The ecru tablecloth with its green and rust-tinted harvest gourds, the silver-edged china, and the milky old flatware sit on the table today just as they appear in a snapshot from 1967. In that picture, I am looking at the camera—my taped glasses sliding forward on my nose, a couple of lower incisors missing—and laughing, my right hand in a destinationless, joyful flight.
The holiday feeling remains—the ground just beginning to freeze, the landscape outside the dining room windows opening up like a stage cleared after a performance, and the peculiar, almost sacred silence of a day spent cooking, a day that started very early, one that would stretch late into the night—cigarettes and coffee around the table, the identical alliances, the worn-out optimism.
Having delivered us to this particular date, the calendar's vocation to organize life, its ruthless regimentation, is dismissed for a few days of eating and farting alone, a blessed amnesia of TV and comfortable clothing, unusually long walks and even more unusual thoughts about books and friends that have been surrendered back to time—and its priorities.
Piles of dead leaves rotting in the center so aromatically, the chic monochromaticism of the grey sky, the odor of sage from the kitchen, being half drunk at noon—the drive shaft of life's forward momentum broken, abruptly halted, so artfully: the respite of the holidays never changes.
Headed toward the shortest day, the old year's breaths become shallower, bourne on a silver tray of egg nog. Memories and scents grow indistinguishable in this brightly decorated, gaudy back alley between years.
The best of life is still ahead, yet it has been left behind.
I squirt some Spray 'n Wash on the gravy stains and throw my mother's tablecloth into the washer. It has worked its magic again.
