The party lights beckon fire-bright and warm and though their call is not for me I come anyway, for old time’s sake. Creep and slide toward the cabin through the snow, my sluggish trudge-tracks elongated into deceptively elegant sweeps by nature, chemistry, and physics, an appearance of grace wrought by things entirely outside my control.

I press my forehead to frigid window pane, see the throats exposed in laughter, hear the clink of crystal, watch it all go foggy through my frosty breath on the glass, swirl a new view with the heel of my palm and smile. I am outside, though I know you’d welcome me in with open arms. I am content in my solitude for now, for a longer and more surprising stretch of time than ever before. I turn and walk back home.

At the computer I sit still as stone, the chaos of these last few weeks a beekeeper’s smoke hanging thick around my head, coating my nose, my lips, making me drunk, stunned, pleasant. My thoughts, my ideas, my blogs, my deadlines, all cooled and stalled like candle wax pooling at this  table, once set grand, now an exquisite wasteland. This rare moment of calm feels like an old friend I can’t quite remember and I blink, wait for words to arrive, send them away again.

Trauma, at first, is a wet wool blanket on the brain. You lie still, unable to move, and you don’t even notice the musty smell — you just give in completely to your body’s most basic functions. You can’t find your words but you can walk a confident path through the snake-like hospital labyrinth. You want to weep over simple arithmetic, but you can successfully maneuver your children through their bed time routines. Nothing is of your own volition, but you don’t resent the loss of control; you simply move forward where you can.

It’s later, I think, maybe seven or eight days in, when your senses figure out where your brain’s been holding you hostage. Each morning you wake a little bit sharper, a little more selfish. You start to whine. You start to notice the way you smell, how little you packed, how cramped your quarters and lumpy your makeshift bed. You find yourself crying over mismatched socks when four or five days earlier it hadn’t even occurred to you to do laundry, or that you even had feet at all.

Suddenly, you want to scream at everyone. You want to answer every flippant, oblivious email with Do you have any idea where I am? How could you ask me that?? You want them all to know the depths of your suffering. You want to kick the world in the shin of the leg it’s stupidly spinning on. You know now that everyone is going to be okay, that you’re only a few days from home, and so you are remembering, worrying, floundering. Your to-do list rises to the surface after you thought you’d weighted her down with enough stones and rope and brick — a surprise. You thought you’d learned to simply appreciate the “little things” but you haven’t, as it turns out, and you hate yourself.

And then, the sky. A sky larger and clearer and fuller than you’ve seen in ages. You stumble into a shallow bowl in a crisp, fallow wheat field and maybe you had to throw yourself off a cliff to find this spot but find it you did, and you forget everything else, because you hear something. The sky is calling you without yelling. She rearranges her lap to accommodate you despite your crass, whiny bulk, and she wipes your snotty face and she is generous as she whispers Sit. Rest. I’m so, so sorry.

I’m just so sorry.

And you believe her. And you feel bad for ever waxing so pathetic. And you settle into that soft spot where she cleaves and in that moment you know in your marrow that you don’t need anything, any time, anywhere, more than this.

I can barely remember how I used to view this blog, even though it’s only been alive for a year and a half. But right now, on this weird slip of time halfway between October and December when Wisconsin decided to welcome its first snowfall, the kind that’s relentless but won’t stick, I just wanted to say, in case you didn’t already know it, that from here on out, regardless of what it means for my traffic, I will not be posting if I don’t have something to say.

I’m not sure why it’s a big announcement. I know in my heart I’ve been doing it exactly this way for quite some time now, but I can’t remember if I’ve made this clear to you, The Reader, or not. I also don’t know whether or not you care. I don’t know what you think. I don’t presume to know a thing, except that sometimes a girl feels the need to state the obvious, and sometimes she feels the need to compensate, and also that sometimes things are not what they seem.

The truth is, the cat is leaking his life all over this house and Dave came home two days early and every single day, somehow, impossibly, Emma says the funniest thing I’ve ever heard but before I can jot it down and enshrine it in cyberforever it’s a new day and she has once again said the funniest thing I’ve ever heard and so the moment is lost. And Gretta is at an age where all I want to do is protect her which is why I rarely mention her on this blog anymore and these snowflakes are so fat that they hold their own weight for ten or twenty minutes before they dissolve and I had the most excellent chardonnay and giggles on Saturday night and before that the most amazing meatballs and I’m not sure you realize how much I love my family and I am hopelessly behind on reading your blogs and some of you are alright with that and some of you are not and I hope you are listening to me when I say that it may not ever be a tit for tat, do you accept that? I’m a girl who wants to be everything to everyone but it may not be possible, and you have to decide for yourselves if that’s okay because really all that matters is whether or not my God and my family and my editor are still speaking to me and she is and they are and He/She is and so this is the part where I say

if you’re still here? Then it’s for the right reasons. And, for that?

I thank you.

Every year I sit down and bang out a holiday card letter. This kind of writing has always come easily to me, the unfettered, unedited free-form riffs I use to keep family and friends updated. I’ve been writing these missives for years and years, and I’ve always looked forward to it. But here we are, three days before Christmas and a day into Hanukkah, and up until an hour ago I hadn’t written a word. I couldn’t.

I have always tried to be honest in my holiday letters. The tradition was born in part from a desire to combat the stereotypical update letter, the happy-go-lucky aren’t-we-fantastic-world-travelers-and-could-our-children-possibly-excel-more-can-you-believe-they’re-not-President-or-American-Idols-yet? letters that make me feel two feet tall. It started when I was a kid, in response to one particular family’s over-the-top letter. I used to write satirical updates on my and my siblings’ failing grades, arrest records, or forays into drugs, just to make my parents smile. As an adult, I kept the tradition and the sentiment but added in truth. I felt like my loved ones would appreciate knowing how un-perfect my life was, that they’d perhaps feel better about how un-perfect theirs were, how un-perfect all of ours are. Because oh, how they are.

The last week or two my laptop has served more often as drink coaster than holiday-card writer, or blog entry portal, or social media connector, or anything responsibility-meeting in general. I can’t seem to do it. I can’t seem to sit down here and tell you about the awesome Christmas party in Chicago, or game nights with my kids, or my visiting house guests, or the extreme snowfalls and frigid below-zero days…. and for the life of me, I can’t seem to sit down and type out an honest summary of the last year because I don’t want to Grinch-out 127 people’s holidays with my card. Because I’m just not feeling it.

I am blessed. I know I am blessed. I have experienced more joy than I could ever document this year, I have. But.

I’m worried about Dave’s job loss, even though he’s not. I’m worried sick about our cousin’s paralysis. I’m not interested in cataloging marriages and divorces, middle-of-the-night agonies and loved ones buried, and wrapping it all into a cute little holiday card bow.

My visiting brother and sister-in-law took Emma to lunch this afternoon and told me to sit down and write the cheery letter already, dammit! So I did. I finished it five minutes ago. I hope it doesn’t let anyone down.

I closed out the letter with the most truthful line I could muster, and I’ll use it to close out this post, too.

I pray all is equal parts sweet and survivable with you and yours.

Happy Holidays.

I don’t know what has possessed me but I can’t stop yanking, can’t stop pulling, sweet twist of the wrist felling clump after clump of well-entrenched weed. I even dream it, this swirling motion, this victory, this steady conquering. I have never been a gardener but this year I can’t help myself, I seek it out and I can’t let go, I can’t stop, not even after the sun has long set and the spoils of my war are nothing but shadows hulking on the berm. My kids call my name but their sound waves roll past my set shoulders, ricocheting off my trowel, reverberating among the pines, I sink deeper and deeper in.

It’s a lovely transition, heading out here to my garden, a desperate attempt to pull the weeds in my head, to rake the rocks from my foundation, to find some quiet, to make everything okay. I stand here at the sink scrubbing grit from my nails and I realize, this is perhaps the first way I’ve found to leap between these 26 black-and-white keys to the dock of Mother, to yank myself from the viscous mud of my computer screen and land in the sweet harvest of my kitchen, of my hearth, of my home. These days are so heady but such a drought on my soul, though they feed, though they sow, though they grow my bank account and its tiny baby dream sprouts. Don’t get me wrong, I still love this, THIS, the chase of a good story, the deadlines, the high, but I yield now, I admit, something is off. Something is off as of late and it’s a bit hollow, that which once filled my belly, this harvest, this fruit. I can’t help but ask myself, is this it? Is this what I’ve been chasing? Is this what I’ve been planting all these years? Is it enough? Am I enough?

There are no answers here in this long neglected garden, but still I seek them. I pull and I pull and I pull, long past the hour other well-meaning farmers have retired.