Second Sunday in Advent

We attended a Christmas party  last night, the only one to which we’ll show up this year, except for the upcoming annual gathering with eldest son and his clan, to which will be added a son in late January.

The party wasn’t excruciating, and we were well fed. We don’t eat a lot of beef these days because of the high cost, but I made up for it last night. Extremely tender beef tenderloin, a nice herbed chicken, green beans, lumpy mashed potatoes (and that is NOT a complaint), salad, and rolls, and started off with chicken salad, crab rangoon, pimento cheese, and several other finger foods and croo dee tay. I couldn’t hold any dessert, but we came home with some great homemade cupcakes (red velvet ones and vanilla ones with salted caramel frosting). We did a gift exchange, and Mrs. Orr came home with a nice gardening gift basket.  A three gallon ceramic planter filled with an amaryllis bulb, a set of tools (trowel, weeder, handrake), a nice pair of gardening gloves, and a glass & terra cotta watering bulb.

Today was gray and chilly, but tolerable. Tolerable for me. Alas, my sweet wife is not feeling well. She has a bit of congestion and a raw throat. She didn’t notice the symptoms until she pulled a cinnamon air freshener out of the wall outlet. Some of the scented fluid spilled onto her hand, and it was quite a potent scent. We’re not sure if this irritated her sinus passages, or if she was already coming down with something and this incident simply made her uncomfortably aware of her body’s symptoms. At any rate, she began to feel poorly right after spilling the cinnamon fluid. She is drowsing now and not her usual cheerful, busy self. I strongly dislike the helpless feeling I always get when I am unable to “fix” her.

The spotted twins and Dixee frisked around most of the day, proud of the bandannas I’ve hung about their necks. They seem to particularly enjoy what Mrs. Orr calls our “twinkly evenings,” with the lights turned low and the tree and various decorations glowing all around the house. I’m rather fond of these long evenings myself. Always have been.

As I type this, we have “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” on the television. I sing along in my croaky, now-unused voice, and enjoy all the old images and characters. One of my favorites is the spotted elephant from the island of misfit toys. Something poignant and lonesome about that little feller. The scene near the end of the show where the misfit toys are preparing to go to bed, crushed by the realization that they’ve been overlooked again by Santa and the children of the world, always brings the lump to the throat.

We watched a sweet, short little movie this evening, Gypsy Colt, starring Ward Bond (The Searchers, Wagon Train) as a kindly farmer and the always-sinister Lee Van Cleef as a sadistic horse trainer. The movie was a reworking of Lassie Come Home and was nicely done. I enjoyed the fact that there were no treacly, quasi-“humorous”  wah-wah-wah moments using the horse as a comedian.  Just a good, meat & potatoes children’s movie with a clear, subtle, moral message.

Speaking of children’s things (which I have never yet fully put away), I’ve been rereading a book I read when I was a boy. Found a pristine copy with the dustjacket in an antique store while we were back in Texas recently. The book is Rifles For Watie, a boy’s story of the War Between the States. It’s interesting to read it through an old man’s eyes now. Not only do I raise my eyebrows a bit at the fawning references to Lincoln, but I also find myself reading the passages describing the long, forced, parched and footsore marches and thinking, “I used to do that once. But no more.”

And so New England clam chowder for me, and chicken noodle soup for Mrs. Orr (neither homemade) and grilled cheese sandwiches, and then a hot bath for my wife, and a small snack of a cheese slice for the hounds, and then bed, and then sleep, and then Monday, and December folds in on us, in the season of Advent, and this mystery we live draws closer to its conclusion. The air is cold and black, the stars aiming their narrow beams of ancient light down on us while the two Carolina wrens sleep under the rafters of the back porch, and the Christmas lights on the front porch reflect back in the still water of the birdbath, and we grow silent under the quilts, in the rooms that whisper love and family and mountain air and finite faith and endless breaths across piney expanses of all that we’ve ever known. Do you hear what I hear…?

~ S.K. Orr