SLOWLY, SLOWLY

We’re still taking down the Christmas decorations.

Who all can say that? I claim busy, I claim a tee-ninecy helper whose little hands will handle oh-so-carefully, murmuring “careful, careful” as have the older Grands in their turn. I also claim lazy---the fact that I’ve sent up almost everything glittery and ribbony and tinsel-wise must surely absolve me of going up to remove all the upstairs swags and bows and wreaths and signs and trees---Oh, Heavens, the trees!

I finally counted EIGHT, in this little house, if you count the ficus littered with birds and coaster-sized lacy doilies AND the big huge vase filled with the same black gnarly limbs which held bats and pumpkin lights as short ago as Halloween. Those old limbs just went out the back door, tossed TOWARD a bit of lawn as I scrambled to get their grasping twiggy fingers loose from my clothes, hair, the shelf-curtain, and doorjamb, whilst holding open a forty-pound door and stepping ACROSS the dog bed, conveniently placed up there just now on the napkin-sized landing by Sweetpea, to give FuzzyPup advantage of the morning sunshine on his fur as he naps. Naps, I tell you---we should all have the advantage and faculty of falling asleep asprawl of wherever we are when our eyes close.

Those huge stiff old black twigs became a thing of beauty as they hung in the corner, with a dozen or so old-old kugels---the pale colors of the fragile bubbles, like pointy-ended ellipses, almost transparent with the wear-away of the silvery pinks and jades and teals of their long-ago inside-spray.

Pay no attention to the lax posture of this picture---I've tried rotating it in every direction, and it STILL lies right down and won't move, like a stubborn old dog. I've dealt with ONE of those this a.m. and not even my pride in doing a nice job here will entice me to coax an inanimate object more than once. So kinda tilt your head left and look, OK? I just wanted you to see the shape of those wonderful old ornaments, almost too ethereal to touch.

So far this morning, we’ve removed the stockings from all their heavy brass holders spelling P-E-A-C-E and N-O-E-L in the two sunniest windows, line danced a bit with Fifi and friends, “worked” the smallest Tinkerbell puzzle in the history of the Dollar Store, solved another problem regarding big rubber-soled shoes and the tight underpants inside a tutu, danced some more, gone out to feed the birds all the old dregs in the bottoms of cereal boxes, played Play Doh, stepped on quite a few Cootie legs and eyes, and had breakfast and a whole pot of coffee. Not necessarily in that order.

And so, the undecorating goes on. Slowly. And we always speak of the children's Aunt, who lived on the place near us---somewhere along between turkey and pie on Christmas Day, you could look out the window and see little drifting bits of silver---vagrant old foil icicles slipped their moorings on her tree, which she'd stripped of everything except those clingy little strands, and tossed out into the yard before she headed over for Christmas Dinner.

And while we bide our time to finish the packing away, we’ve unearthed a nice space for sitting with some new books.

Sounds just right to us. And YOU?

(Addendum five minutes after I posted---I went into the bathroom with Sweetpea before her nap, and noticed my hair in disarray. It was a goodly-sized two-pronged twig, which I suppose I've been wearing on my head like a little antler since the branch-tossing incident. There's nobody here but us chickens, but I DO feel a bit like Ignatius O'Reilly: "Have I been pushing this about?")

And I MUST have THAT TALK with Sweetpea---the one about "We ladies TELL each other things, like when our slip's showing or we have lipstick on our teeth."