best foot forward

The problem with only asking for two things for Christmas, and with those two things being weird and expensive, is that on Christmas Day you end up with a casserole dish and a knitting book, instead. I like casserole dishes and knitting books, but right after Boxing Day I got a check from the gallery and took this as permission to turn New Year's Eve into Christmas 2.0. 

Three days later, I was unboxing a child-sized medical skeleton with a flexible spine. My kids said, "what the heck," and then they said, "I want that thing".

They did not give a damn about my other item; a negative scanner. Over the summer my grandfather let me take his big box of neatly filed negatives and slides dating back to the 1970s and 1980s. Most of the prints have been lost or destroyed, and among them are my baby pictures, my mother's college graduation, and my grandmother's original landscape reference for her watercolor paintings. I took this kind of thing for granted - they’ll turn up, someone else will find copies, it wasn’t that big of a deal, I still remember that event anyway - until I finally noticed how quickly time brushes out the tracks in the snow just behind you. Stand too still and it'll catch up.

Kodak Scanza 

 

In the spirit of making time work to catch up, I drove to Pupukea and met my best Canadian (ex)librarian, who recently got fed up, gave both middle fingers to her career, and hopped on a plane the minute the border reopened. We caught up with each other on tippy plastic chairs in the sand, drinking hard kombucha while the sun went down.

 

Five days into the year, and it has already peaked. Oh no.

Gavin flies back to Rochester on Friday. He is boosted, equipped with N95s, and I ordered snow pants and a saucer sled to welcome him at his dorm. These last days are like taking a big breath before hitting the flip turn and swimming back the rest of the way.

But there are skeletons to draw, and custard buns to steam, so that’s something to go forward with.