only by the black bare branches that announce winter like nothing else, all of it made me feel I might just be in another time zone. I blinked my eyes and what was left behind in my vision – the residue, I suppose you could call it – was not silver or gold but the most pleasant shade of blue I’ve ever experienced. It was blue with a very precise dosage of green. It wasn’t what I’d call light blue, but it had a lightness to it. Sign number one of a brain tumor taking hold, I thought. Or perhaps a holiday greeting from my long-gone grandmother. It was from her that I inherited my love of blue, I’m pretty sure. I’ve been searching for her blue dishes for decades now, and I’ve yet to find them.
The fig tree out in my side yard is doing weird things this year. This past summer, and the summer before, the fruit appeared in the spring, as it always does, but then the late-season cold and wet threw it off course. I think the people who come by in the fall with baskets and pick figs must have kept going this year because what they picked the year before was probably not good. At any rate, the leaves fell. Hundreds are composting beautifully in the yard and hundreds more have gone with the breeze. The branches are bare of leaves but the figs remain. They remind me Brussels sprouts display at the grocery store, still on their stalks.
I decided to attempt hanging lights outside this year not long ago, early on a bright and sunny December afternoon. There are electrical considerations – as there always are in this house – but I was on the enclosed porch out back, doing my business, and out of the corner of my eye, through the south-facing window, the sun was striking a bead of moisture on top of one of the figs, which wasn’t swaying in the breeze exactly, but was moving just enough to cause the sun-captured droplet to appear to be spinning. And it was a bright, bright shade of green, almost piercing. Emerald, I suppose you would call it. For what felt like many minutes I just stared out the window, and by the time I came inside, the inclination toward bright lights this time of year made perfect sense to me. Natural, you might even say.
