This day after
Christmas has been very satisfying. The tree is on and the whole family is sleeping. All manner of new delights are strewn about. I am sipping
pinot grigio. My
stocking is flat and my tummy is not. We had left over ham and those funny green beans cooked in mushroom soup with
fried onions from a can. I have heard so much Christmas music I am almost tired of it, but his year we have expanded our collection with some really cool
jazz and
blues from the radio. We now have nine and a half hours of Christmas joy, every off the wall, blues or jazz number we could find with no Bruce or Barbara to muck it up.
I have been making really amazing foods and scarfing them in hedonistic delight with my husband. Cranberry bread, left over pork tenderloin strips marinated in lime and garlic, simmered in hot enchilada sauce and rolled in a tortilla with fine sharp cheddar and a drizzle of plain yogurt to take the edge off. Oatmeal raisin cookies and egg sandwiches with the yolk just right (my husband insists on runny yolk for dipping, I need solid with a bit of mush to it). Chicken pot pies with basil crust. Crusty bread baked with spinach that has been simmered in lemon juice and six or seven cloves of minced garlic. Kalamata olives. Feta. Fresh oranges so cold they shock my teeth, so juicy they embarrass me.
We have been drawing with new colored pencils. Taking turns on the sit ‘n spin. Playing with puppets, beating our drum. Watching home videos of long loving pans of the bookshelf, shots of the floor, Katie dancing in prism rainbows to the Sesame Street theme song.
We stayed up last night and laughed until two, making love in front of the Christmas tree, listening to old audio tapes we made of our life before we got married or had children. Apparently we taped what can only be described as a “home improvement party”, our friends in one room discussing the finer points of rolling a blunt, telling stupid jokes with long set ups, laughing while we run the vacuum in the other room. While listening to this it struck Jay and I as funny that we were off vacuuming while our friends were waiting for us to join them. When it would get quiet in the other room we might have been off polishing something (“we can’t party ‘til these spots come off this glass!”) We were such frightened and ridiculous new homeowners. What a learning experience that was. I used to stand in the middle of my “backyard” and freak out on the amount of space that we had all to ourselves. I thought of it as more than nine acres. It was really millions, all stacked up right on top of each other. I owned it all the way to the core of the earth. (Well, perhaps.)
The family is still strange. Grandma is stable but still on a respirator. When I called the family gathering it was really strange. My parents did not ask to speak with me. Grandpa is freaked out and sounds tired. Everyone is edgy. Who knows what any of them really think about anything? They are very confusing and I really don’t know them very well at all. Am I supposed to make more of an effort because I was the one who moved out of state? Because I am younger? Because otherwise they sit around and keep score. They do not really hear me. I probably don’t hear them. Maybe I should not worry about it, but it is hard not to. Even when everything else in the world is going right, there is still that apprehensive sense of ‘what now’ whenever I deal with my relatives.