Twilight

I didn’t sleep much last night. This isn’t unusual. What is unusual is that I slept, long and hard, on both of the previous two nights. The year is winding down and the days are almost as short as they can be, and we have many hours of darkness every day and I slept through most of those hours on two consecutive nights. Last night, I returned to my normal non-sleeping self. But the sleeping was nice while it lasted. 

My son just asked what that sound was. It’s your mother’s lightning fast fingers flying across the keyboard, that’s what that sound is. 

I’ve been dreaming, too. Three mornings in a row, I’ve awakened to remembered dreams. I don’t remember now what the first two nights’ dreams were about, but last night’s was about bad driving. That one is probably premonitory. 

Fifteen days until Christmas. It doesn’t seem right. I haven’t stood on the deck at a high school swim meet yet. I haven’t been to a school band concert or a holiday party. At least we have a Christmas tree and lights. We’re going to watch “Elf” on Friday, and I’m going to start making cookies this weekend. I hate making cookies, as you probably know, but it’s a Christmas-y thing to do, and I’ll take it. 

*****

It’s the next day now, the next day being Thursday, the fourth day of what feels like an unusually long work week. That word doesn’t look right. “Unusually.” But it’s right. I can spell, even if I can’t sleep. 

It’s 4:37 PM. This is in some ways my favorite time of a December day, especially a clear and sunny December day, especially when I get to sit on the couch in my family room watching the almost-winter daylight fade, and feeling the darkness collect. I don’t like how early in the day it happens, but I do like seeing the transition from daylight to twilight. The sky outside my window is pale gray now; almost white. And the bare trees are dark, dark brown, almost black. It will soon be completely dark, and this screen and the Christmas tree will be the only light. 

I could sit here for some time, but I have a virtual committee meeting tonight at 7, so I have to make dinner a bit earlier than usual. Five more minutes of quiet Christmas tree-lit twilight, and then it’s back to work. 

*****

Sometimes I see someone out walking and I wish I was out walking, too; but I’m on my way to or from some errand or I’m on my way home from work (back when I worked somewhere other than in my house) and I’m just too busy to be outside. But then sometimes when I’m outside walking, especially on an unseasonably nice day, and people drive past me, I wonder if they envy me for being free and out in the world. 

I didn’t have time to walk on Wednesday or Thursday, but I finished work at 4:15 today, just early enough to take a quick walk before dark. People are wearing masks outside now, even when they’re by themselves. But not me. I breathed the fresh air and I smelled candles as I walked past a neighbor’s house. It made me want to light candles at my house. 

So I did. I lit some Christmas-y scented candles, and I poured a glass of wine because it’s Friday night and I can, and now I’m writing this. It’s two weeks until Christmas. 

*****

It’s Saturday morning now. I'm in my pajamas, streaming a British police drama. I’ve watched more television in the last nine months than in the previous five years. I like to watch scenes of regular workaday pre-corona life, when people just lived and worked and went about their days without thought of social distance; when you could just look at people and see their faces. I’m nostalgic for the ordinary. 

Someday, there will be a spate of books and movies and TV shows about this very peculiar and God willing temporary episode of isolated, limited, curtailed life. And maybe with enough time gone by, when we’re all back to our pre-corona routine of rushing to and fro from morning to night, without time to think or reflect or breathe, then we’ll all be ready to visit this time again. Maybe we’ll even be nostalgic. We’ll talk about how we were once so tired of quarantines, and now we’d pay money for just a one-week lockdown. 

But not today, or for a long time. I miss life, even the long and exhausting days of too much to do and too many places to go. Especially those days. 

It’s 13 days until Christmas. I’m going to make some cookies.