Sherry Chandler » Wild and Sweet
Wild and Sweet
It’s a gray and rainy Christmas day here in Central Kentucky, as you can see through the window beyond our decorated avacado plant (I apologize for the wires—hard to hide them on an avacado).
Not unusual here. I’ve celebrated many a rainy Christmas, some of them at the tobacco stripping bench. Or in the bulking barn. This is prime tobacco working weather (well, actually a lilttle wet and warm) and the crop had to be processed or else there would be no Christmas. My sister, who ran a small country store for a while, would sometimes carry an interest-free account for local farmers to be paid off with tobacco crop money.
But I digress. Christmas is more often marked by mud than snow here. So it is not the weather that makes me pensive on this Christmas morning when only I and the cats are awake in the house.
I am thinking of the sadness that seems so much more sad at this season.
Of my friend whose mother is dying of ovarian cancer, who comes to this Christmas knowing it is her last with her mother
Of my friend who just received her own diagnosis of cancer
Of my friend who has just had radical spine surgery and escaped paralysis by a matter of days
Of my friend who is struggling, in her 40s, with rheumatoid arthritis
Of my friend who has been struggling to be reconciled to her empty nest
Of my coworker whose son has served two tours in Iraq
Of my husband who lost his aunt on December 14, of his cousins who sent out her Christmas letter anyway
Of my nephew whose grandson born on December 18 won’t make it out of the hospital for Christmas, though he will may make it home for the New Year
And I am thinking of this old Christmas cactus. I don’t know how old it is. Like many of the plants I photograph here, it is a legacy from my mother-in-law, who died in November of 1981. I have snipped and started branches, repotted and neglected it for 25 years, until who knows how much of the original is still there. And yet it is still the original, and still it manages to give us these gorgeous blooms every gloomy Kentucky Christmas. Or sometimes Thanksgiving.
The joy is in the journey.
We touch one another in life and in death, in trouble and in joy. We should remember this at Christmas and all the year.
“We must love one another…” said the poet W. H. Auden in his poem “September 1, 1939.”
But he could not decide whether to end that line “We must love one another or die” or “We must love one another and die.”
Both are true.
We must love one another.
Possibly related posts:
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
5 Comments
1. Terry replies at 25th December 2006, 9:42 pm :
Wishing you much love, Sherry. There’s no shortage of it in you.
2. sherry replies at 26th December 2006, 6:06 am :
Thank you, Terry.
3. Georgia Green Stamper replies at 26th December 2006, 9:55 am :
“The great question for the old and the dying, I think, is not if they have loved and been loved enough, but if they have been grateful enough for love received and given, however much. No one who has gratitude is tthe onliest one. Let us pray to be grateful to the last.” … “Time, then, is told by love’s losses, and by the coming of love, and by love continuing in gratitude for what is lost. It is folded and enfolded and unfolded forever and ever, the love by which the dead are alive and the unborn welcomed into the womb.” Wendell Berry, _ Andy Catlett: Early Travels_.
4. sherry replies at 26th December 2006, 3:40 pm :
Thank you, Georgia, for sharing this Berry quote. It is lovely, and we would do well t heed it.
5. Sherry Chandler » A&hellip replies at 21st February 2007, 6:33 pm :
[...] On my drive home tonight, I learned on All Things Considered more about Auden’s disenchantment with “September 1, 1939,” a poem I discussed at Christmas. It seems he became really disenchanted with it when Bill Moyers wrote words closely echoing the final lines — “We must love one another — or die” — into a speech for Lyndon Johnson, a snippet of which was then used for the infamous Daisy campaign ad (video here). [...]
Leave a comment