Love and Counting

I finally took down the Christmas decorations.

One year I left them up until April. This was when we lived in the woods. When you live in the woods, anything goes. Usually the first thing is your sanity. If you're lucky. You start seeing animals everywhere, even when they're not. This is because animals are camouflaged to blend in with their environment. Is that a deer behind that tree? Nope, just a deerlike tree. In the same way people are made to blend in with their environment. Sometimes I've gone to The Mall and thought I was the only one there.

When we lived in the woods, I sometimes went for a hike and ran into a bear. Usually, a bearlike tree. The time I'm remembering, the tree grunted. My first clue. Then it watched as I walked backward down the path to the gate through the gate across the yard up the steps to the house. Try walking backward down a path through a gate up a set of stairs with a bear the size of a Buick watching. This event happened to coincide with A. my birthday, B. the Rodney King thing (remember that, class?), and 3. a gathering downtown at the Federal Building to protest the Rodney King thing. I called my husband to say I'd be late to the protest, having been waylaid by a bear the size of the Federal Building.

One winter I spent the better part of a sizable Arts Grant feeding the deer. A winter of record-breaking snowfall, deer dying by the boatload, immobilized by the ocean of snow. Every morning I donned my space suit and trudged out to the shed to load the toboggan with 100 lbs. of deer mix, which I hauled 100 yards up the path to the feed troughs. I repeated this at dusk, and on a daily basis for three months. By the time spring finally broke, I was, too, and my herd numbered more than five dozen. They'd made their Green Barn in the woods surrounding our property and spent the winter yarded up there, waiting in the shadows for my visits. I began to recognize individual animals and spoke to them as I moved through the woods. When the snow melted in June, I found antlers scattered around under the trees, like thank-you gifts.

I suppose many of their descendants are still there. Maybe even a couple of the old-timers. How long does a deer live? Not long enough.

My Christmas decorations deadline this year, proper little townie that I've become, is Valentines Day. I'm just under the wire. Although the red-and-gold of Christmas lends itself to Valentines Day as well. Also to a funeral parlor, which my normal non-holiday decor resembles. I remind myself of this whenever I'm considering purchasing yet another fringed velvet throw pillow. When guests arrive, I'm sometimes tempted to greet them in a hushed voice, "Are you with the Anderson party?"

With the spangles and bling of Christmas '07 relegated to memory, the wreaths and candles and lighted houses tucked away on the basement shelves, I sit in the sun under the piano window and tune my autoharp. A lengthy process, someone has to do it. Nothing worse than an out-of-tune stringed instrument, I always say.

...G-flat...G...A-flat...A...

I think about Christmas Past, about music, about The Past in general, all those years I fanatically tuned and retuned the Gibson, the Martin, how I changed strings weekly, sometimes daily, worshipped my calluses like they were battle scars.

...B-flat...B...C...D-flat...

Now the Gibson and the Martin and the Melody Maker and the 335 are tucked away in their cases, criminally out-of-tune, lined up like coffins beside the piano, and here I am, forging a new relationship with a vintage 1966 15-chord RBI Chrom-A-Harp, who knew.

...D...E-flat...E...F...

Which reminds me of Miss Hessler, the traveling music teacher in my old elementary school, who traveled between schools and around the room like Groucho Marx, mustache and all, with her autoharp and her pitch pipe and her sensible shoes, who spat when she sang so that you prayed for an umbrella, one of that old generation of unmarried female schoolteachers who died in the trenches.

After awhile I lay down the tuning wrench, press the chord bar, and a big ringing A-minor fills my living room. My funereal living room in town. I squint into the sun, clear my throat, and begin:

"The ants go marching one by one..."

The Preschoolers are going to love this. Valentines Day, the "Hearts and Numbers" unit, or, as Charlotte put it the other day, "Love and Counting." It's time something replaced "Jingle Bells" as their favorite song. And actually it is a rather dirge-like little tune. All these connections, isn't life a trip.