Comfort

When the days are short and the nights are cold and the days are cold and the nights are long, there is one way to survive. I call it "Self-Comforting Behavior." I am quite good at it. For instance, at the moment I am eating a warm cinnamon roll which I have just baked from a multipurpose bread dough that I made ahead from scratch. Each day I bake something a little different using the same basic dough. It's very comforting. I am eating that cinnamon roll while wearing my new footie-pajamas. The kind babies wear. Target has grown-up sizes, and I am floating in fleecy-jammie-ness each evening. I sit in these fleecy jammies indian style on my couch, surrounded by textbooks. I am working genetics problems. Many many punnett squares. Punnett is a comforting word, in itself. If you do not feel that genetics is comforting, simply draw punnett squares and observe how nicely structured they are. Think of white pea blossoms and purple pea blossoms and Gregor Mendel working away in solitude in his monastery garden on a quiet evening, counting peas. I am sure that counting peas must have been very comforting for him; a meditative kind of work. Think also of how these names go together: Mendel, Mendeleev, Mendelssohn. Brilliant men, all three.

I comfort myself further with an abundance of twinkle lights. Their warmth counters the drafts and drifts and keeps Jack Frost at bay. My table, too, is adorned with twinkle lights, lending their sparkle to the crystal and glass grapes that grow sullen away from the sunshine. These lights and small mimickers of the sun sit atop my new blue, beautiful sky blue, winter sky blue table cloth. This cloth sets my Christmas dishes in the sky; upon each plate sits a small bird, in painting really, but ready to take flight from the stoneware with my slightest breath. Each plate is a golden nest, a resting place for sweet slumbering birds who, because they are storybook Christmas-time birds, have hibernated there on their plates, as if they truly were only painted on the stone, in their box, in the closet, in waiting. Now that the darkness has come I've set my table, in waiting for my guests. Out on the table where my small birds can sing, can breathe the crisp coldness of their blue-sky tablecloth, from whence momentarily they will, I am sure, depart in a flurry of wings, feathers, and twinkle lights.

I do hope the birds will wait until my guests arrive, will burst from their places in a glory of song just when I've invited my guests to come, sit. Oh, that would fill me with comfort for many days, that remembering of the feathers, the lights, the flurry, the glory, the shared wonder of my guests and me, the swelling of my heart inside my chest.