“It was almost Christmas, and I was driving north with “special cargo”, on an urgent mission. I would be returning 18 claw foot tub feet to the salvage yard. I’d borrowed them. Why? I was not going to buy a tub leg, without trying it on first. With a jolly twinkle in his eye, the clerk had crated them up for me, & carried them to the truck. I was to learn the hard way about their flourishes and styles. How their flanges would prove infinitely quirky; how trying to match their random, rusty, partially painted, doorstop personalities to the contours of a tub, would be something of an IQ test. Days earlier, on my knees in a forgotten, back corner of the unheated warehouse I’d sifted through crates and crates of them, feeling very much alone. The used parts market can be cruel. I was wiser, perhaps, for having tried this game of russian roulette, but lost. I felt a sudden kinship with obscure, out-of-stock parts. Could feel the impact of being “thrown out”, and jumbled amongst other rejects. Good god, I thought. What am I doing here? A fine liquor of rain on snow was beginning to fall. There would be other equally confounding trials upcoming, in tandem with the Yuletide. But sprinkled like confectioners sugar into the sloppy mix that was to be my holiday, there were also gems. The carpenter who went upstairs to play a waltz on the mandolin, to my dying cat. The surprise visit from a single friend, similarly isolated for two years by lockdowns & mandates, bearing news of good skating on a marsh in his city, that had lifted his spirits to near bursting with joy. A late night convo, dram or two of whiskey to ward off the chill, & story swap - permission to embellish granted - and medieval slog in the star-blind dark, to build a fire. The electrician with his five year old daughter in tow, who came out on Christmas Eve day to wire a plug for my washing machine. The last stamp stuck to the last card, pushed through the mail slot, and the empty thud & release of all that effort. The fields clotted with ice & stumps, and gangly shrubs & gigantic golden rods that won’t lay down. I have time, finally, to cook, and ski and sweep. Making quick work of supposed “disastrous terrain”, making soul food out of muck. I buried the cat as the snow mist flowed in, a natural shroud supplied by air. That fills the body with an ache that is hard to categorize. Because longing for life is a wolf, sort of loping on autopilot, with a keener instinct for truth than you or I would ordinarily be capable of.”
