My plot is thickening nicely, as is the rest of me

Fuck off cookies

I got up early on Christmas morning and because the house was full, the couch taken, and my usual workspace in a quiet zone, I went into the spare room, which makes it sound like it’s an extra room, as if we have rooms to spare or something, which we don’t.

This is a small house. It looks exactly like the emoji on your phone although slightly larger

Anyway. It’s not like we have a spare room. No. It’s just that we have a room full of spare things, you know, a dusty electric drum set and things of that ilk. My mother’s silverware, groaning bookshelves, an old desk, a grandfather clock – horizontal for some reason (just like grandpa?) or possibly for no reason at all – and lots of art stacked behind the door including paintings that were removed from various rooms during short-lived but earnest bouts of home improvement, and never made it back to the wall. It’s actually hard to believe there’s a bedroom under all that stuff but there is and it sure would have come in handy.

But, as I always say, why make things easy when they can be difficult

So I wrote for maybe an hour and a half, in the spare room, and then I learned Chorus of the Bells on the glockenspiel, very quietly, just hinting at contact with each key, and the resulting notes were dull and brief but I practiced anyway until I heard voices and movement throughout the house and just as Christmas morning was blooming, I went and sat on the bottom stair in the basement and let loose. I’m a novice for sure but the sound was pure and I got all the notes and it was a heart-meltingly nice way to start the day, which had a couple of other great big heart-melting moments like when Anna unwrapped a paper airplane with a WestJet card tucked in its wings so she could go to Calgary to visit her heart which she left there in September.

And now, for the analogy…

Keeping those notes quiet for so long is like letting your thoughts roll around in your head a while before you sit down to write and by then they’ve thickened nicely and they just sort of roll onto the page and there’s something gorgeous about it, you know, because it’s real and it’s honest and sometimes speckled with surprising bits that make you happy, and make other people happy, too, you hope.

It’s like saving up for something special instead of frittering your money away on bills or something. It’s like not snacking all afternoon so you will enjoy your turkey dinner even more. It’s like not starting with whiskey in your coffee and mimosas in your breakfast and wine in your vicinity all day long… but that’s a dead duck isn’t it because if you save all that up to enjoy at once you won’t last and if I’ve learned anything about successful Christmases, it’s that you have to build up your tolerance. To sugar. To bad manners. To drop-ins who bring the dog. To mess. To people who nod off mid-sentence. To people who eat voraciously but don’t utter one little complement about the delicious food. And of course to moonshine.

But everything worked out great except the shortbread, which maybe we’ll take to the farm and offer as salt licks, and the mince tarts which are at least easy to stack

But it’s time to get back to less of everything except love and laughter and the gym which is where you’ll find me first thing tomorrow morning because I swear I will wear my jumpsuit first day back to work, and not as a scarf, either.