Got Stuck There for a While

Personally, I’m thrilled to have a brand-new aquarium of a year to swim around in. I feel as though for the last two or three months I was moving my little fins through mud instead of water. Put another way, I couldn’t move forward. I mean, I had 95% of my Christmas cards done on December 8^th but I simply could NOT finish the rest. I called my husband at work: “I’m going to just throw them all under a bridge somewhere, like that mailman in New York turned out to be doing for months and months.”He laughed, but I wasn't joking. I truly I was stuck, the same way I used to get stuck as a kid in various turnstiles and revolving doors, what with my violin case and that bulging book bag over one shoulder. Time simply stopped for me around the first week in November.Example: I had put a pumpkin on my porch some weeks before Halloween, along with one of those purple kale plants and a pretty sheaf of wheat like they talk about in the Bible when the speaker in The Song of Solomon tells his lady friend that her belly is like a sheaf of wheat.Well, the kale died the death of most extravagantly colored plants and the stalks became dental floss for the squirrels, but that pretty pale-peach pumpkin I simply could NOT throw on the compost pile, even when neighbors up and down the street were decorating for Christmas.Instead I set it on the stone wall out back, where still it sits.Even now. Even with that stubborn snowbank sullenly hanging around the edge of my driveway like a schoolyard bully making a silent point about who's really going to win this battle we’re now joining.Winter will win it of course, just like the House always wins at the casino. A few more days and we’ll be shin-deep in snow again and quaking like the leaves on an aspen tree. And I know, I know: It’s not as if this is the Yukon, where hardy men send straight strong streams of pee into the frigid air which then freeze into stout shafts for use in their damaged dog sleds. It’s not as if this is even Minnesota, where people’s eyelashes get cemented together while they’re trying to crack open the diamond-hard shell of ice encasing their cars.Still, it’s winter and winter is cold. And we mind the cold, hothouse tomatoes that we are.Yet already the days are growing longer and in just eight weeks that old Uniform Time Act will have us all reading the paper in the park until almost 7:00 at night. Until almost 9:00 by the end of June.Then what? Then the days will start getting short again alas, because Time is a big old ferris wheel that never does stop moving, except ever-so-briefly, to let new little folks on and the rest of us less-than-new folks off, each in our turn.So what is the universe trying to tell us? Maybe to love the pumpkin for all its beauty and then to let the pumpkin go. Maybe to love what is given today.It might also be hinting that no matter what bleak, stuck place I find myself in, I should really never throw 200 handwritten, sealed and stamped Christmas cards under a bridge, because does it really matter if they arrive a little late?Let's hope not! You guys should be getting mine any day now. :-)

at the post office