Sylvia's Journal

My numb hands held the the fist paragraph of today’s entry when I woke up. It is always a fragile arrangement. There was a phrase in there somewhere, about yesterday. Not this yesterday, but yesterdays in general, which made me think something like, “Oh, of course, that’s why I do this EMDR exploration of the past (all these yesterdays).” It was a clever phrase and I had wanted to start my writing with it. But I made the mistake of turning over and sleeping a little longer. Now all that is left of this brilliant opening is a vague outline, like a footstep in a snowstorm, the wind quickly obliterating its exact shape and form. A wind is also blowing inside my head and waking me up. It is the airstream produced by millions of synapses firing; checking out to-do lists for today, smelling the bread baking downstairs (a machine), hoping for tea in bed, and stuff like that

There is also wind in the outside world, and rain. The fog horn bleats – I asked Axel for a verb to describe the foghorn’s sound and we agreed it sounds like a sheep. It is dreadful weather and staying in bed (by now the tea has arrived) seems like a great idea. Today will probably be the last day for the remaining snow that is still visible in patches here and there. Once again my flight to Gardner is postponed. I did keep the plane reservation to circle around Beverly airport again for some practice, assuming that the weather will be a little better around 2 PM and that I manage to get out of bed.

Yesterday morning we all piled into the car, Sita and Tessa in the back, Axel and I in the front, to drive to Wareham, south of Boston. We went to visit Axel’s mother’s only remaining sibling, the baby of them all, Charles, who was born in November 1909. He lives in a small trailer park, dwarfed by a big shopping center. This is handy when you cannot drive a car anymore. His small trailer home is the most uncluttered house I have ever seen and stands in enormous contrast to our most cluttered of all homes. His house is probably also one of the few remaining houses in the US without a computer or any other electronic gadgets; unless you count the singing and moving Christmas decorations. They are only up for the holidays and won’t clutter his living room much longer. His living space represents our collective yearning for a simpler life; but it would never do for us – no car, no computer. And yet, he is fully connected to the world through his friends, family and TV.

We had meant to treat him to lunch. Instead he treated us to a wonderful lunch at Lyndsey’s in Wareham. We ate all the things that Weightwatchers warn you about, served in huge portions. And while we ate Sita illustrated on a placemat all the family information we could collectively extract from him. Each piece came with a story and a twinkle in his eye. As the youngest of seven, Charles had been a keen and witty observer, especially of his quarelling sisters Penny and Betty, and appeared the wiser of them all. It was funny to hear him refer to his young nephew when we discovered this nephew is in his eighties. If that was young, what were we, and in particular Tessa with her 22 years?

After lunch Charles directed us on a driving tour of some magnificent beaches in the area. We people from the Northshore don’t know the Southshore at all. We felt like we were very far away from home. It was a glorious blue-sky winterday. I kept thinking that flying to New Bedford would have been a lot more fun than sitting in a car for 2 hours each way. We would have seen the cranberry bogs from the sky, as deep red blotches on the landscape, rather than at eye level. They are still magnificent that way, but not as striking; but the girls and Charles declared that they’d rather stay on the ground.

On the way back we had planned to visit the whaling museum in New Bedford but it was too late. So instead we stopped at the temple of modern and cheap furniture, called IKEA and got Tessa a rug for her large and cold Canadian living room. She’s penniless and in debt but we love her so much; we’d buy anything for our poor little darling. She found herself the biggest and cheapest rug that wasn’t also hideous. It has a tic-tac-toe pattern woven into it and nothing, we think, that the puppy can get his teeth in.

At home we found Steve up and recovered from his 18 hour bus ride from Canada, with his friend Roy. They were the ones that made the small ramp in and out of my bedroom, back in July. Now Roy is sleeping in that room, which looks again like an office rather than a sick room.

We completed Christerklaas and Christmas with an exchange of poems and presents between Steve and his family and ours. We now have more than a liter of real maple syrup, some more good books and Steve has things to keep him warm (including the rug) and several puppy paraphernalia.

Everyone went to bed very late, including us; we working on various projects (Christmas cards before Easter?) and the kids playing boardgames downstairs. It was fun to have a noisy and cluttered house. I wouldn’t want to have it any other way.