On numbering our Novembers

The quiet glory of the in-between months

I said to someone this week, “We can still be friends… even though you already decorated for Christmas.” It’s true. I prefer that Christmas and all its trappings wait until after Thanksgiving. And I suppose I hold this opinion strongly enough that I feel the need to add the but-we-can-still-be-friends disclaimer.

Listen, I feel the angst too. October has evaporated and November is disappearing even more quickly. We must use its remnants to get ahead! Prepare for the main event! But if we’re not careful, every season can become little more than preparation for the next. And I really don’t want to miss the particular glories of November.

Just today I realized that some of the maples in our neighborhood were just now reaching their peak, weeks after the others. All but the beeches seem to have shed their leaves entirely as a windstorm last night whipped the remaining ones into a frenzy on the street. But there in the golden light this morning, near the stop sign my 4-year-old always spells out loud, was a little maple draped in reds and purples. “Look at that one!” she said, and so I did.

That tree won’t look the same tomorrow morning. Fall has a way of reminding us of the transient beauty that is here today, gone tomorrow. There were a few days earlier in November when the trees behind our house all agreed to turn golden at once. I had to write a sonnet.

There’s something fragile in the gilded golds
The learned one, she’s seen it come before
Is it what makes fall painful to behold
That gold is but the knob of winter’s door? 

(And if you’re into poetry and not already following

The Rabbit Room

and

Anna A. Friedrich

, check out this interview I wrote up about her moving new poetry book!)

Poetry comes and goes for me, but I find it helps name the feelings dredged up by transitions. There is this ache I feel all fall over the sheer beauty and brevity of it. It’s almost a relief when late November rolls around and I can return my gaze to the simple, less overwhelming details of nature’s beauty. To the return of the dark-eyed junco pecking leaves beneath the feeder. To the startling shape of leafless branches against blue skies. To the clipboard containing years of Thanksgiving meal plans, with time stamps and all.

I think the urge to decorate and shop for most of us begins after we turn our clocks back that first week of November. The darkness starts knocking on our doors now at 5 p.m., and then earlier and earlier. Putting up Christmas lights is a way of driving it away, giving ourselves visual reminders that there is still something to look forward to even as the nights expand.

I too can hardly wait to light our dining room advent candles each evening. But wait I will. Advent, after all, is about longing for the once and future arrival of God with us. Celebrating it in the dead of winter reminds us that we are waiting still.

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Nearly there
A Shakespearean sonnet for Winter

They say that you can feel it in your bones
this cold, that drives the last of leaves away
But look at the way it reveals the homes
of every little bird you hoped would stay 

They say it will freeze pipes and nights and weeks
this cold, it drives all color from the lawn 
But look, how it reveals the pinkest cheeks
of little girls who, in their warm homes, yawn

They say it will stretch on and on and on
this darkness that arrives at day’s exhale
But on an early morning, glimpse the dawn
and see how quickly it makes blackness pale 

When all is cold and dark and in despair
I will remember light is nearly there. 

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This year, Thanksgiving falls on the fourth anniversary of my mom’s death. This will be the fourth year of thinking of her as I prep the one meal she taught me to make and remember the one week we spent walking her home. And this will be the fourth year I marvel at how the memories have turned less bitter, more sweet, as time moves on.

But this will also be the first holiday season that I can offer people a book to comfort them in their own losses. Oh how they seem to come in spades this time of year. “In the midst of life we are in death,” Joan Didion wrote in The Year of Magical Thinking, and I think of how true that can be as we look around our holiday tables. If you’d like to have an extra copy of We Shall All Be Changed ready to give to others this season, there is a deal on Amazon right now, or mark your calendars for Moody’s 50% off sale starting Nov. 29.

I was grateful to read this Amazon review, because it echoes what I’ve heard from others—that the book has been helpful to heal a long-ago loss. I was also encouraged to see that Jen Wilkin has the book on her bedside table this week, and I got a note from a reader in Madagascar who lost her mom at the exact same age as me and found comfort in the book. May the Lord help each of us to continue to steward such mysteries (1 Cor. 4:1).