At The Year's End (31/12/2020)
1. The church was quiet and smelled of incense. Built in the 1400s, it possessed that same sense of stillness I’ve found in houses of worship and contemplation across religious lines. When I am in these spaces, this is what I like to reflect on. There is a particular quality of air that culminates inside a place reserved as sacred, be it a cathedral, a prayer room, a temple, or a zendo. There is the resonating aura of a song that has just ended. At the door of this old church, Christmas decorations had blown over in the last strong winds of the year. These are the same winds that always seem to come just before New Year’s, in climates like this one, to sweep the last autumn leaves away before the requisite blank canvas that is January.
2. On Christmas Eve, seafood booths were set up outside Paris supermarkets, selling oysters in wooden crates, pre-cooked lobsters, and enormous peachy crab legs on great beds of crushed ice. The lines for them trailed down the block. Our breath created a warm mist under our masks that fogged M’s glasses and collected on my eyelashes like dew. We went out to get our supplies in the late morning, and then walked home under a light rain, our bags filled with fresh oysters, orange flower brioche covered in pearl sugar, a big bouquet of holly, and a Christmas cake from Manon.
3. Last week before Christmas we walked down through the 9th arrondissement, through the covered passages. We looked at the old paintings in the painting shops, and the old books in the bookshops, and bought a heart-shaped ornament decorated like a fabergé egg. We bought lemon mantecaos biscuits from La Cure Gourmande that had cinnamon sprinkled on top. Traditionally from Spain and the South of France, they are crumbly and chewy at the same time, like Mexican wedding cakes and like cookie dough. They remind me of the biscochitos we eat in New Mexico around the holidays. We walked down to the Jardin du Palais-Royal and sat on a bench to eat the cookies. The sun broke through the grey clouds, throwing gold down onto the bare trees and the green shoots of the early daffodils coming up already from the winter earth. New red shoots were already protruding from the sides and tops of the manicured rows of naked lime trees. Little boys chased a ball. Under the arches, an older couple were dancing the tango without music.
4. This Christmas I was given an enormous book called The Architecture of Trees by Andrea Cavani and Giuilo Orsini. It’s like a book for a life I don’t quite have yet. Apparently it’s a classic for designers and landscape architects, but I have wanted it from the first moment I saw it in a bookstore, simply because it is one of the most beautiful books I have ever seen.
5. The winter rains come and remind me of California. They fall through the night and into the next morning. I remember a misty Christmas one year when my mother still owned our old house, and all three of us grown children were there, staying in the house with her. We spent the day quietly at home as the mists drifted over the pines and redwoods on the shady side of the valley, until the day settled into an evening of pink-violet haze. This might have been the year that my sister was pregnant with her first child. I remember making her a baby quilt. I recall having to give an almost-finished craft present, probably this quilt, and how I was not the only one that year to do so. It was a day of us all eating, sewing, knitting, watching something, a fire in the fireplace, the rooms warm, the tree bright. It might have been the last Christmas morning that we would all have, together like that. This past Christmas night, I dreamed that I was trying to buy back that same house, and to renovate it, so that everyone in my family would always be able to go back to it, whenever they needed.