There’s the kind of talk at the end of the day when you’re tired, when everyone’s had a day of work and stress and all you want to do is sleep. There’s the kind of talk with the friend you’re catching up with, sequential and summary, the “did I tell you about this?” the “this hadn’t happened yet last time we talked” and the “how can so much time have gone by and I have so little to report?”
There is the little talk with acquaintances to keep encounters from becoming awkward, and there is the scrupulous avoidance of a topic, the gentle lead-up to a much-needed but a delicate thing to say, and there is talk you didn’t know you needed to have until you do, after which some tension loosens in the chest.
But it was a different kind of talk that made me, in these dangerous days, cross the ocean, quarantine ten days, test for Covid, and drive four hours north. I’m here in Wisconsin with family, after eleven months away.
Quarantine in Chicago was surprisingly joyful. On the doorstep of a family Christmas that I thought would not come, my husband and I enjoyed our days reading and watching TV shows, I knitting, we mapping out the next steps of future plans. We were Christmas prepping and exercising to aerobics and Bollywood dance videos. Then yesterday we cleaned and packed and donned our masks again for the journey to the car (which feels like a journey in these Covid days).
My parents moved to Stevens Point, Wisconsin just a few weeks before we moved to Norway, and the house they have set up here is their retirement dream brought remarkably to life. There is my mom, stepping out barefoot onto the frozen concrete of the garage to wrap us in hug upon hug, and here comes my dad to begin carrying in the suitcases. Gordi the corgi pads his way around, finding his way to the center of whatever commotion there might be. My sister, living with our parents while her job is still remote, waves wildly from her makeshift office in the front of the house. She’ll come join us when her day’s Zoom meetings are done.
That first frenzied greeting gives way to constellations of conversation, mostly centered in the kitchen where one or more of us are preparing food, last night my dad’s no-oil chickpea tagine on riced cauliflower (yum), this morning my rye porridge (mostly yum), tonight belated birthday carrot cake for my sister (what can I say–yum!).
Here’s what I’ve missed these last eleven months: it’s the kind of talk that blossoms up not because any of us decided that we wanted to talk right then, not because we’re catching up, and not because we have something particular to say. It’s happening just because we’re in the same place, and we love spending time together. We are unapologetically unproductive, which usually makes me antsy, though here it feels great.
We are wandering through the details of a recipe. We are laughing at Gordi rolling on the carpet. We are identifying the origins of various ornaments on the Christmas tree. We are retelling old stories of childhood and sharing new tales of the recent months. We are anticipating my brother-in-law’s arrival later today, planning the menu for Christmas, and receiving our yearly lesson in how to work the shower.
The conversation is like a plate of cookies. You wander in. Oh, that looks good. You stick around and have another. Soon you’ve been there an hour and you might as well just stay talking until dinner. That’s the kind of conversation I haven’t been able to recreate on Zoom, and now I’m back, a year away, and so is this kind of talk. It’s a blessing I first recognized last year about these times with family, and this my pilgrimage back to the cookie plate again.
We’ll be here until the fourth of January. There’s plenty of time to talk, and I expect the more pressing concern will be finding the time to finish my Christmas knitting projects and the time to write. That’s always how it is, but what better reason can there be to pine for time to write than family conversations, cooking, and easy walks through the Wisconsin forests?
I got some good news the other day: I’ll be getting a third story published, coming in Hunger Mountain this spring. It’s a story I feel proud of, and a good feeling that I am trying to cultivate and relish. See, Jimmy, you can do this.
Love and best wishes to you all, and a merry Christmas to all celebrating,
Jimmy
Words like trees 