A Mom's Year

Twenty-six years ago today, Tim Taylor proposed at the National Christmas Tree in Washington, D.C.

I remember it was a very cold night, but Tim insisted on driving to the White House to see the tree. I bundled up in a warm but desperately unglamorous sweater. A choir stoically performed the “Hallelujah Chorus” to a crowd of three—me, Tim, and a homeless gentleman. Afterward, as we walked along the Ellipse, admiring the trees, Tim took me completely by surprise by dropping down on one knee and asking, “Will you be my wife?”

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My mom gave me Ross Gay’s BOOK OF DELIGHTS last year for Christmas. Gay, a poet and professor at Indiana University, spent a year writing an essay every day about something that delighted him. In an interview with MPR’s Euan Kerr, Gay explained his definition of delight: “It feels to me that it often involves an element of surprise or an element of ‘I didn’t know that,’ or ‘I didn’t know that I knew that,’ or ‘I forgot that.’ Or something [that is] sweet and reminds us of the good. It’s a category of joy.”

The Christmas season is filled with moments that surprise us with delight. The first time we rode the ferry (a delight in itself) to Seattle at night and saw the Ferris wheel lit up like candy canes was a delight.

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For as long as I can remember, I’ve loved making things. I come by this honestly, with grandmothers, grandfathers, parents, aunts, and uncles who are creative souls, whether they’re cooking delicious food, building furniture, painting, sewing, or producing all kinds of homemade treasures from scherenschnitte pictures to stained glass windows.

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It’s a chaotic morning. I’m at my “desk,” aka the kitchen table, trying to write, but family members, both the human and furry variety, constantly stream in and out. Andrew’s in a rush to get to work, which causes a sudden flurry of activity because cars need to be moved so he can get out of the driveway. The Shark Ninja that Tim ordered on Black Friday arrived and is zooming around the house, much to the chagrin of the dogs. The girls want to put googly eyes on Bruce (get it? from Finding Nemo?), which I support, but I have to stop what I’m doing—again—to go dig them out of the craft supplies. I’m starting to feel Grinchy because Christmas is coming and I have Things To Do and these distractions aren’t helping. All may be bright, but calm is evading me.

As I was writing about peace the other day, I wondered, briefly, what the difference is between peace and calm. I didn’t have an answer, so I just kept writing about peace. Today, though, I’m thinking maybe the difference is that peace is more of a state of mind. A general sense of “God’s in His heaven—All’s right with the world,” as Robert Browning wrote. And perhaps calm is more of an active verb. We calm a baby, calm our nerves, calm down.

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One of the nice things about moving to Bainbridge Island is that we’re closer to Lily’s godfather, Arun, and his family, who have a home just across the Puget Sound in Snoqualmie. We met Arun when he and Tim worked together in Minnesota years ago (Lexie was a baby) and we quickly grew to love the entire family, which includes Arun’s wife, Alraune, and her parents, Abhijit and Ranita.

A few months after we moved to Bainbridge, we went out to dinner with the Kothanath/Chowdhury crew. Alraune had taken a job in the Netherlands and she was cheerfully telling us about their new apartment and how different it was from American apartments. Apparently, there weren’t a lot of closets so she had to store her clothes all over the place. She laughed as she described getting a shirt here, pants there, and a scarf in yet another room.

[Read more…] about Advent Reflections: Home