This is a love letter to people who leave their blinds open at night.
I like to take walks through my neighborhood and peek inside your homes. Especially this time of year, as Christmas trees begin to pop up in windows and stair banisters are strung with twinkle lights. I am not trying to spy on you—mostly I am interested in what color your walls are painted, what kind of kitchen cabinets you have, I am always on the lookout for a better living room lamp, do you have a nice one that might serve as inspiration?—but every now and then I catch a glimpse. You on the couch, watching television. You at the counter, chopping onions. Your family sitting down to dinner, so much later than mine does. Was it a busy day at work? I tell myself stories about your lives, imagine you as characters in a piece of writing I’ve been slowly crafting in my mind. The woman seated in the round back chair by the window, book in one hand, a glass of wine on the end table beside her: she is a mother, small children finally in bed. Her shoulders ache, her neck is stiff, but this is bliss, seated here alone in the dim light of a reading lamp. I’ve got a glass of wine and a book and nobody needs me! she will text a friend and they will go back and forth for forty minutes, sharing stories of their days as she scrolls through Twitter and Instagram until she starts to grow tired and decides, wine finished, book unread, to head up to bed.
It is a strange time of year, this space between Thanksgiving and New Year’s. Equal parts festive and melancholy. The daylight diminished but everything aglow in holiday lights. I like the pinpricks of color reflected in windowpanes and wet sidewalks. I like a cold night where I need a scarf and a hat. Where I pass other people on the sidewalk and we smile, tight-lipped and rosy-cheeked, and I can feel the weight of the past year in the hunch of their shoulders.
My family finally caught Covid, after all this time, and I can still feel it in the way my breath catches if I inhale too deeply, which is something I do often this time of year. Step outside in the morning and take in a full breath of the frosted air. Walk in the evening and let the smell of woodsmoke and wet leaves fill my nose. I am still fatigued, more easily worn down by small tasks. I cannot walk as far as I would like to, and thus have fewer windows to peer into. I am hopeful that this will improve in the coming weeks—as more decorations appear, so will my stamina.
I used to live in a neighborhood that was next to a neighborhood full of beautiful old homes. What is nice about Baltimore and its abundance of rowhouses is that with a single quick glance you can see the majority of someone’s home; the downstairs floor is usually one continuous long space. But there was one rowhouse in the fancy rowhouse neighborhood that had a grand staircase in the front room and it blocked the view of the rest of the house. The owners would drape white lights and garland along the banisters and red bows hung in even increments down the full length of the stairs. In this high-ceilinged foyer, they would place a towering Christmas tree. I would pass by this house every night when out walking the dog, stand for a long moment and look through the window at this gorgeous setup and imagine the lives of the people inside. People I never saw.
I think about that house often—the scene inside like something from an old movie, classic and beautiful, the kind of Christmas Bing Crosby would sing about. I prefer our current neighborhood, though, with its kitschy displays—inflatable Santas and reindeer, oversized plastic nativity scenes that cover an entire porch, so many colorful lights strung from a single home that it’s almost an assault on your eyes. Best of all, I like the handmade children’s decorations that get taped to windows and doors. Wonky, asymmetrical snowflakes and construction paper Christmas trees.
My son has a set of markers that are made for drawing on windows. At Halloween he drew a spooky scene of ghosts and monsters. For Thanksgiving, he did a series of turkeys of increasing size—Tiny Baby Turkey all the way up to Jumbo Magnus. Yesterday he erased the turkeys to make room for his holiday display, though he is still waiting to decide what exactly he wants to draw. Soon we will hang up the advent calendar my sister and her husband made for us—a tradition that is big in Germany where my brother-in-law is from. Soon we will pull out the menorah. We will get a Christmas tree and my parents will come to town to help my son decorate it. We will celebrate many little bits of the holiday season. We will try to lean into cheer and warmth and the cozy joy of traditions, while also trying not to overdo it as we teach our son about gratitude and restraint.
The weeks will march on and the year will come to an end and my husband and I will try and fail to make it to midnight. It was a pretty good year, we will say. Good enough. Better than the last. Maybe next year will be even better. Easier. It is the lie we all tell ourselves to keep going, to push through the long, gray winter. To hold out for spring. Though I admit, I have grown to like winter. To anticipate it and welcome it with something akin to pleasure. It asks so little of us really: Slow down. Seek warmth. Simply survive.
I walk and I take in whatever the evening has to offer, whatever the season has to give. I like coming back inside with my nose and cheeks stinging, the smell of cold clinging to my hair. My home is warm and dimly lit. Upstairs my son is sleeping. I sit on the couch with a book and a drink. Nobody needs me, which feels wonderful, but lonely—a perfect encapsulation of this time of year—so I pick up my phone and text a friend.
As an accompaniment to this post, I offer up this seasonally-appropriate poem, previously published in Second Chance Lit.
My Father and I Take the Same Antidepressant
Christmas is canceled.
He’s finally making good on that threat—
lifting the tree by the trunk with one hand and
splashing water out of the stand
onto the floor. Later my mother will mop it up
with towels and a knowing shake of her head.
The limbs are still strung with rainbow lights and covered in
ornaments: reflective red orbs, popsicle stick reindeer, handmade
paper cutouts framing our smiling school portraits, a bizarre wooden clown that
years from now we’ll finally throw out
having collectively decided it looks vaguely racist.
He flings open the door and heaves the tree into the backyard.
Ornaments smash and scatter across the grass.
Christmas is canceled, he tells us,
quietly closing the door.
Years from then I tell him
“Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas” is unequivocally
the best Christmas song ever.
Oh definitely, he agrees. But only
the old version. The one about muddling through somehow.
Yes, obviously. Of course
the muddling through.
Yes, obviously
we’ve always had that in common.