Unlike those who have to drive to work in the dark and come home in the dark, I love this time of year. I just snuggle into it and live every minute of it with freedom and joy.
All the way around the year, I wake up pretty early and I lie in my bed and try to remember what I am supposed to be doing. Yesterday the top priority that propelled me downstairs was clearing the horizontal surfaces. It is a losing battle for me, trying to keep the various areas of the house distinct in their purposes. Other people like to have all the tools for their projects at their fingertips. (To be fair, Jon had just completed the long-awaited task of rearranging every picture on the living room walls to make space for the painting that we brought back from Lexington. He needed those tools.)
For an hour I energetically put things back where they belong. Hammer, drill bits, tape measure: three steps from the counter to a drawer, conveniently still in the kitchen. Various containers of ingredients from recent meals: pantry closet. Collection of empty canning jars: ten steps to the shelf next to the basement stairs. Piles of drying herbs: into a bag for future processing. Leather working tools: into a pile on a side table as those were an ongoing project.
When Benjamin and Jon got up, I lost interest in that morning activity and got in the hot tub. Ahhh.
Jon made a farewell breakfast for Benjamin and Anna and Gordon came to join us. There is nothing that signals vacation time like having breakfast at the table with guests. Jon makes delicious waffles, and waffles help to soften the blow of a batch of grape jelly that never jelled. Concord grape syrup is a rare delicacy. Anna brought mangoes, another delicacy from who knows where at this time of year.
Then Benjamin got to work on packing up to go. He travels with very few clothes, but he had quite a collection of materials that he needed to take on the bus. The most challenging object was a piece of wood that was about 3 feet by 2 feet. Anna looked at his pile of metal and wood and said she would make him a bag. She was back in about ten minutes with a snazzy looking portfolio bag with a sturdy red handle that could go over the shoulder. The cloth was leftover from some curtains that she had made for her office a while ago. Anna is a very fast bag-maker, and her machine is always ready. Benjamin was delighted and proceeded to fill the bag with all sorts of important objects for his project in New York. He noted that it would have taken him a long time to collect up these things at Home Depot -- it is so nice to have a farm with an inventory of miscellaneous materials.
While Jon dropped Benjamin off at the bus stop, I practiced piano. Of course I can practice when other people are in the house, but I most like practicing when the house is all mine. I can make the same mistakes over and over without feeling like I am imposing on shared air space.
Then we finally got down to the part of the day that we had planned. We knew that we had to go to Loudoun for a few hours to open up the tunnels and give the plants some fresh air, and it is always good for both of us to remind ourselves of the lists that are waiting to be tackled out there. We took the leisurely route and stopped in at Larry Krop's to see how many trees had had left. He was there, puttering around outside so we stayed for a visit. He had more than a hundred trees leftover and he was not happy about it -- his trees were disappointing. The whole business is a crap shoot.
We spent a chilly couple of hours in Loudoun. I opened all the doors, admired all the plants, and hoed some teeny tiny spinach Jon worked on setting up some irrigation for winter watering. I lost interest in the work when I started to get cold.
On the way home we stopped at an excellent Vietnamese restaurant in Leesburg and had an early dinner. There is nothing like a giant bowl of pho to warm you up from the inside out.
But we were still a little chilled when we got home so we got back into our delicious hot tub and poached ourselves all the way through. It is absolutely the most luxurious thing in the world to have a tub of steaming hot water just waiting on the back porch. And it weighs on my conscience if we don't use it often enough because it would be a waste of energy (Charles recently calculated that it costs us 50 cents a day to keep it hot, but it's not just the money).
Then, to finish off our day, we retired to the couches, with a fire in the wood stove. I read the rest of the new Barbara Kingsolver novel (she is still really preachy but her stories and her characters are so good), in between brief naps. Jon was entertained by all kinds of something or other on his phone, between naps. As the very last treat of the day, we had blueberry/banana milkshakes. I could drink those twice a day and never get tired of it.
And that was how we spent Christmas Day. I told Jon we should do this every year, and he said we might not be able to plan on having Benjamin here, but maybe another one of our kids might be home, you never know. It would be enough for me to just hang out with Jon all day long, with nothing to do but revel in the freedom of winter. There is no reason to rage at the darkness -- that is precisely what makes a day like this possible. Shechechyanu.
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