December

Speak of the universal. This is drummed into every writer at some point along the journey: speak to the universal. And then we are told Wait! Wait! Do it this way - by personal detail, tiniest iteration, minute nuance. Speak of my experience by telling me in intimate detail about your own.

We hear this and we are reminded that there is a severe shortage of stories to tell. And we become confused. Because we know that this is is not true. Our stories fill our mouths like too many marshmallows. They spill out of us and stick to our lips. They define us, and make a mess of us, and sweeten our lives, and cause us to drag metaphors out to hyper-extension. But you get the idea.

I want to write, "For many of us, December is a month of Mondays and loss." But that resonates about as well as a starter violin. I will have to write instead about decorating the tree with ornaments that my grandmother made before she died. After all these many moves and seasonal packing up, there is only one egg left uncracked. It is a blown half eggshell, pale blue, with a tiny plastic virgin Mary inside it. The figurine closely resembles the plastic soldiers that come with parachutes out of bubble gum machines, but only if you look at her that way. Inside the fragile egg, she is staggering. Fragile. She is nothing like my grandmother. My grandmother hardly knew me. And yet. December is the month of her birthday, when we went to the Home to pick her up, and all of her friends came to our house, first with walkers, then in wheelchairs, then in diminished numbers, until my grandmother decided not to have any more birthdays.

December 14, on my grandmother's birthday, we picked our tree out of the collection on sale in the NoFrills parking lot. How ignominious. We walked it home and carped about how heavy it was and the lack of snow. We were intensely human, in moods ill-fitted to the occasion.

I put on Christmas carols. The ones my mother likes. I lift my father's mother's eggshell Virgin Mary up to a branch, and slide the peach silk hoop over a branch. I lift her to the tree as if she is the very embodiment of what came before. And then, for the first time in my life, I let go. I tell the children that they are free to put up the rest of the ornaments with me. They can start with the brand new shiny silver bulbs I bought after Christmas last year, thinking this one would be better.

The package springs open. One of six silver balls shatters to the floor. Em cries. She is afraid to touch another ornament for the next 30 minutes. When she does, it is a mitten knitted by somebody's grandmother. Something unbreakable. "It is December," I want to say to her. "Everything breaks a little bit in December." She is too young to know this universal truth. But old enough to feel it.

And to feel this, too. (And she does, deeply) There is love in the cracks made by all that breaking. Maybe more than there would have been had we been able to remain whole.