A Valentine for my sweethearts, just a little early.  It’s always Valentine’s Day for them, really – but they required a flourish of roses in honor of hearts and holding hands and smooches.  My familiars, my surrogates, my crystal clear desideratum, telegraphed to the ineffable without any need for translation.  Here, let me show you what I want.

Tulips for our week, brought by Mr. Tulip, my sweet assistant.

I saw so many friends this week.  Flower friends, photo friends, and friends from my first temp assignment when I went back to school.  That’s a lot of social engagement for me – celebrating the good enough feeling of just getting together.  A time capsule in lunch and supper, spanning how life has unfolded in the past 10 years.

I’ve worked hard to establish my uneventful life as a petty bureaucrat.  I know I should want more – but that is the trade off for a bird in the hand.  You have to walk away from the terribly seductive pair singing in the bush.  I have enough to do to keep this little bird fed and chirping.

Tulips are eventful, though.  And you do not have to choose only one.  You can have quite an armful if you know Mr. Tulip.

We got our first big snow last night – which is the prettiest time for the snow to arrive.  I’m sure you remember – the air shimmers and twinkles, or drifts and dances, depending on the kind of snow it is, how fast it is falling and how close your window is to the nearest streetlight.  This was a shimmer snow, and it left behind 9 inches of feather-soft crystals to shovel and sweep.  Oh well.  Nothing’s perfect.

Tuesday seems like forever ago.  I mean, it really does.  But it’s not even 6 days.  I saw my friend, and we behaved ourselves – especially me.  I have to surround those hours with words, to protect them from the accumulation of ordinary time that has already diluted their pungency. So that I remember.  Remember that whether we behave or not doesn’t change very much between us.  The story still ends with “I love you.”  But it ends.

Meanwhile, these tulips. The exact color of raspberry-orange sherbet. Doesn’t that sound delicious?

It’s day 10,000 of grey – so it was just inevitable that I had to buy glowing red tulips and sweet Meyer lemons to make my own sunshine – and a spot of tea.  And my sweet little couple – because I still have hope.

Well, this blue was just a loveliness I couldn’t pass up – even though I am trying to cut back a little on flowers so I can get some other things I need.

I haven’t written as much about my ups and downs here lately. I’m not sure why.  I certainly still have them.  One night last week, I drove past a particularly steadfast and cozy house, with a single, electric candle shining each window.  In an instant, I burst into tears.  Its unattainable durability suddenly embodied all the ways I have never grown up, or managed to fill any capacity larger than barely covering rent and food and, it must be admitted, flowers.  I have plenty of regret to keep me company, any time.

And I spend a lot of time in music that absorbs and transmutes dilemmas that can’t be resolved with only words.  Wrapped in Johnny Hartmann’s incomparable voice – It Was Almost Like a Song.  Drive Fast (The Stuntman) – the same prayer Bruce has been writing for 40 years.  Keep me in your heart.

But the flowers themselves are medicine.  The oceans of shadow and color in each miniature bell or feather-light petal, the air filled with their green scent and respiration.  Spending some time, some where, with just what is beautiful.  There is so much hope in that.

Just in time for the gloomiest skies we’ve had all year,
when we couldn’t tell 9 a.m. from 5 p.m. for all the January gray:
Hyacinth.

Well, hello there 2023, when did you sneak in?

I don’t have too many plans for you, except to try to see some of the far away people I love in actual real life. And to take pictures of my things. It would be fun to go dancing, etc. I might get a new hat to wear in the garden.

Instead of figuring out what I plan to do with you, I’d like to ask you, 2023, to take it a little easier on us. The whole world, I mean. We’ve had enough power-mad zombies to last us for a good long while. Maybe you could arrange for them to get stuck together on a desert island and leave the everyone in peace? I’m looking at you Elon, Vlad, Don and Mitch. Bon Voyage, boys!

In addition, I wouldn’t mind more barely pink chrysanthemum frills and blushing alstromeria, with spicy sweet stock winding its way into a sunny spot by the window.

Actually, that’s sort of a minimum I expect from you, 2023.

Capiche?

The Arctic came for a visit, as it is wont to do – but it came a little too early for our collective liking. By me, the snow fell not as hard as predicted. The wind blew not as bad – but the biting cold overwhelmed both of those factors, and set winter firmly in place for the next week or so. As luck would have it, my lights stayed on and my wheels kept rolling. It was not like that for everyone – so we have to count this Christmas as a blessed one indeed.

Every little house looks so sweet with its new white roof and landscape. Yard by yard, block by block, the frigid dark glows with warmly colored lights festooning gutters and shrubs, watched over by inflatable lawn giants – Snowmen, Santas, Grinches. My neighbors put out Santa riding a dinosaur. I like where they are going with that.

I can’t tell what to think about Christmas. Is it too material or too much pressure? I think it’s a very good idea to get together with people you love, and eat pie and add a little nog to a hot drink – and give people things or otherwise do something that makes them smile.

I think it’s an equally good idea to remember that in long nights, something new and unexpected can be born. And to keep in mind that, whether you believe the story or not, it starts out with two young people about to become parents, who have nowhere to sleep, and no one to help them. I’m not sure about the rest of the story – but I believe that part. That good – even miraculous good – has the power to unfold, unpredicated in circumstance – through will, through love, and even just through luck.

That seems like plenty of Christmas to me.

Next Sunday is Christmas, as it happens – and the very darkest, longest night of the year is just a few days away.  Indoors, we take our glow where we can find it – reflections in amber candle light, starbursts of petals and pine boughs giving back what they took from the sun on some warmer day in a far off place.

This time of year is crowded with emotional edges.  Places you can’t back away from because the culture just won’t allow it.  The ascending dark and cold carving out a season prone to introspection.  We pass inevitably from grief for the old into a new, unwritten year, muddled with celebration and loneliness.  Who wouldn’t feel like crying?

The afternoon was cold and beautifully blue, with almost no wind.  Fluffy nests of snow piled in the branches of every tree.  Overhead, puffs of pure white mingled clouds with snow and snow with clouds.  If you were a kid, you would not want to come back inside until you were a snowman yourself.

I took my walk at the botanic gardens and stopped for a while next to the bench where Mom would sit to get back her energy.  I could see her there so clearly – in her brown car coat, leaning on her cane, spine curled like a comma from the osteoporosis.  She would have peered up at the pattern of the bare black twigs, listened for birds singing from the shelter of the thick arbor vitae, and marveled at the miracle of being out in the snow – a lost pleasure for her, because the specter of hidden ice made walking in winter so treacherous.

I could imagine her thin, soft hand in mine and hear what she would say.  “Keep going toward the sunlight, honey.  I’m okay where I am.  I miss you.”

Winter peonies.  As unexpected a treat as oranges in December – remember?  Stand close and you will catch the clove-spice carnation mixed with the medicine of pine and eucalyptus.  Press your nose closer still to find a hint of sweet hay and honey from the peonies, their muted scent hidden amidst glorious petals.

Lately, the flowers have begun to tell what they want without much agony from me.  This, too, is an unexpected treat.  I understand how rare and precious it is to feel things make themselves, and mostly need only to listen well, and do what is asked.

And yet – I think I might need to take a break and let some new things happen.  Or just let some nothing happen.  It’s probably the internet I need a break from – not the flowers, or the camera or the words.  Everything has changed so much, me included.  Maybe I want some time to get acquainted.

And maybe it is the darkening world, asking for time alone together – to see what isn’t readily shown, and feel the expanded outlines of what became from summer’s growth.