L’il Buddy is a Dark-eyed junco.

“As winter arrives, flocks of these lively little birds suddenly appear across much of the U.S.” and I’m all, Here, kitty kitty.

A cardinal in the snow is a visual power play. White. Red. Black. Slap. Slap. Slap.

A winter candle person, scented or otherwise, I have emphatically not been.

“Who are these twee candle people?” I have said thumbing through this-time-of-year’s catalogs of arranged candlescapes in cabins advertising his-and-hers long johns and fleece.

“Barf,” I’ve said to my sister. “FAKE CHEER.” And then I’ve retired into my badger hole until late February when a body begins to feel the sap rising again.

Not this year, friends! 2020 has been such an flaming dumpster that it has officially, Dickensianly, A Christmas Carol-ed me.

I am reborn! I am remade! My eyes have seen the glory of…

tealights.

Tealights…

The modern medieval auguries of this pandemic that I personally ignored are many, so I don’t want to miss what you, morning doves on the roof, are trying to tell me with your lilting coos.

Your song sounds soft, low, nostalgic, and sad. Is that how you feel? It’s a balm in this age of hard, screechy, forward-marching, and relentlessly, cheerfully, entrepreneurial.

I also have a public-facing self. My public-facing self is neurotic.

But then, so is my private-facing self. One could say about me, “At least she’s authentic” and it would be praise, because we appear to be in…

Rachel Syme writes, in The Allure of the Nap Dress, the Look of Gussied-Up Oblivion, “We are used to seeing women in white nightgowns as haunted, anxious, skulking around with unfinished business.”

“But there is also the figure of the innocent child in white, a kind of prelapsarian state of guilelessness and imagination. The Nap Dress combines these associations into a single garment; it is children’s clothing sized up for adults, or creepy, adult ghost clothes festooned with sweet and approachable details. It is a dress that connotes both extreme stress and also the cessation of it.”

When I wear…