a cold coming we had of it">a cold coming we had of it
Last night we took down the Christmas tree, and today the recyclers picked it up for mulch. We bought it from Delancey Street, so I feel like it did good deeds coming and going. It was also amazingly beautiful, festooned with lights and inexpensive ornaments from IKEA. Thank you, tree.
Claire’s language is coming along at the speed of light, and I have ridiculous nostalgia for the baby talk she no longer uses. She used to hold her arms up and say “Tawwy!” Now it’s, “I want to be carried, please.” She still says “Twick or tweet!” and “I like it the playground” and when drawing attention to something will repeat it without drawing breath, for emphasis: “A moon a moon!” But her verb forms and gender pronouns are conforming to standard English and soon her rich baby patois will disappear, the only traces of it being the tender in-jokes Jeremy and I trade.
It’s been an intense winter, what with Julia arriving and Mrs Bud dying and me setting foot in a church again. It’s pretty clear to me that I no longer believe in the virgin birth or the resurrection, if I ever did, but I do believe in the incarnation. My faith boils down to this: unto us a child is born. Any child, anywhere; every child a potential prince of peace. And even if it is, it can count on being hounded to death.
Nevertheless. Kids are the hope bombs we lob into the unknowable future, and not for ourselves alone, but for everyone we love and have loved.
Tuchman’s The Proud Tower was an exquisitely timely pick. Pesce just finished her A Distant Mirror, and I picked up Sarah Vowell’s Assassination Vacation, which references The Proud Tower on page seven. (Claire liked The Proud Tower too. She tore into it this morning, but Jeremy fixed it with Scotch tape.)
