Kate flew in on the 27th; on the 28th we drove to Iowa to pick up Lexi, who had spent the night with my sister and her husband after she was done with her Christmas visit to her Papa in Minneapolis. Julia and Ed leapt at the chance to keep her for a day (they haven't had a chance to have her to themselves since she moved to California), and then deliver her to Des Moines. Love Is.
For once, the drive flew by. Kate and I were long overdue for catching up on each other's lives, and car talk is some of the best. There's something about the intimate setting of the car in the darkness that invites open conversation, and given the time of year, we had plenty of darkness to enjoy.
Once back home, we had three more days to enjoy being together. Joe and Rita brought the baby over every evening. We had an evening with Kate's old friends, another where we celebrated the New Year as it arrived in Buenos Aires. (Thank goodness for the internet, which quickly supplied a city three time zones east, so we could bring in the new year at 9PM local time. We were all tired...)
Kate and Lexi left in the wee hours of Wednesday morning; I saw them off, then went back to bed. When I got back up at my usual time, the house was quiet. Very quiet. I sighed, got dressed and then reluctantly took down the Christmas tree and all of the holiday trappings. OK, it was past time - the tree was beautiful, but every time I brushed a branch to remove an ornament, the needles let loose in a shower of green - but it was still hard to let it go.
To avoid falling into lonely from alone, I got out a jigsaw puzzle once I'd finished cleaning. I love putting together puzzles, but don't do it too often because I find it addicting. The puzzle sits there innocently on the table, and every time I pass by I pause, for just a few moments, to find another piece or three. The next thing I know, it's an hour later.
This puzzle is a good one, with random bits flying about the picture, making it harder to guess where things line up. (To up the challenge level of puzzles, I don't look at the picture after I've dumped out the pieces. I have SOME idea of what the final picture is, but don't go back to the box to find out if the red blob belongs to the barn or the wagon or... I figure it out as I go.)
It's made for some excellent meditation time over the past few days. As I move pieces around and fit them one by one into the completed picture, my mind wanders hither and yon. I reflect on the year and the decade just past. I mull over where I am, things I have done well, things that didn't go so well, ways I hope to change going forward. I wonder what challenges and joys will be revealed in the new year.
Puzzles are a good metaphor for my life. I go along, looking at the individual pieces, fitting one day into the next without looking at the larger whole. Then, something breaks my trance and I stand back and look at the current picture of my life. Only then do I see how far I've come from where I started; see the larger pattern and how it all fits together; see the beauty of how the days have shaped the months, the years, the decades.
I start the year off-balance; a living example of the truism that good changes cause stress surely as the harder ones do. Balance will come, the picture will come together. It will just take some time.
Happy New Year!
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