winter solstice

On this shortest day of the year, we look out through the front window, between peeling porch posts, over the humble spirea's snowflake blossoms, and on to the neighbor's spruces across the road. I love the farm in all the seasons, but winter is the best, and this day must be the bestest as it's the winter-i-est of them all.

Inside, on the sofa in front of the window, oh dear, the fabric is starting to fray on the edges. I can never replace this fabric. Even if I could afford it, I doubt I could find anything like it. Horsemen trot along in a perpetually fruited orchard while farmhands pick pears. Quite fitting for the farm. (There's another image with detail, below.)

Some women meet here on the sofa too, though you can't see them. The couch belonged to Grandma Olive, a woman unknown to me except in stories and objects that traveled many miles and decades to get here. She was like Martha Stewart, with the same impeccable standards for design and beauty, and also lacking a bit in warmth. She died when I was four. My mom's dad (stepdad actually, her dad was far away, but her stepdad adopted her) remarried another woman after Olive died. We called her "Aunt Edith" - a wealthy, distant woman who is also represented on this sofa in the cushion she needlepointed with a daffodil. Edith didn't have children of her own (though she had one stillborn), and my memories of her are chilly and sharp. I don't have much to judge Olive and Edith with, except stories filtered through my family and a few memories of feeling inferior to rich relations. So why do I treasure their objects? These cushions are stuffed with down feathers, so soft you have to fluff them after sitting. Every time I do that I see Edith's chauffeur fluffing them when he came in before breakfast to ask when she needed the car. I'm still that wide-eyed preacher's child in a corner taking it all in, but no longer wishing for a life not meant for me. Years have changed the tools I use for measuring and observing. I know my own sharp edges that need softening, and I see how people's life choices are sometimes made out of pain. Olive was divorced young, she struggled with a temper, and when we packed up Mom's house I found tender letters she wrote to Mom lamenting her own failures as a mother and grandma. Also I can see how Edith's inability to have children might have turned her toward travel and material things for meaning. Even so, there is life in the stitches she made.

Now I lie back on the sofa while I meet Lesley on the phone, in the laps of Olive, Edith, and my mom - and feel all of us warm and soft.

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Today's Christmas decoration:

These Matroyshka stacking dolls observe from the piano, behind Grandma Olive's sofa.