Wintry Mix

As the world turns toward the light

We were promised a Wintry Mix and that could be anything: Appropriately cool music, a peppermint jumble of sweets, a handful of clouds and rain, but what they call Wintry Mix at the weather service is mixed snow and rain: sleet, or as they call it up in the mid-mountains, graupel. Soft balls of hail that crush in the hand. Gently rimed snowflakes.

Wintry mix predicted but not delivered

But we got no Wintry Mix—unless days of rainsheets that tore into my yard and broke the barrier of my home’s carapace, leaking down interior walls that never felt such moisture before—followed by sunshine and tumbling clouds and stiff breezes. That’s a Wintry Mix, too. (A call to the insurance adjustor is in order.)

I tried to make a poem out of the wintery words but they didn’t fit together, and those muscles—my poetry pecs—are untoned, wabbling like the turkey’s neck instead of pounding and punching a perfect meter. Something to strengthen in the New Year.

Christmas Cake (British tradition) and mince pies

I made all the traditional things: Christmas Cake, (vegan) mince pies, sweets and treats for all, and then the power went out. We postponed Christmas for a day, and went to visit the littlest Traceys, another generation to carry my husband’s Irish name. The littlest one is named for our lost son, another Austin Tracey, so it’s bitter and sweet, like the darkest chocolate, like Brussels and cranberries roasted together. I love having a wee one to pull onto my lap, to ask me why-questions, but he isn’t ours, and we can’t keep him, home, safe, where he’ll stay under a wing forever. (And we never could. We never could.)

Instead, the big kids (Grownups now. They’re adults. They’re not babies.) came up and we drank Cosmos and played Cards Against Humanities and charades, ate non-traditional meatless lasagna instead of a roast goose or a beef Wellington, refused to discuss politics so as not to sour the mood, and between cigarettes and bites of candy, settled into the TV puppy-pile we always make when we’re together: leaning against a shoulder, sharing the sofa, a pillow, a cat, a blankie. The kids are cool and smart and secure, making wedding plans and travel itineraries, educating themselves and leaping toward goals they hadn’t yet shared, and laughing harder as we Facetimed other siblings and half-sibs who wished they were here.

Boxing Day fun + a gratuitous Whoa, Nelly! promo shot.

We did all right, raising women smart enough to know about Plan B, and peri-menopause before they need to know, about red flags and insurance and emergency funds. They have loving partners, generous in-laws and kindly relations on their other sides, and they make our holidays bright with the brief grasp of their hands, their endless coffee and ciggie breaks, their bottomless laughter and occasional tears.

I want to hold them so tightly they won’t leave me, but I don’t. I want to stand at the porch until they are out of sight — “It’s the custom.”— but my husband pulls me inside. “No long goodbyes,” he says, but I could chase their cars like a naughty pup, barking my farewells. I miss them when they are still in the room and daily live with the scarcity of their presence, pieces of me out in the world where I can’t even hold them. Where I feel them but can’t see them. The cells we exchanged in utero, the pieces of me that are in them, and the bits of them that linger in me: These are ancestral maternal bonds. I would lactate, or weep, if I thought about it enough.

They are here and gone. Our house creaks and settles. The Wintry Mix does not arrive, but teases: Maybe next week. Maybe next month. Just bring me a dusting of snow, a cold hush so I might sink into these pillows, this book, this steaming mug of cinnamon tea, feel myself readjust to the place where I live now, mama-writer-partner-friend-not-mama, and send me a new story to write.

Word by word. One page at a time.