Field Note: Moving Into Cozy Time

Today isn't written yet.

I’m looking at my novel, “Postcards,” and considering working on it. I’m looking at field notes and considering those too. I’m thinking about how distant some friendships became, or how untenable they had already been for a long time. I’m thinking about how stable my family and kids feel now, how we seem to be orbiting one another just fine.

Life, in some ways, was much harder. In other ways, it is so much better than it has ever been.

I dreamed of Ian last night. He was never really my stepson in the traditional sense because he was already grown when I married his father. He was in our lives, coming for holidays and visits. In the dream, I saw more of who he had been back then, over ten years ago, before he became terminally ill—the easy smile and laugh, the empathy, the thoughtfulness. The person I wish illness had somehow released back to us. But illness finished what it had started, and the body finally let Ian go.

Birthdays and holidays carry their own ups and downs after someone is gone. He’s not the only ghost at the table for us.

We probably won’t really acknowledge Halloween again this year. Last year I had just started pulling out decorations when we got the phone call. The kids have mostly grown out of Halloween anyway, and I’m grateful there is no pressure to make something of it. We can simply let it pass. It was distracting fun for a while.

Christmas has taken a lesser form too, and I’m grateful for that.

Christmas was sometimes one of the hardest times of the year when I was growing up. Family fights. My mother’s depression. Relatives performing how religious and righteous they were, seeding my religious trauma with the way they talked down to me and judged me as a child and teen. People forgetting to send anything, or not bothering to call. There weren’t really traditions holding it together in my family. It was a tense and heavy time that sometimes had sugar or glitter sprinkled over the broken bits.

I got to create traditions with my own children, thankfully, but those traditions are changing shape as they’ve grown.

Not in bad ways.

Now it feels more like rest and recovery. Some presents. Good food. A slower pace. Pretty lights. Cocoa in old Santa mugs. Cozy time. Family dinners. Naps when you feel like taking one. Decorations that make the house warm and beautiful without requiring the season to become a production or performance.

And then we just let it go.

We ease into winter. Stargazing with early nights.

That is what fall and winter have become for me, at least for a few months.

A quieter season.

A softer one.

And I love it.

It is enough.

So this is my gratitude field note, nowhere near Thanksgiving.

Gratitude for my cozy family and its rhythms. Gratitude for the way traditions are allowed to change. Gratitude for the people who are here, and love for the people who aren’t.

This is how I am stepping into the season.

Vanilla lattes.

Listening to Khruagbin’s “The Universe Smiles Upon You” album.

Letting go of more of what doesn’t serve me.

Embracing the simpler, more personal traditions.

Namaste.