Winter wonders

 I trace the delicate glitter trails that line the shiny baubles as I hang them from the porch railings. The sensation is oddly pleasing, as the warm, sandpaper scruff of a cat's lick. I worry, though, I may absentmindedly rub away too much of the holiday sparkle.

The wind threatens to upend my designs, crashing the orbs into each other and maybe into oblivion, a place we all seem to have forgotten to fear until lately.

Now that we are hovering on the edge of more isolation as this new wave of pandemic settles in. 

It's like a malevolent stalker made even more powerful by our tendencies to put as much

of the onus on the victim as we can pile. 

You can feel its putrid breath on the back of your neck, and the pointy fingers of blame jabbing in all directions.

The squirrels in our minds frantically scramble to hide precious nuts so's we can find them and feast one dark winter night in our not-to-distant future.

None of us want to recreate the patterns we adhered to last spring when we hunkered down behind locked doors, many of us with lofty goals of learning a second language or baking the perfect loaf of sourdough. 

A few weeks later and we

were all measuring our success by whose supply closets still bulged with the most toilet paper or which of us had drained our own personal swamps of booze. 

My online language teaching app has sent me a letter outlining how much of an actual disappointment I turned out to be as a virtual pupil.

But I have excelled in some efforts. 

In addition to the nightly cocktail, I have picked up another addiction: a daily run known as "streaking" to its devotees and "an-injury-waiting-to-happen" to just about everyone else. 

My kids have picked up cooking for themselves and answering the phone when it rings, two seemingly dissimilar pastimes that have roughly the same level of chaotic aftermath: the former in the shape of literal mess from dishes and spills left to harden; and the latter in the form of potentially important messages left unrecorded and unremembered.

Until several nights after it may have been relevant: 

 "Oh, mom. Some doctor's office called like three days ago. Said something about confirming an appointment for someone. I don't remember."

I don't have the stamina to hang on to anger, which may be the direct result of the five-mile run completed on day 196. 

We did manage to plant the light cannon in the front yard so it can shoot dancing pinpoint laser lights onto the house, and we can pretend we exerted some measure of holiday effort. We forgot to turn it on that first night, having lost both the instructions for programming and daylight for inspecting the switches.

A few days later, after fixed the short circuit, our light cannon's green and red lights flickered like fireflies on the ceiling, delightfully dancing a technological tribute to a different kind of holiday sparkle visiting us now from our memories of the summer sky.