Joy is the giant snowflakes that fell last Thursday night after a solid day of rain. The temperature dipped below freezing and the water turned to slush then white fluffy flakes. Dee ran outside and took photos with her iPhone, she later showed me the flakes, which looked to be about the size of big white apple blossom clusters.
Joy is the bed Jim made for us on the patio the night of the lunar eclispe. I’d fallen asleep on the living room couch, the girls in their beds, and he roused us all from sleep. Come on out, he said, I have a cozy spot for you to lay down. We piled into the sleeping bags that he’d placed on a mattress, then he covered us with a Pendleton blanket and another blanket, we were warm and for about a half hour, up to midnight, we could see shadow creep across the lower right hand corner of the moon.
Joy is the woman who I saw standing in front of Walmart with her Salvation Army bell and kettle, she was thin, wore a red sweater and red Santa hat, but other than that she had no costume, and I admired her courage to stand in front of the automatic doors as shoppers walked all around her, in and out, in and out, paying her little mind. She shook that bell, smiled at everyone and said Merry Christmas. What drives a woman my age to be on that side of the shopping experience?, I wondered and wished we could trade places so that I could ring and remember that this was the true meaning of Christmas.
Joy is the Christmas lights last night, a pale blue, the kind you know have been around for decades, each year more of the blue paint on the bulbs chips away or fades until what remains is a ghost of the color covering the white light, an uneven string of blue, blue-white, white, all around the roofline of the house. Those are my favorite lights although I love any place that’s lit up, this is, after all, the season of light.
Joy is our Christmas tree, it’s a live one, or rather, cut, and we don’t usually go in for buying cut trees but we got one this year, I like the way it’s not perfect or symmetrical, how big vacant spots open up between boughs and even after I hang three or four ornaments in them I still see plenty of empty space.
Joy is sitting in a cafe with friends, drinking too much coffee, not thinking about what you still have to do or not do, just being present to the moment, Joy is Taos in December, sit walk write, just being, just sitting, just writing.
Joy is the few minutes I have left in this write, the sound of the space heater, the taste of coffee with soy milk, the Christmas cards I got even though I once again didn’t get mine out on time, Joy is the misshappen tamales I made with Mom and Bobbi and the girls, they will be the laughing stock of Christmas Eve, and see?, that’s Joy.
-Related to post WRITING TOPIC – JOY
redravine.wordpress.com 
yb, have wrestled with the idea of writing about what joy is for me or isn’t for me. I even looked up the definition of the word, but it doesn’t resonate with me. Joy…have I even experienced joy? Maybe I have, but I can’t remember. Will see what comes up for me when I write the word followed by the definition and let my mind go.
P.S. I would eat one of the misshapen tamales without laughing as I don’t get homemade tamales very often at all. The joy in the making of them would make them taste so good regardless of how they looked.
LikeLike
This was a hard topic to write on, Bob. What made it easier was to go back to the Topic post and read it one more time. QM did that post, and she instructed to write Joy Is… at the top of the page (I think that’s what she said), which I did. It helped to jump off from there. She also suggested writing on Joy Is Not…, which might be something good to do as well.
Regarding the misshapen tamales, a friend came by and took some shots of us while we made them that day. Jim and I were looking at one of the photos, and he said, “Oh, I like this one where you’re holding cinammon sticks in your hand.” Well, what I was holding were our homemade tamales–they just happened to look like cinammon sticks! So now we’re calling them “tamale sticks”!
LikeLike
Sounds to me like “tamale sticks” might be appearing in the freezer section next to “pepper poppers” and “pot stickers.”
LikeLike