Writing ISN’T the most important thing in a writer’s life
It’s likely that a fair number of the people reading these words are experiencing post-NaNoWriMo flashbacks, recognizable by uncontrollable bouts of splitting infinitives and seizures in which you roll on the floor crossing out every third tile in red ink.
Even those of us who didn’t try to write a novel in a month routinely try to write one during every spare sliver of down time we can scrounge, doing the math in our heads: the cake doesn’t come out of the oven for 35 minutes–that gives me 33 minutes to write. And that’s glorious! How else would we ever get those words on the page when we’re juggling a job, cooking/cleaning/laundry and taking the pet aardvark to the vet. I get it. I do.
But hold onto your shorts, Mildred, I’m about to say something heretical: there might possibly be something in life more important than writing.
Folks, it’s Christmas. How many of those do you figure you have left? Fifty? Twenty-five? How many while the kids still believe in Santa Claus? How many while your parents still remember who you are? I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to be the writer who looks up from her laptop one day to see that the rest of life has passed me by and I missed it.
My novel’s not going anywhere. It’ll be waiting for me after I help put the popcorn strings on the tree. The spaces between the yellowed kernels get bigger every year and I often wonder why we used red thread. It shows up so bright where the knots of popcorn have crumbled away. Of course, we never dreamed at the time it would matter. We weren’t making anything to last, just decorations to hang on the tree that Christmas and then throw away. The popcorn strings were temporary. Just like the lives of those who made them.
***
Both of them had daisies in their eyes. I remember noticing it for the first time as the 3-year-old looked up adoringly into her face. The little boy had inherited his grandmother’s deep hazel eyes, with gold highlights that sparkled like the pedals of a flower around a black center.
And I remember noticing how at home in her hands the needle and thread looked. Whenever I tried to sew, I was so clumsy I always poked myself in the finger, drawing blood so the laughing child suddenly looked concerned and offered to kiss it to make it well. But she never poked herself, not once the whole time she sat in the wide oak platform rocker, balancing a squirming child in her lap as she strung lengths of popcorn to put on the Christmas tree.
There was no snow on the ground outside the windows as she worked. Clouds the color of pewter hung just above the treetops, dripping dreary winter drizzle into the red Mississippi mud. The magnolia tree in the front yard still had a few yellowed blossoms scattered among the seed pods. The grass was still green. The temperature hung on a nail at 50 degrees, moving neither up nor down with the passing of December. It was a strange, disorienting first-Christmas-away-from-home for a young couple and their 3-year-old child.
The only thing that brought a sense of family and tradition to the season was the grandmother’s presence, the sight of her arthritic hands stringing popcorn on long pieces of red sewing thread, her off-key voice singing Christmas carols in the comforting Texas twang that was already beginning to fade into Deep South mush in the speech of the towheaded youngster in her lap.
When each popcorn string was complete, there was an elaborate ceremony involved in placing it just-so on the tree, much backing-up-and-eyeballing it, making sure the drape and swag were perfect enough to satisfy and imperfect enough to imply a lack of planning and a carefree spirit. The little boy got to eat all the candy canes whose position on the tree interfered with the popcorn strings, and he crawled around on the carpet beneath the tree, munching happily on stray pieces of popcorn gleaned from among the fallen pine needles.
There was a lot of laughter, rich childlike laughter that year. It’s etched in my memory with the smell of hot cider and home-baked cookies and Texas chili bubbling on the stove. The grandmother’s eyes never strayed far from the little boy. She slipped him extra cookies when she thought I wasn’t looking. She pretended not to notice when his squirming on her lap pained her arthritic legs. She hugged him tight and dried his tears when she left to go back home to Muleshoe after Christmas, telling him she’d be back, that they’d make new popcorn strings for the tree next year.
But they didn’t.
Her heart failed in May.
She died in a Texas nursing home without ever seeing the little boy with flowers in his eyes again.
* * *
The popcorn strings are always the first decoration to go on the tree. Right after the lights. My three sons know that. They’ve always known it. It’s been that way every Christmas any of them except the oldest can remember.
They also know the strings are precious beyond measure to their mother and their oldest brother. And that they are fragile and growing more fragile with every passing year. And they know the story, too, but it usually gets told every year anyway. The story of how the first Christmas after the death of their grandmother—the grandmother two of them never knew—was a very sad Christmas. And how their mother discovered the popcorn strings the grandmother had made the year before, tucked away in one of the Christmas decoration boxes.
I never did find out, I’ve told them for almost three dozen Christmases now, how it was that the popcorn strings wound up in the Christmas decoration box. I know I intended to throw them away. In fact, I thought I did throw them away. But maybe their oldest brother wanted to keep them and sneaked them into the box. He does not remember.
All I know is that when I spotted them among the ornaments, I cried, great gulping, heaving sobs. Then I took my 4-year-old son by the hand and together we put the strings on the tree with the other decorations—in my mother’s memory. It has been the same every year since.
When the oldest left home, the popcorn string tradition passed to my middle son. When he joined the Army, the job fell to the youngest. Even after they were all gone, one or the other of them always has been home at Christmas to put the strings on the tree.
The little boy with daisies in his eyes has children of his own now. After Christmas last year, his wife repaired the strings, interspersed the old, crumbling yellow kernels with fresh popcorn on new red sewing thread.
And this year the job of putting them on the tree has passed down to another generation. My youngest grandson is 5 —a year older than his father was the Christmas after my mother died. It was his job this year to put the strings on the tree. Oh, his hands weren’t as big as his father’s and uncles’ hands. His little fingers weren’t as gentle. He twisted the red sewing thread as he worked and crumbled some of the popcorn under foot. But I figure his great-grandmother understands.
Write on!
9e
