White lights and train dreams

a life can be ordinary and still be enough

The day after Christmas, our refrigerator is full of leftovers. The remaining homemade pfeffernüsse cookies sit in a jar on the kitchen counter. Our daughter is packing to leave—first to visit friends for the new year at the other end of the state, then back to the West Coast. Our son is spending the day drawing on the computer, absorbed, content to be mostly quiet.

Half of us were felled with something like the flu this week, the other half on the edge of sickness, so the house has moved slowly, as if wading through water. Soup reheated. Tea brewed again. Long naps taken without apology. Coughing heard through walls.

The tree stands in the corner, trimmed only with white lights. No ornaments this year. I kept thinking I would get to them, and then I didn’t. The lights are enough. Or maybe they are simply what I can manage. Both things can be true.

We didn’t give presents, and Santa didn’t come for the first time in 33 years, though I hesitate even to say it that way, as if something were missing rather than rearranged. There was no rush of anticipation, no paper to tear, no bright moment demanding to be documented. Instead, we let the days unfold more quietly, without insisting they be anything in particular.

The exhaustion of most of us being sick hangs over the house like a low cloud. Bodies heavy, voices thin, movements deliberate and slowed. Even small tasks feel like effortful journeys. The children watch us closely, cataloging the slow movements, the little pauses, the way our bodies remember fatigue more quickly than they once did. They notice, and in being observed this way, we feel both fragile and ordinary, the passing of time made visible but not frightening. There is a strange intimacy in shared weariness, a recognition that being together in this slowed, sickly state is enough.

After afternoon naps, in the evenings we gathered for dinner and then watched movies together—Bagdad Café, Train Dreams, the new Knives Out film, and Remembering Gene Wilder. We watched with tissues and ginger tea within reach, the glow from the screen mixing with the white lights on the tree. Nothing monumental happened. No declarations. Just the comfort of sitting near, sharing a story, staying put.

The first night we watched Train Dreams, its quiet, wide landscapes unfolding at the pace of a life lived mostly alone, shaped by work, loss, and the passing of whole eras. It moved me in significant ways; it is a hauntingly beautiful movie I want everyone to see.

Another night, Bagdad Café, improbably warm and strange, a story about people who find one another in the middle of nowhere and make a beautiful kind of home there anyway. The films felt chosen by the season rather than by us—stories about endurance, about connection made sideways, about how a life can be ordinary and still be enough. We watched without talking much, letting the stories do their work, the room held by low light and shared attention.

This year held more letting go than gathering, aided by sickness. More tending than celebrating. More attention to what remains when the old rituals loosen their grip. The refrigerator full of leftovers feels like a small mercy. So does the jar of cookies, the soft light at dusk, the sound of our adult children moving through the house—one preparing to leave, one still deeply inside his own world. Hearing them talk together in the kitchen from time to time has been a balm.

Transition rarely announces itself. It arrives disguised as an ordinary day. As illness. As fatigue. It asks us to notice what still holds, what still warms, what still gathers us even as the edges loosen.

The day after Christmas, nothing feels wrong. It just feels different. And different, I am learning, can be tender, too.

I hope your holiday, in whatever shape it took, held its own small mercies, its own moments of light and warmth.

Love,

Patti