With my daughters home from college for the holidays and preoccupied with seeing high school friends also back here in Lancaster county between semesters, and my son wanting to be anywhere but home, getting everyone together to choose and decorate a Christmas tree didn't happen until the solstice, just yesterday, the latest into the season we've ever gone. As it was, I had just enough time to string the lights before having to leave for a business meeting that lasted well into the evening. By the time I got home, the tree stood decorated in a quiet house, abandoned by children gone off to be with their friends for the night. I contemplated their work and felt their absence, with a bittersweet nostalgia for times when the fabric of our lives was more closely knit to the family being together.
This morning I baked buttermilk biscuits which Tina and I had for breakfast with plum preserves and coffee, then she went to her studio down the street. I'm taking the weekend off from working, but knowing that I would slide into melancholy if I didn't do something, I soon found myself sitting on the old Victorian sofa in front of the living room window with sketchbook and a tin of colored pencils, listening to a suite of somber Christmas piano music, rubbing an image of the tree onto the open page. Staring into the dark recesses framed by spruce needles, old fashioned lights, and familiar ornaments we've accumulated over the years, it occured to me that this cherished symbol captivates me still in eddies of impenetrable mystery, much as it did when I was a child, suffused with a longing for something always tugging just beyond the fringes of perception.
christmas tree, 8 1/4 x 11 1/4, Derwent Inktense pencils