Time, Traditions, Transitions and Pinworms

Time.  So many people tell you that it slips away.  It's gone before you know it.  Turn around and poof...life has warped.  Or time has warped.  They warn against wasting it, thinking you have all of it in the world, and that you should cherish it in the moments.  I believed all of those things to be true.  I reveled, for the most part in the moments as they happened.  Soaked in the memories, the traditions, and the people, children, family and friends, who were a part of them.  The small corner of realist in me knew that time would change things; that with each passing year we were drawing closer to a new era, a new time, with new traditions, memories,  and people to share them with.  The idealist in me, which takes up far more of my psyche, was certain that I would be prepared,  and transition into that era with the grace and acceptance my mother modeled.  Outwardly, I am putting on a decent show of it.  But inside. Inside I'm falling apart,  Inside feels like a weekend binge of Stepmom, Steel Magnolias, Sweet Home Alabama and Homeward Bound, and a long parade of marching bands.

One hundred percent, I thought I had one more year.  I was prepared this year to soak it in, potentially for the last time.  Those traditions and activities that have filled this holiday weekend.  Tree day.  Decking the halls.  I was girded up,  ready to handle each ornament one last time, remembering each circumstance of its arrival to our tree.  I was even ready to grudingly let the kids put the pregnant " Mom to Be" rabbit and kangaroo on this year.  Seriously, an ornament to mark every life circumstance and milestone is in our box!  Pregnant rodents.  Good lord! The Polish glass Santa, a gift from a dear elderly neighbor, my first year in Flushing.  Mittens bought on a weekend getaway,  four  creepy Victorian doll heads, nursery rhyme books, trains, bears, cats, football players, black Santa,  the Big Cheese and a Magic School Bus.  I knew decorating this year might be a bit emotional for me.  I knew there would be some staring, and laughing and some barking of "pull yourself together," which might be hissed  the loudest from my internal voice.  But things haven't gone quite as I had thought or planned. 

Instead of pushing forward with the traditional activities and exhausting demands of tree day, we spent time with wonderful and dear family who rarely visit.  We pulled it together to go get a tree, acknowledging that this would  be the last year, only to pull into the farm to find their sign announcing  "This is Our Last Year."  It seemed fitting.  We were so thankful that we had decided to go.  We had almost chucked the idea.  Some of our St. Paul family joined us, to experience cutting a live Michigan tree.  It was lovely. Balmy and bright.   There was laughing and singing and debating, and some pressure to get a Christmas bush instead of a nicely shaped spruce.  When you get your own house you can put up a Christmas bush or a Douglas Fir, or a Jack Pine, but this last year, this last tree day, I'm looking for a magnificent Blue Spruce to carry me through.  A spruce to remember and mark this passage of time.  A bookend to the first perfectly shaped Blue the light shone on 24 years ago at this very farm.  I didn't say any of that out loud, except  the part about "getting your own Christmas bush," but the rest was all in my head.  And heart.  The rest I was soaking in, knowing it would be the last.  That next year will be different. 

We opted out of decorating on tree day.  We didn't even bring the tree in.  It's actually still outside, laying on the patio, still bound in its red wrap. It will get inside eventually.  I hope,   We spent the rest of tree day laughing and talking too loud and playing horrifically inappropriate games at a home town brewery.   Because we needed time out of the house, because we needed to cherish and take in cousins and in laws and each other.  Because we  all needed to be  fully informed about things like pin worms and how to find out if you have them, and that all of us have a bit of emotional "stuff" we still struggle with. We needed to laugh.  At ourselves and each other.  We needed to let go and not hold so tightly to the traditions of the past, and focus on the time we have right now. Right here. In this moment. 

So today, I am mostly here on my own.  I am forging ahead with a new kind of tradition.  I am slowing down, not racing to get it all done so that everything looks and feels like it always has.  I am reworking, reexamining, revising, as I step across the threshold into a new era a bit before I thought I would have to.  I admit, as I am holding some things perhaps for the last time, and I am doing a bit of weeping.  And laughing. And shaking my head at those damn pregnant rodent ornaments.  But I am also taking my time doing it.  Inclined  to put whatever I am doing aside to revel in other moments of time that are right in front of me.  Although, if any of the people that are a part of those moments want to help me decorate this tree...I'll gladly hand them a bulb, and then tell them where to hang it.