party time

I hosted a winter fest on Friday. Twenty-two guests attended, some in semi-formal attire and some in festive sweaters and suspenders. I pulled a costume change halfway through the party to dress in both, and Santa arrived with trivia and lottery tickets in her sack, one of which I won for naming Boris Karloff. The dogs sat on whoever would let them while a group of us played Uno, then I drank a homebrew with the friend who helped make it this summer. The first wave arrived by 8 and the last left by 2. I napped all day Saturday recovering on the couch eating leftover chips and cupcakes.

I spent the earlier part of the week preparing for the party and taking a seasonal moment of retrospection. I met Leo in the middle of December, and he passed away at the end of the month seven years later. The first day we spoke he was recovering from his work holiday party held at a local tavern that has since changed hands and re-branded. Our first night out was to a Starbucks the following weekend. We talked until we closed out the place then moved over to an Applebee's where we talked some more until they closed, too. By then a light snow had dusted the parking lot. That was the same day as the shooting at Sandy Hook, and the December he passed was the month COVID was first reported on the news. Our last night out was to my work holiday party, which happened to coincide with the anniversary of that first time we met, and which turned out to be the last of the work holiday parties I'd attend with that company.

The virus arrived here about three months after Leo left, and I found a sort of healing connection in the shared experience. The first day I attended church this year was the samhain service where we each added a stone to a pitcher of water to acknowledge the dead. I felt a similar kinship then to witness the crowded line and the water displaced by stone, the length and volume of which I saw as proportionate measures of how much change we had collectively grieved, a process a friend recently described like retreating to a dark place. I think it's dark inside a cocoon where a caterpillar can dissolve entirely before emerging as a butterfly, an image borrowed from a neighbor over tea at her place earlier this year on a rainy spring day.

I read an article a few months ago about hunger in Africa attributed to war in Ukraine as shelling kept stockpiles of grain trapped in warehouses. Those quoted said with confidence that the grain would move, which moved me because I was hungry not for the grain per se but for the resilience and sustenance. I left my day job five months ago this week. Before then I had the pathways and gates leading to the house repaired. I attended three months of counseling, had one panic attack, and hired one junk hauler to remove one truck of clutter. Since then I've left the county seven times for church and six times for outings, once to see Leo, twice for weddings, and three times to parks with the dogs. I've connected and reconnected with about 40 friends and neighbors, hosted two parties, written 65 posts including this one, and had one unplanned blog outage. There is war, famine, and plague, and there is music, food, and a fire still burning, rekindled in these pre-hibernation times.