Now. Here's the trick. Jumping back in here. Do I try to cover everything that's happened in my life since, well, basically, July 2015? I started trying that in October 2015 and never caught up, even then. So perhaps we start with just today. I actually only want to talk about today anyway.
It was a day of mundane and terribly sacred and sad and typical things. A day where I shoveled old sand out of a chicken run but also cried in front of complete strangers in a flower shop. I don't know how to make those two things exist on the same day in my mind, but they did.
So what did I do today? Well, I woke up, as I always do, with Paul's arm flung over me, and could tell by the light in the windows that it had (finally) snowed. I planned a series of errands in my head - buy some apple juice from the orchard, look for bigger pajamas for Hadrian, visit the flower shop, go to the Asian Market... At home, later, I would deep clean the chicken coop and make a test batch of glogg from a recipe on the Norwegian advent calendar my friend Maren sent me (hi, Maren). We ate waffles for breakfast because Ansel made the iron-clad argument that "It snowed, so we eat waffles."
I hadn't left the house for a week - so even in my full-pandemic cautiousness, I was happy to be driving around, even in the snow. But this was definitely the longest list of errands I'd tried to run since, well, March. At Foxglove, I broke down trying to ask the florist if she wouldn't worry about making a "pretty bouquet", but just give me one sprig of every kind of plant they had in stock. It was for Annie, I said, like the florist had to understand everything I meant just with that much to go on. I kept trying. She's dying, I said. She...she's an artist, I said. She has two young children, I said. And I thought maybe she would want to see as many kinds of flowers as I can find right now.
I wandered the Asian market looking for cardamom and star anise while I waited for the bouquet-of-many-flowers. I remembered how we could find those things so easily in the Bazaar in Odense. We'd ride our bikes there every Saturday morning to buy all our produce from Ahkmed (who became so used to us that we became like friends there in Denmark - all foreigners together. When we left we made him a pecan pie, which he said he'd loved eating in Texas, in our only pie pan. We weren't taking it back in our suitcases after all.) We'd check out the spice market, the nut market, the Turkish bakery every week just to see what would show up. It was the place we first saw and tried persimmons and dates. It was the only place we could find cranberries in our Danish town.
I had time to burn before the flowers still so I walked through Pioneer Book - ended up with three more books (Bill Bryson, the history "Salt", and a Christmas pop-up for the boys) because I can't help myself. Stood in line for Hruska's Kolaches next door. And finally picked up the flowers.
What a day - dropping off Kolaches to my youngest sister, just to check in. Walking through a department store -- quickly, looking for pajamas, but never stopping my near-jog until I walked right back out the door because I was afraid of being around so many people. Just such mundane things. And then pulling up to Annie's house, seeing the windows filled with paper cranes, a large flag that said "Peace". Leaving the flowers and a note, knocking, walking quickly away because I didn't have any words. I do know that the house felt...it felt like a sacred place. I almost wanted to take off my shoes before walking up to the door - I might have if it wasn't freezing. It's been a while since I've felt that heightened sense of the sacred. I'd missed it. But I didn't like the reason it was here in my life again.
What was the rest of the day? Watching my kids play outside. Raking new sand through a chicken run, like a monk in a rock garden. Making the trial glogg - realizing it was the real deal, and then spending the afternoon quadrupling another batch with the last gallon of apple juice for the week from the neighborhood orchard, jarring it all to go out to the neighbors tomorrow, literally sewing my dried orange slices onto ribbons and tying it all together.
Holding my kids on the couch while we listened to Paul's very impressive performance-reading of Chapter 2 of The Wind in the Willows. And now, writing about what I did today. A sad, strange, regular, warm, cold, pure, mucky, snowy, windy day.
