There’s something wrong with me. I think this every year in December. Because I don’t like Christmas. To be fair, I don’t like any holidays. No, I like ordinary days, immemorable moments. I love to wake up and think, Nothing special is supposed to happen today. I like to picture my perfect ordinary day while still lying in bed, the hours lined up like eggs in a carton. Not one of them cracked.
On an ordinary day, I swim. I love swimming. The pool, a chlorinated, pale blue ice cube, is my portal. I dive in and enter another world . It’s similar to the world I enter when I write or read or meditate, but even quieter. No phones can reach me there. So many poems begin underwater. The only problem, I need to write them down before I forget. I don’t want to start a conversation before I jot down a few notes.
But even swimmers are chatty around the Christmas holidays–they seem overcome with an urge to wish me happy or merry this or that. It’s all so very merry. What other time of year do we use that word, merry? Why not mix it up a little? Wish someone much jollity—whole bowlfuls of jollity. Wish them mirth.
Mirth is one of those words that doesn’t sound to me like what it means. Sort of like myrrh. The tree resin once commonly used in embalming. And also, as a medicine to cure, among other things, scurvy, hemlock poisoning, and baldness.
Emerging from the pool, I could use some myrrh. Chlorine, after all, is like a desiccant–it seems to draw the natural fluids from the body. (No, I’m not going to elaborate on that. I’m not going to describe the code brown alert in the pool the other day either). Perhaps a little myrrh would make me appear alive again. I could use some Frankincense, too, which is said to hydrate the skin, reduce inflammation, and, according to my yoga teacher, enhance your mood and cure depression.
How can I resist? I just ordered some on Amazon, and it’s supposed to arrive before the 25th. I sure hope it works. These dark winter days I am wishing for miracles, big and small. Which reminds me of Thomas Hardy’s Christmas poem, “The Oxen,” in which Hardy imagines going to the barn, or “lonely barton by yonder coomb,” to see the oxen kneel, “hoping it might be so.”
painting by Richard Diebenkorn
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Author: Nin Andrews
