The Countdown

Deadlines move in and you begin to count backwards. How many days? How many hours? How many minutes until...whatever is scheduled inexorably for a certain time.

I used to keep my house so that somehow I could get everything shoveled into place (or apparently so) in time. There was some sort of criterion for cleanliness and orderliness that got set sometime in my life-- never a very perfectionist one, but one that defined the self esteem comfort zone. If I was not going to meet the deadline it actually rattled me terribly, and caused whatever event it was to be not the totally joyous thing it was intended to be. I would get jittery and apologetic -- and it's not fun to be around someone who is jittery and apologetic.

The children and their children will not be arriving anytime at my door, which is some 3000 miles from where they are. So the heat is off. In our life now, it's easier that way. We are living sort of like university students, with our tools of activity all around us in a project lab. No one would invite the family to one's workroom for a dinner or high holiday.

My own daughters are extraordinary homemakers, sublime gourmet food artists, interior decoration professionals, and beautifully honed hostesses. My son and his wife are the personification of hospitality with wide open arms and wide open doors and sweetly perfect guest facilities and totally comfortable hospitality that is sustained for a long visit for this gramma. These three homes anyone would give their eye teeth to go home to!

I remember when I first went off to boarding school. (Think 1955.) The campus couldn't have been lovelier, and I loved my ancient, high-ceilinged room on the third floor overlooking the rolling lawns of the Bucks County campus. The living was briskly pleasant, the dining room served home baked bread and tall pitchers of cream for one's cereal, and the people mostly genuinely wonderful. Students were not allowed to go home before Thanksgiving vacation -- a sort of "boot camp"concept in case anyone had to get over homesickness.

That first visit home at Thanksgiving was like nothing I have remembered since: everything at home was absolutely gorgeous. The same house my childhood self had thought of as sort of ordinary--sort of flawed with familiar shortcomings, little things that bothered me, like the severety of the drapes on the windows and the scuffy marks on the very old and slightly threadbare Persian rug in the livingroom-- things that embarrassed me a bit when my wealthier friends came over-- that same house was like a palace. Everything smelled so good, and the sheets were so crisp! Everything was so small and endearing! The food was served on the fine old flowered plates (same old plates as always) and there were fresh Crysanthemums on the table and, we ate with the usual silverware that had seemed unextraordinary up until now. Lovely cigarette smoke (forbidden at boarding school) curled around over my father's chair in the luxurious familiar way, and there was the baby grand Ibach piano looking fine and inviting with its aged ivory keys and the Bach book sitting on it at the ready.

Thank goodness for such wonders. It was not the furnishings that made home so wonderful, nor the expertness of the interior design. It was the readiness for people! It was there for us to fit ourselves naturally into and to talk and laugh and reminisce and catch up on news and look anew into dear eyes and see things that we would remember long after the people were dispersed into different worlds. I remember so well my mother and father sitting the certain way they did, and my younger brother, who, that Thanksgiving weekend greeted me by picking me up bodily and carrying me all around the house, both of us laughing as I mock-protested. This was the equivalent of a big hug, we both knew.

All of those people are gone now into different worlds. But I can still smell and feel and hear the goodness of home when I think of them and that Thanksgiving.

Here in Newfield, in our little old 1922 house with its strange crevices and sagging spots, we are counting down, after a fashion, to Christmas. At this writing, the mantle has been somehow cleared off so there can be a fake laurel draped over it and pretty Della Robia type fruits sprinkled through the greenery. The arborvitae tree is still in the car. I have half the cards written, and we won't be able to send them until Monday, and some will not arrive in time, I fear.

I still have a little clutch of things upstairs to send off in priority packages to loved ones far away -- away in that place of elegant, clean, orderly houses all ready for the holidays and the Christmas Eve family party. This time it will be at my second daughter's home -- and the table will be laden with beautifully planned and executed delicacies. They will bring in bags of surprises and plop themselves down in comfortable furniture, and nibble on olives and fishy Norwegian Sardines and maybe even sushi or caviar. There will be a nice mess of wrappings on the floor and the strident voice of my little two and a half year old grandson ringing out in all the excitement. There will be a plump little confection of a baby on the floor chewing on whatever she can get her hands on. There will be a silly game to exchange cheap gifts for the grownups, including a courtly, tall dark-haired fellow who is my first grandson. He will be impeccably dressed in perfect clothes for the occasion because one of his things is men's style. He will raise his considerable dark eyebrows in amusement at some of the funny gifts. He will offer to trade the smelly candle he got for something else.

In February I will get on a plane and go to Seattle and go breathe the wonderful air in the homes of my children. I will see their homes as if I were going home for a high holiday, breathe in the sparkling air and hear the familiar sounds as if they were brand new.

Meanwhile, I will enjoy the fact that it's just us two and our four-legged creatures who are going to tuck ourselves into the comfortable places we have made perfect contours in, cover ourselves with our favorite blankets, and get misty watching old Christmas films. We will admire the tree. We will call the kids, and the dear family folk. We will eat our skinless delicious turkey breast and cranberry and our carefully crafted non-fat pies. Then we will go to bed with sugar plums dancing in our heads, and feel very lucky that we didn't have to hustle our bustles much about all this.

We are just two lucky folks, looking at seventy early next year, and enjoying the latitude our life gives us.

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