Well Well Well Well Well Well Well How Very Merry Then
Oh, the weather outside is unseasonably warm
But the fire inside is...non-existent, really
And since I've got no place to go
I'm drinking a growler of Southern Tier IPA
Now that didn't rhyme at all, did it? Nor was it melodic. And, when you get right down to it, Christmas is not particularly embodied in a glass of India Pale Ale.
We had smooth white snow last week, but now that it's all warm and whatnot we've quickly entered the sludgy-snow-mixed-with-rotting-leaves phase that is just so attractive. I suppose it's better than the sludgy-snow-mixed-with-auto-exhaust-and-street-crap phase that made winters in New York ery special.
This will be the last Christmas at Peapod, and after a few glasses...hell, even before a few glasses, which might account for the purchase of said glasses-full in the first place...I am of course a bit sentimental.
We came here exactly 361 days after the September 11 attacks, 361 days that I spent mostly out of my mind. I never liked living in the city...I knew it was a target even before the '93 bombing. When the strike came, I went a little nuts. Just a bit. Pea's apartment was a few blocks from the U.N., and I wouldn't let her go back to it. We walked across the Queensboro Bridge together on that day, along with thousands of others, and I think she went back to her apartment twice afterwards...once when we had a fight, and once to pack her things into boxes and move them to my apartment in Queens. Together, we fled the city, and bought this house.
There's an adage...something about making important life-decisions during periods of extreme stress, I can't quite remember.
It's been three years since then, and I don't regret anything. I wonder, sometimes, what would have happened if 9/11 didn't happen. I think I can honestly say that I'd be worse off, personally, strange as that sounds. Cohabitation with someone is an intimacy that has a way of making you face yourself, and it forces you to sort out your habits. Alcohol? I used it too much, for the wrong reasons, and with an intensity that I wasn't comfortable with (my current IPA indulgence notwithstanding). I doubt I'd've figured that out holed up in an apartment in Queens by myself. There are other things too, which aren't your business. But on balance, it was good to come here, it was good to buy this house, it was good to live with Pea, and it's sad that this will be our last Christmas here, and our last Christmas together.
Over the next two or three weeks, we will complete some home improvement projects that were supposed to be for us, but are now for potential buyers: remodeling the dining room, painting the grotty textured ceiling in the living room. We've already replaced the roof and re-painted the exterior trim...again, not for us, but for whoever occupies this small house after us. There will be packing to do, as we remove what is unique to us from this space, so that prospective buyers can better visualize themselves in it.
I expect it will be the final details that will bring down the emotional hammer: what do we do with the lawnmower and the weed-whacker? Should we do something about the brush pile in the far corner of the yard, with the dry skeletons of (by then) four Christmas trees in it?
Right now, the fourth tree stands at the base of the stairs, next to the groovy armchair we bought when we first moved here. It's our smallest tree, measuring just four feet, to insure that we get the decorations off it and packed away sometime before April. It's full of lights, and there's a pile of presents under it.
As it should be, no matter what comes afterwards.
