If There's a Crack There's an Opening

I woke up this morning to the sunrise screaming in at me through a crack in the curtains and my phone ringing. By the time I took out my ear plugs and shifted gears from one of those dreams that takes awhile to come to terms with ,I missed the call. The dream was so vivid and real it seemed like it was the real life and that the view from the ends of my eyelashes: a messy garage apartment, me under 5 down comforters, guitars, chords,broken strings, albums all over the floor, CDs with out cases and my sliver spun Christmas Tree was the dream.But the dream was of my ex-husband and me at my great grand mother's house...it seems so real.

This time of the year has all the potential of the world. But for me it just shines the mirror back in my face. That I am really alone. Since leaving my marriage back in '07, I have packed away and stored about ninety percent of the person I used to be. I was once a person who cooked 2-3 meals a day, baked cookies for every occasion under the sun in perfect shades of nostaligic colors and piped borders, canned summer harvests of heirloom tomatoes, drove to the midwest in prime corn season to bring back a bushel to freeze for the cold winter months and sent my husband off to work with leftovers that made his co-workers drool.  Since leaving my marriage, I think I have cooked 2 meals, Baked 3 birthday cakes and a batch of cherry blossom cupcakes.Now  I just make rice in a rice cooker and steam a bag of edamame in the basket above. That's hardly cooking. I translate cooking with love. If there is no one to love, there is no one to cook for.
Christmas is the same way. While I am not religious in  a Christian way, The Holiday Season that revolves around the Winter Solstice which is a week beyond my birthday and goes through the new year is a time for celebrations big and small. Mostly small. So the holidays are creeping in and I have been trying to avoid them.  I don't believe they are for me anymore. Some how I have made up the story that I do not deserve a Christmas.

From the time when I was a little girl living on welfare with my single mom and not having enough money for presents, to the night on the 28th of December when my house burned down when I was 14,to the 22nd of December when we put our beloved black lab, Tupelo, down, to the years spent working Christmas in a ski town and now to Christmas alone...This time of the year has always been the darkest for me inside and out. I always tired to make it look perfect though. The lights around the windows of our old cabin in Fraser with a snow man in the yard and hand cut pine bows twined together around the door were perfectly unperfect- I made most everything look like the photographer was coming and I was staging the scene. Now the view from here ...is narrow and tunneled. But I do see through a crack, a new tradition...My new tradition.

The other night I was out for a walk with my dogs in the below zero bitter air in the little park by my house  noticing all of the giant pine trees with lights swung from branch to branch. I always loved the way Christmas lights looked in the snow. I remembered that I used to love decorating for Christmas. My last Christmas in my married house was no exception. My husband and I went go out with our dogs, with a hand saw and our big snowshoes and trapsed across the  hillside looking for the prefect trees  to be chosen. We found  the perfect ones  and drug  them  back to our car. The trees were too big and we had to cut the one down to fit the size of the room. He handed  me each ornament and I placed  them  perfectly on the tree that was strung with little white lights. By the time we had all the ornaments on the tree we had relived all of our years together through the ornaments.  Friends of his parents made these beautiful Norweigan Rose Mauled ornaments with our names painted on the back and the year. His mom would send us ornaments every year too, often hand made. Every year we got more and in the 14 years or so we accumulated a beautiful assortment.

As I walked though the park the other night it was so quiet except for the squeaking of snow under my boots. I found my self really liking the bright lights in the trees covered in snow. I remembered the Christmases of my past. I got a little sad. I came back to my little garage apartment and got out my sliver spun Christmas Tree and my big box of ornaments. I put on an old Christmas album on vinyl and unwrapped the layers of our past. I found all the Christmas letters we sent every year. Oh, it was almost too much reading of the happier times. Here I was alone hanging just a fraction of the ornaments on the little tree. My little tree.

I figured that I need to make my own traditions now.  So I picked my favorite ornaments: a few jumbo body guitars, a little kid holing a chocolate lab that looked just like my Chocolate Dog that died, a spun wool snow man with a sea foam green hat and scarf and vintage pink glass balls. I packed up the ornaments that my ex husband's family sent us over the years along with a stocking made by his ex girlfriend and wrote a note saying...Not sure what to do with these, but I figured since they were from your family you should decide.
Part of me wanted to include a copy of each one of our old Christmas letters- but after thinking about it, it'd just be something shitty to do. I was the one who left- it wasn't a mutual decision- so for me to send them to him it would have just been a slap  to his face.

So I read the old letters and remembered our life together- the good times, the traditions, the meals, the excursions, the ranch we lived on and the house we bought- the life we made together. And it seems like a million years ago. I dont even remember that girl. Maybe it's becasue she's so hard to uncover today.

I have no regrets , he has now found love again and is remarried. And I genuinly want nothing but a love for him in his life- one that I was never able to give.There are so many people you break up with and say you want to be friends with- and it just never works. When we ended the marraige- I really thought he was gonna be the Larry Klien to my Joni Mitchell, the Brian Ahearn to my Emmy Lou Harris...and he wanted that for a while too but apparently it wasn't meant to be.

So I will celebrate in small ways-the quiet of this season, listen to the falling snow and I will try and quiet the voices in my head...the ones that say I don't deserve a Christmas. 

Now don't go feeling all sorry for me...that's not what I am asking for. I made my bed. I made the choice. I can't honestly say I want some one in my life again. I can't honestly say I miss sharing my bed with some one.
What I can say is  that I can give myself a new way to celebrate. I can give myself something small. I can make a deal with that girl with that heinous voice that lives in my head-the one who says the shitties things- to just pipe down for a few hours, that we can go back to the endless 4 in the morning talks later. That if she can just stay quiet now- I will give in to her demands to be heard later. That if she can just give me a little piece of time to allow a new way to enjoy and embrace this life I have, I will let her run her whole adgenda some time in the very near future.

So I am staying quiet and staying put. I am telling my story. I am starting over.

Jami Lunde
12.11.09
Lyons Colorado