I’m writing this post while Nora Jones sings her song December.
“December, come to me,” she croons. She’s asking for snow and sun. She’s promising to carry December home, to take the month away from the loneliest place it’s known. She promises to do this if December reciprocates. “Take me from the loneliest place I’ve ever known,” she sings.
I’m wondering about this double negative of a lonely month and a lonely person helping each other home.
In junior high on the day winter break started, a group of us walked home exuberant from being let loose from school. The snow was falling and we wanted to do something, but this middle time of definitions being smashed and reconsidered, of no longer understanding everything to be black and white and instead standing, cowering, and sinking into the gray, made it hard to decide just what to do with ourselves.
“Sledding!” a boy yelled out.
“Sledding!” the rest of us cheered.
All of us ran home to put on snow pants that were too small, shove our feet into boots we told our parents we were too cool to wear, grab sleds from our garages, and bolt to the nearest hill.
It was just like kindergarten that afternoon-turned-evening. There were no cliques, no “who likes who.” We were all friends, laughing and holding out gloved hands to help each other so we could climb up the icy hill again.
It happened again in college, in the thick of finals and fighting the December gloom of going home to a place that we now understood wasn’t our only home anymore. Someone would tuck a cafeteria tray in her winter coat, a sly smile would form, and she’d wink to those of us who saw her. The rest of us would follow suit.
You can’t worry about core subjects or packing or even home while sliding down a steep hill. My memory is that all there is to do is laugh and scream and feel the December air, perhaps carrying you away from your lonely places.
Maybe December needs us to show all the beauty it holds in its 31 days. Maybe we need those 31 days to show us ours.
Ways In
Poetry: Write a poem about sledding or another December tradition.
List: What 31 beautiful December things can you write about?
Letter: Write a letter to December, the month that holds the longest night, but that hopes for all of us to watch for the light.
Photo by cotaro70s, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Callie Feyen.
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Megan Willome says
It doesn’t get better than Gary Johnson’s “December” (http://www.garrisonkeillor.com/radio/twa-the-writers-almanac-for-december-4-2019/) but here goes.
December
“You can’t kill them,” the young woman said as she sold
us Boston ferns in the spring. She, who raised
eight thousand poinsettias in a greenhouse
with a dripline.
But September happened
and then November. Now the eight ferns
are dead
as December.
We deplant them, load them in the truck,
take them to the city’s brush recycling
pile to be made mulch.
We carry on, carry
forward, carry tales
step by step
mile by blue mile.
Richard Maxson says
A Brief Enchantment
There are many ways to enter
a December wood or, forest,
let it remain enchanted,
no matter what words we use.
The first of all attributes is magic:
snow expanding the landscape,
darkening the boles of trees
splashed with bands of white,
their lofty panniers of green
now gelid umbrellas above you.
This is the silence where worlds begin,
a depth made deeper by multitudes.
The vivid face in the sun’s mirror
shows you the roundness of chaos.
So much occurs in the in the quiet sky,
in the vast everywhere you are not.
These are the new woods we watch
fill up with stars, knowing that snow
is local. Let each morning sun be new
and different, as when we danced for it.