The tree before the kittens got to it.

I realized tonight that I vowed I wasn’t going to do stressful holidays anymore, and in that spirit I’m going to take a couple of weeks off from Velvet Verbosity so that I can have a few more hours to add to the holiday schedule. Hours that I hope will allow me to relax into baking and wrapping and receiving guests.

There’s no de-stressing the shopping part for me. The minute I walk into a store my brain starts overloading. The best I can do is shop local in little bits. Besides, Corporate America doesn’t need my money this Christmas. I’m lucky to live in a town bursting at the seams with local artisans and shop owners.

I hope whatever you celebrate that this season finds you and your family healthy, peaceful, close, and relaxed. Much love to you word-nerds. I’ll see you in the New Year.

The kittens are at the foot of my bed playing with a mouse on a string, taking turns batting and gnawing. They have become quite delightful, fetching toys, wrestling one another, sleeping on heads and tucked under chins, trilling their greetings, and showing off their intelligence to the delight of visitors.

Over the weekend we got our Christmas tree. One far more humble and appropriate than that time the Christmas tree ate our living room. And just at the moment when we collectively stepped back to admire the cone of holiday wonderment, it got all Simon’s Cat up in here. Just imagine this x 2.

We averted disaster by a narrow margin, scooping Pippa the kitten out from the branches about halfway up the tree. It seems we weren’t the only ones to escape disaster. In the continuing story of Rachel and the looking glass, a new twist:

The glow grew brighter until Rachel had difficulty seeing. She closed her eyes against the glare and when she opened them again the light was normal. Curious she slid off the bed and padded down the spiral staircase.

The oddness of the light told her something different was happening in the outside world. The wall before her went hazy then opaque and finally clear. She could see out into her room!

Running forward she placed her hands onto the glass, felt a tug and was pulled through, landing bodily against her bed.

She had escaped…but how? And where was Seraphina?

Little time for reading but I’ve just ordered a replacement of our favorite Christmas book, Letters from Father Christmas by J.R.R. Tolkien. We had the cassette version for my children growing up and they remember fondly listening to the cranky North Polar Bear.

The word is:

BUNDLE

The house is quiet. Two of my people are out holiday shopping, and the third fell asleep early on the couch, his freshly showered hair spiking out at odd angles from underneath a comforter. Quiet reminds me of what I loved about the early days of motherhood. The frequent naps, the husband gone for the day to work, the not-yet-developed-fully child voices squeaking and cooing, the needs plentiful but so many of them purely physical. The questions and the observations were not personal then.

The constant banter of teens, I worry, is not so compatible with the introverted mother. And yet to say, “let me be” when so very soon they will do just that seems ungrateful. Yes, yes, be careful what you wish for.

So Profane Tmesis has been vexing me with his lack of a comment system, so I’m just going to go ahead and pick his piece this week and see what he does about that.

Zamglenie

I wake up with a sack over my head. He reminds me of my actions. I would remind him of his, if I could talk. He explains how easy it is to find privacy in a Stasi holding station. How securely the room is soundproofed.

Fair enough; I deserve to die and he deserves to kill me.

As it is, the muck who tied me up happens to be the gambler we turned. As it is, they picked me up on a drug run. Paralyzing agent. Flavorless with coffee. He should have known not to turn his back on me.

By my bed is Start Where You Are – A Guide to Compassionate Living by Pema Chodron. Did I ever tell you about the time I was her driver for a weekend? The word is:

ESCAPE

“No escape, no problem. We already have everything we need. There is no need for self-improvement. All these trips that we lay on ourselves–the heavy-duty fearing that we’re bad and hoping that we’re good, the identities that we so dearly cling to, the rage, the jealousy and the addictions of all kinds–never touch our basic wealth. They are like clouds that temporarily block the sun. But all the time our warmth and brilliance are right here. This is who we really are. We are one blink of an eye away from being fully awake.” (pg. 1, opening paragraph)

Here come the holidays. First up, Thanksgiving. I’m not making a turkey this year. No, instead my daughter wants to go to New York to see the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, live. Which is, in my book, all kinds of crazy and yet…it’s not the first crazy road trip the two of us have embarked on. It’s our thing. We’ve been known to go out on a simple errand not to return for several hours having been struck by the spontaneous road-trip fever. No one even bats an eye at it anymore.

But this may be up there on the crazy scale. I mean, the traffic and the train are going to be insane. And then there’s my crowd-induced claustrophobia, or my general disdain for the commercialism of Christmas. But boy-howdy, my inner child is jubilant at the prospect of being right there, curbside, as the floats and the balloons go by. Daughter is starry-eyed herself, imagining us in our ear muffs and winter boots wielding hot-chocolate filled travel mugs.

I raised a romantic, what can I say?

Since I’m clearly covered in sap already over here, I couldn’t help lighting on Purple Moose’s entry this week. Sweet melancholy, lovers reunited…yeah.

Snow on Snow on Snow

The CD played and she softly sang along: In the deep midwinter, snow on snow on snow.

Melancholy touched her spirit. It was this time of year, her formerly favorite time, when Roy had left for Iraq. He’d smiled and touched her forehead with his at the deployment center.

“Ah, my sweet love, I’ll be back before the deep midwinter. We’ll be together before snow piles on snow. I love you. I’ll see you soon.”

Her heart left North Carolina that day. She missed him terribly.

Roy’s rich tenor joined her alto and she looked up to find her joy.

Back to Essays of E.B. White (because it’s still within reach) and I open to (once again, I kid you not) the essay titled, “Here is New York”. It is a somewhat dark essay of E.B. White’s changing New York. Here is the opening paragraph:

On any person who desires such queer prizes, New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy. It is this largess that accounts for the presence within the city’s walls of a considerable section of the population; for the residents of Manhattan are to a large extent strangers who have pulled up stakes somewhere and come to town, seeking sanctuary or fulfillment or some greater or lesser grail. The capacity to make such dubious gifts is a mysterious quality of New York. It can destroy an individual, or it can fulfill him, depending a good deal on luck. No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky.

The word is:

LUCKY

In the morning we lay in my bed bonelessly entwined, breathing each other’s breath as we talked in that inaniloquent way of lovers. You laughed when I told you how Maria had called the snowdrifts pressing against the windows snow elephants. These were the incidentals we turned into treasure chests, the words in which we stowed the meaning of moments. Codes to hint at what words could never describe so that we could relive the fulsomeness in mixed company, hidden in plain sight. This is what the peculiar language of  inside jokes is about, and together we perfected it.

I woke this morning to white sunlight across my white comforter and wondered for a brief moment if it had snowed in the night. Such are the things the mind does in that intersection between sleeping and waking. A place I wish I could choose to live in at will. Life would be much softer.

Yet consciousness breaks through and the day begins. There are the sick kittens to nurse and care for. Little Pippa has pneumonia and but for her little wet coughs, like a brush on sandpaper, you wouldn’t guess. She paws softly around the room with her sweet expression and pigeon-like coos and trills and sets to purring even as you just begin to reach for her silken coat. She purred so steadily even at the vet’s office that he had to give her a little scare to get her to stop long enough so he could listen to the rattle in her lungs.

Christabel is on the mend but spends her day sleeping on the bed, sighing occasionally before she goes to the door and cries for her sister who is quarantined across the hall.

Before the quarantine.

And then there is the regular work to be done which I simply can’t do when one or the other of these creatures is in the room being so new and achingly adorable in their wonderment of life, so I quarantine myself to the downstairs and solve problems for clients and take phone calls while I prepare a beef stew. I wonder if I could ever go back to office life, or if perhaps this blend and bleed of the domestic with the professional is just craziness. There is something to be said for clear lines between the two.

Finally, around midnight I browse through last week’s entries; laughing, reflecting, nodding as I do every week. The challenge was “writing”, and newcomer Columbibueno gave us this:

Posters

Knuckles moved down Michael’s spine.

“You uncomfortable?” Mr. Crisco wiped his glasses. “Anyway, as I was saying… We need to discuss this sudden cult hunter phenomenon.”

Jill rolled her eyes. “Dad!”

“What? Can’t we entertain intellectual subjects during dinner? Our visiting scholar might have valuable information.”

Michael watched the shadows that trawled the walls. “Yeah, I know about the Cult Hunters.”

Mr. Crisco perked up. “Then I can tell you. Some guys wearing ball gowns burst in and nailed small posters with crazy writing and symbols to our walls.”

The knuckles dug in harder. “Mr. Crisco, those aren’t ball gowns.”

Which was interesting, no?

During the recent October snowstorm and extended power outage, I was reading Essays of E.B. White by candlelight next to the fire (I know, I know) and it’s still sitting next to my reading chair, so I picked it up to do the magic finger selection and I kid you not, the word my finger landed on was:

SNOW

Have at it, the challenge is open until midnight Sunday.

Ah my dear word-nerds, I got buried by Snowtober 2011, was without power for 4 days, and then travelled across two state lines to bring home two rescue kittens, one of which I’ve been nursing back to health (I hope). My daughter, bless her, made me do it and it’s been an emotional roller-coaster up in here. Myself? I take a long time with the grief thing, folding in on myself and cherishing memories, so having new kittens while I’m still grieving over our little tortie Maine Coon passing – just pass me the valium and the chocolate.

I’m also limping along with National Novel Writing Month but what with two new babes in the house and catching up on work after a technology wipe-out, I’ll be lucky if I hit the halfway mark. How many of you are partaking in the madness this year? Can I get a show of hands?

While I’m getting a show of hands, how many of you are Google+ users? Because they just rolled out pages for businesses and brands and since I’ve been known to frequent the G+ more than Twitter as of late I set up a Velvet Verbosity page there if you want to get updates.

My pick this week is from Purple Moose:

Fright Night

“It only comes once a year. It’ll be fun.”

Marnie Grimm coaxed Henry into submission. She knew once he got into costume and she got him out the door he’d have a good time. Fright Night was a big deal in their little town. Even they could dress in costume to walk among other town folk.

Marnie was dressed as Little Red Riding Hood, holding a leash attached to a diamond studded collar around Henry’s throat. He wore an old-fashioned nightgown and cap over his furry head.

“Ooooh, Gramma. What big teeth you have!” Marnie crooned seductively into his ear.

In celebration of National Novel Writing Month madness, the prompt this week is not one word, but rather whatever you want to say about:

WRITING

and what it means to you. Go!

As I type this I am completely alone in the house. Completely alone. I love my people, but I don’t get enough time like this – hours upon beautiful quiet hours in which I can have uninterrupted thoughts.

There is only one thing wrong. Usually when I have the house to myself I’m not actually completely alone. There is usually another little life in the house, curled up in a warm spot somewhere or weaving through my legs, or sitting on my chest as I type with paws wrapped around my neck. Last weekend our beloved cat companion was killed by a car and I don’t know exactly what to say about that except that I can’t remember anything that so wrecked me like the moment that I tried to pick up her dead body from the road near our house.

I couldn’t do it. I howled on my knees by the side of the road equally horrified by the stiffness of her body as I was by the prospect of leaving her there for one more minute. It wasn’t rational, she was already gone. There was no life left in her to feel uncomfortable. But that’s what shock will do to you, what sudden grief will do to you – gut you of all rational thought and leave you on your knees on the side of a very busy road with your head bent less than a foot away from the yellow line, not caring if it gets lopped off by speeding metal and steel just so long as the dead body of your cat isn’t left in the dirt and exhaust fumes one minute longer.

It was eventually managed in a collaborative effort in what was probably minutes but felt like an interminably long time.

How could you not fall in love with this face?

The house…the house is much more quiet without her vibrant little presence and I still haven’t gotten used to it.

My pick this week is from Daniel Hathcock whose piece resonated with me even though I’m not exactly sure why yet:

Mad Ones 

Thoughts are naked at 3:00 in the morning.
Camping out here at this
Little kitchen table with the
Ugly blue vinyl striped Wal-mart tablecloth.

I have a massive cup o’ Joe,
But I’m getting drunk reading my Kerouac
And the mad ones.

It hurts to know you’re
Not the person you thought you were.
Not a roman candle exploding,
But still a spider.

8 legs of confusion, of doubt,
Of quiet little mouse-like
Timidity choking on half conceived words.

Frailty personified.
Fear made flesh.

The words are alcohol and
The bottle is full.
Always ready for yet another shot.

I’m reading several books at the moment, but I want to leave this prompt open for anything to do with spooks, ghouls, spectres and other haunty things in celebration of

HALLOWEEN

Or All Hallow’s Eve, or Dia de los Muertos, or All Soul’s Day. Point is, scare the ever-lovin’ crap out of me. Ok?

Yes, I’ll be late to my own funeral. I’m sure of it.

Busy per the usual. Did you read about Times Square this past weekend? Dudes, I. was. there. And then somehow the next day I found myself swept up by a little vortex of luck and serendipity that dropped me into the middle of a surprise visit by a Buddhist meditation master where I heard a sober call to action for sanity and wisdom in these transitional times. This followed by a bop on the top of the head as blessing to those of us in attendance. Afterwards standing shoulder to shoulder with these 100 or so folks and saying hello through a sea of elbows to some faces I hadn’t seen in a decade, but no time for proper catch up as I had a train to catch.

Coming back home after what felt like a year of adventures whose nature I couldn’t quite fully grasp was a difficult transition. As though I had aged 100 years in a weekend and  now my own people felt strange and far off. But unlike Betty, I have not settled into unnamed satisfaction:

Betty was ambitious from age twelve at least. She would have fame and respect. Most of all she would have wonderful affairs with rebels and poets.

She learned to settle. She would have a stable relationship with Ralph and work hard to produce one thing worthwhile.

Now she is fifty-one and everything has finally come apart. No money, and no safety net. No time to start again. Ralph’s not coming back, she realized that yesterday.

It’s Sunday morning and she’s in bed with a cup of tea. Staring at the wall, wondering why she feels so satisfied.

Onward, now, word-nerds. The new prompt from this quote I ran across from Aldous Huxley and I rather liked it:

‘There are quiet places also in the mind’, he said meditatively. ‘But we build bandstands and factories on them. Deliberately — to put a stop to the quietness. … All the thoughts, all the preoccupations in my head — round and round, continually What’s it for? What’s it all for? To put an end to the quiet, to break it up and disperse it, to pretend at any cost that it isn’t there. Ah, but it is; it is there, in spite of everything, at the back of everything. Lying awake at night — not restlessly, but serenely, waiting for sleep — the quiet re-establishes itself, piece by piece; all the broken bits … we’ve been so busily dispersing all day long. It re-establishes itself, an inward quiet, like the outward quiet of grass and trees. It fills one, it grows — a crystal quiet, a growing, expanding crystal. It grows, it becomes more perfect; it is beautiful and terrifying … For one’s alone in the crystal, and there’s no support from the outside, there is nothing external and important, nothing external and trivial to pull oneself up by or stand on … There is nothing to laugh at or feel enthusiast about. But the quiet grows and grows. Beautifully and unbearably. And at last you are conscious of something approaching; it is almost a faint sound of footsteps. Something inexpressively lovely and wonderful advances through the crystal, nearer, nearer. And, oh, inexpressively terrifying. For if it were to touch you, if it were to seize you and engulf you, you’d die; all the regular, habitual daily part of you would die …. one would have to begin living arduously in the quiet, arduously in some strange, unheard of manner.

QUIET

(open through midnight Monday)

Is it just me, or is time flying lately? I’ve been seeing more activity around the internets about National Novel Writing Month because, holy crap, it’s just around the corner! My tactic for this November is to not even pretend I’m going to persevere and finish. My version of reverse psychology. I’ll let you know how that turns out. What are your plans? Got a novel you’ve been itching to get out?

I know Seeking Elevation does, even if she doesn’t yet. I try never to pick the same writer back to back but I couldn’t help myself this week. I might have to ask her to take the month of November off from 100 Words and devote her energies to NaNoWriMo just so I don’t get called out for playing favorites. But yeah, this piece socked me:

F-Stop

My children have started characterizing things by manner of exclusion. Fish are not birds. It is not raining. They are not adults.

I am not wondering what the skin under your jaw tastes like. Your ribs are not Braille; your hip is not for me to know. I am not imagining myself in front of you, mouthing the words, “Let me.”

I am not answering a ringing phone.

It happens. You think you have all the information, and then suddenly the aperture gets widened. Light gets in; you’re left clutching things that are falling, defining yourself by what you’re not.

Currently I’m reading Bloomberg’s special edition tribute to Steve Jobs. He was truly an amazing man of high standards who gifted us with his drive and talents. Rest in peace Steve, you left a mark on this world that will not soon be forgotten.

Pulled from the tribute, and one of Steve Job’s quotes, the word is:

SATISFIED

“The only way to be satisfied is to do what you believe is great work.” ~Steve Jobs, 1955-2011