by Kitty O’Doherty
The Marathon
by Nancy Simmonds
Alarms are set before the dawn
Car gassed and geared to go
The water's in the coffee pot
One touch will make it flow
Our route is programmed 1-2-3
Into our GPS
The stops that we anticipate
Are planned like moves of chess
Pour caffeine in those travel mugs
Add bells for sneaker fun
Plastic prepped? Get ready, gals
Black Friday's here. Let's run!
by John Caviness
by Alys Caviness-Gober
by Nancy Simmonds
By Kitty O’Doherty
(on holiday in Germany)
by John Caviness
Holiday Hell (or, Merry Fecking Christmas)
by Alys Caviness-Gober
(copyright 2015)
Holidays are Hell at our house. There’s always this undercurrent of misery, masked by the brightly ornamented Christmas tree, the cheerful background jingling jangling perky-ass Christmas music played over and over year after year, and the truly wonderful smells of warmth and spices emanating from the kitchen. Oh yes, we do the homecooked meal, everything made from scratch, but the misery is made from scratch, too. It lies underneath: pungent, mute, and eternal.
I blame myself (mostly). My husband and I both love to cook, we both love our families, but years ago I’m the one who innocently said, “let’s have everyone come over to our house for Christmas this year!” That’s on me. But in some ways, the deck is stacked against all of us, right? We’re raised with this freaking Norman Rockwell ideal of the Holidays, where spending Christmas with family is, like, a MUST DO. We all see it in our mind’s eye playing out a certain way. Like, perfectly. Like a Norman Rockwell painting. The perfect setting, the perfect food, the perfect gifts.
Shit, the gifts. In the months leading up to Christmas, don’t we all shop? And shop. And shop. Try as we might to find bargains, up up up go the credit card balances. Our closets fill up with brightly wrapped presents carefully selected to please all the relatives who will descend upon us like a biblical plague of locusts. The week after Thanksgiving, the Christmas tree goes up and the brightly wrapped packages come out of the closets and lie under the tree, patiently waiting for the oohs and aahs of receptive delight. Fecking fakers ~ you know they’re going to regift that shit at the first opportunity.
But still, our grand Holiday traditions continue, thanks to Norman Rockwell. Close your eyes ~ you can see the Rockwell version, right? Two sweet old white-haired sets of Grandmas and Grandpas, the fun-loving boisterous cousins, and jolly aunts and uncles all gathering together to celebrate love and life and family. The halls are decked with evergreen boughs and red ribbons and Christmas decorations. Everything’s so clean and bright and shiny. The Holidays always look so charming in Rockwell’s paintings. Well, our Christmas scene is not quite so . . . charming.
One set of our Grandmas and Grandpas stays as far away as possible from the other set; they can’t stand each other. And sure, all four may be Grandma and Grandpa to our kids and all the fun-loving boisterous cousins, but they’re in-laws to my husband and me. My father-in-law is Grandpa Dick ~ at least, he’s called that in my head; to the kids, he’s Grandpa Rick. Sometimes, in my head, I call him The Pontif, not because he’s Pope-like in any way but because he pontificates. About EVERYTHING. He’s the eternal expert on all things. Grandpa Dick never shuts up. And, my mother-in-law? I can’t even.
I’ve never asked my husband what his head calls my folks. Probably best not to, right?
Anyway, I bust my ass the two weeks before Christmas, packing away our more fragile decorative treasures so there are no accidents when the fun-loving boisterous cousins are horsing around. I rearrange furniture in every room to maximize the comfort of our guests, and of course I spend days cleaning cleaning cleaning. What’s the first thing out of my mother-in-law’s mouth every year? With a condescending smile, she says ever so sweetly, “oh, hun, I’m SO sorry I couldn’t get here early enough to help you clean this place, you poor thing.” My sister-in-law chimes right in, “sweetie, it’ll be FINE,” in a we-know-you’ve-done-the-best-you-can tone, as if I’m housekeeping-retarded ~ I mean house-keeping-challenged. Seriously, what can I say to them? I’m so sorry you have to spend the day in my disgusting home where all your food is cooked for you and everything is prepared for your comfort; I know it is just a terrible ordeal for you to put up with my apparently not clean enough house. BUT I’M SO GLAD YOU COULD COME!!
Opening presents is always a blast, right? NOT. It always seems like my husband and kids and I get the craziest white elephant shit. The camel’s back broke on that score two years ago. That Christmas, one of the aunt/uncle sets gave my daughter a little statue. Of a cat. Reading a book . . . about cats. Grandpa Dick gave our son a shower wall soap dispenser. Shaped like a nose. So the soap . . . yeah, you got it ~ a runny nose soap dispenser.
My mother-in-law always gives me a lovely Christmas sweater. That year, two years ago, she gave me a Christmas sweater with elves on it. They were pole-dancing. Yep, pole-dancing elves (and I don’t mean they were dancing around the North Pole!). My husband swears his mother didn’t notice the poles; he says she must’ve thought the poles were just part of the sweater’s knitted pattern. Yeah, right. You know, I actually used to put a lot of thought into my Christmas shopping for these crazy-ass people. After that year, I just hit a couple clearance racks two days before Christmas. Regift that shit, motherfeckers.
Anyway, after opening all the “wonderful” gifts, we eat. Close your eyes, you can see us all gathered together in Norman Rockwell splendor ~ the table’s piled high with a huge turkey or Christmas ham, fluffy mashed potatoes, breadcrumb stuffing, pots of gravies, my famous homemade mac and cheese, the obligatory green bean casserole ~ you know, with those crispy crunchy onion things on top. That’s the one thing we serve that’s NOT made from scratch. One year my husband tried to duplicate it from scratch: he cooked down some fresh green beans and made the mushroomy goo from scratch, and he even fried up some onions for the top. It just did not taste like the one made with canned green beans and the Campbell’s soup, so I told him, “from now on, cans it is!”
Of course, we’ve always got wonderfully tasty homemade cranberry sauce with bits of orange in it ~ not the jelly glop from the can, people. My husband makes his famous homemade dinner rolls and apple pie and pumpkin pie ~ man, the list of deliciousness goes on and on. There’s always a plate of insanely complicatedly-decorated Christmas cookies one of the aunts brought (the crazy aunt; you know the one). The wine and beer flows.
During the meal, the fun-loving boisterous cousins always end up shrieking “ANIMAL HOUSE!” and having a food fight ~ their crazy-ass parents softly murmur to them, “now, now, let’s behave” and then smile at me and say, “isn’t it great to see them all together, aren’t they just so happy to be here with their cousins?” Yeah, right. Fecking delinquents. Who do they think has to clean up all that shit??
Well, after I have cleaned every pot and pan, and after I’ve loaded every dish into the dishwasher ~ oh yeah, didn’t I mention? No one offers to help clean up. Anyway, after I’ve stood at the sink for an hour or so, I’m ready for the beer and the wine to flow ~ right down my gullet. I admit, I always have a glass or two more than I should, in fact by late afternoon, I’m pretty toasted.
Honestly, I don’t care, and really, it isn’t totally MY fault. My husband becomes selectively deaf and visually impaired that day. He’s obliviousness to the boisterous fun-loving cousins, the pontificating Grandpa Dick, the snarkiness directed at me by his mother and sister, and my general exhaustion ~ so yeah, I over-imbibe ~ but, can you blame me? Between my husband, and my crazy-ass cookie-making sister, and the freaking fun-loving boisterous cousins, and all the food, and the white elephant gifts, and Grandpa Dick, and oh god my mother-in-law, and the jingling jangling perky-ass Christmas music, I’m ready to feel no pain. So, yeah, let the wine and the beer flow! It flows overmuch for the uncles, who tend to drunk-brag ~ you probably have brothers or brothers-in-law like them. Yeah, they’re trouble! In my head, I call them Bragger One and Bragger Two, like Thing One and Thing Two in The Cat In The Hat. Their drunk-bragging starts innocently enough. It usually starts out about something like who caught the biggest fish during the last family fishing trip, but eight, ten, twelve beers later, they ain’t measuring fish!
Eventually, in the wee small hours of the morning, my husband and I finally toddle off to bed. I lie there exhausted but fuming from the day’s tortured basking in the warm and fuzzy glow of family, unable to quiet my brain and relax my tired muscles (all that fecking cleaning!!). And my husband? Within seconds, he’s peacefully snoring away. I lie there, so pissed off ~ seriously, how does he DO that?
Yeah, the Holidays are Hell. And yeah, I mostly blame myself ~ after all, I’m the one who started the whole Christmas-at-our-house thing. I guess I could say no next year. But feck all, it is REALLY hard to change family traditions, and coming to our house for Christmas is now a carved-in-stone etched-into-eternity family tradition! So yeah, I blame Norman Rockwell. He’s probably in a special spot in Hell, right? And I’m right there with him ~ every fecking Christmas.
(Author’s note to her family: this story is complete fiction ~ except of course the food descriptive parts!)
by Kitty O’Doherty
(on holiday in Germany)
by John Caviness
Through Winter Grey
by George Wolfe
A spark in forest wind.
Cardinal breaks through winter grey,
vigilant crest scrounging for seeds.
Mercury in subzero.
Fahrenheit redness.
Winged messenger and fleeting star.
by Alys Caviness-Gober
First Snow
By Vivianne Belle
I have a love-hate relationship with the first snowfall every year. The love part is singular: it’s so beautiful. There’s a lovely calming cleansing feeling that envelopes me the first time I see the world blanketed in a soft white fluff, especially if the snow falls at dusk. The waning sun, falling asleep behind its own gray-cloud blanket, gives the falling snow a supernatural glow. The next morning, the cool blues and dark grays the confront the struggling sunrise ~ the sun has as much trouble getting out of its snuggly bed as we all do in the winter ~ begins the hate phase. The cool blues and dark grays make a mockery of the first snowfall’s beauty because now everything just looks . . . cold. The love-beautiful-calming part melts away and I’m filled with dread.
That first snowfall ~ it doesn’t crunch underfoot like the satisfying hard crunchilicious dead-of-winter snowfalls do; it’s just slushy mushy and makes your feet cold and wet. If you’re like me, you haven’t gotten your winter boots out of the back of the closet yet, right? So, for the rest of your day, your feet are cold and wet.
No matter the date, it’s too damn early for me; I really don’t like cold weather. I just hate being cold. Whether or not I’m inside or outside, there just aren’t enough layers in the world to keep me warm. I have a friend who, every year, says, My feet are cold from October to May. Mine, too. i wear three pairs of loose socks stuffed into slippers two sizes too big, and that doesn’t capture enough warmth for my poor feet. My gas bill goes sky-high if I turn up the thermostat past 68 degrees. Who can afford a $350 gas bill every month?? Not me.
Then there’s the roads, the slick dangerous wintery roads. I hate winter because of the roads. I hate when snow includes ice, as it often does that first time. An snow and ice combo is pretty common for the first snowfall here, because it’s usually still a little warm the first time we get winter weather ~ the residual earthy-warmth means snow, the incoming cold air means ice. It’s like the Universe can’t even decide on the temperature. That wreaks havoc on roads, and I’ve got loved ones driving to work out there. It’s weird, but the ice always seems to stick to branches and the roads, not the ground. Granted, the icicley branches look mysteriously beautiful, and you can get really pretty photographs of them, but still ~ they signify the dangers of winter.
I don’t like the labor-intensity of winter, either. Piling on layers and layers just to go get the mail. In the digital age with emails and texting and messaging, it’s always just junk mail, which is pretty annoying. Occasionally it’s a bill (durn that gas bill!), which is equally annoying. Shoveling snow sucks. Snow-blowing it is faster but kinda worse ~ those things are so heavy!
Some people get SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder) during winter months, some people feel a sense of enforced hibernation or too housebound. I don’t get SAD and I like being at home, hunkered down under blankets, reading favorite books and watching old movies. I guess I shouldn’t dread winter so much.
Last night, the first snow fell. It was really beautiful. I heard on the news this morning that there’s some icy patches on the roads.
by Alys Caviness-Gober
By Kitty O’Doherty