I took down Christmas like a logger felling a tree, lopping off the higher limbs then chain sawing it down in sections. Christmas took days to put up with its exterior lights, interior arrangements, well-choreographed nativity scenes, collectible Santa figurines, spinning wooden carousels, candle arches and incense smokers from Germany, precious things everywhere you looked. It was not the disassembly so much as the filing it all away. Everything draped in nostalgia and loss. A perfect act for New Year’s Day and best done solo with lots of caffeine.

I kept the lights up outside because they were all white and helped ease the transition through the last of the really dark months, January. Put away the ornaments and tossed the tree out on the front lawn; would later drag it up the road for the Boy Scouts to collect on Saturday. We shifted the furniture back into place and marveled over how much light we got back into the den with the tree now gone. But it was so perfect and sweet we were tempted to keep it up for just another day.

I wanted to give something up for January, as it felt like the thing to do. I thought I’d remove the video game console from my work desk and replace it with a plant. My hearing was fucked enough already and the gunfire and explosions didn’t help. There was a near-dead plant with some growth on it still and I thought that would be poetic to look at every day.

And for the first time ever I sat in silence in the morning in the den with just the cat, a candle and the clocks. Maybe I’d stop checking work activity on my phone before 7. No good came from that anyway. The app showed a count of unread messages that was impossible to ignore. Maybe I could move it to another screen.

I could try to ease back on the coffee too, could start my mornings kneeling on a block on a mat in the den while the coffee maker burbled and think instead about nothing, just try to wake naturally. Then what would happen?

I left my phone in the other room so as to not bring its energy into my space. But then I couldn’t find it and had to turn the lights on and realized how ridiculous it was, its pull on me.

Kneeling in the dark I could go back to the dreams I’d just left, riding the elevator in my old office building, people I used to know. Then I could trace the trigger for those dreams through yesterday’s dialogue with my daughter’s boyfriend, the coffee he brought from Mexico. Me boasting about being a coffee roaster once.

I sat with the cat while he dozed and the clocks ticked, so quiet you could hear the wick on the candle crackle, all the life that breathed quietly through our home.

They said in my yoga book something about a union between the individual and universal soul and I thought that could be the darkness I sensed when I sat still with my eyes closed and pictured a palpable thing there. Like being in touch with the eternal.

My other daughter was watching a TV reality show about teenaged girls trying out for a K-pop band. There were several episodes and she’d probably binge watch them all in one go. My wife was knitting a scarf beside her. I sat on the edge of the couch just to be with them though my daughter was also on her phone. The teen vocal instructor said even Beyoncé needed voice lessons: most of us could take classes every day until the day we die, he said. I liked that. I said so but I’m not sure anyone heard. They were then going to watch the gay hockey show so I went to bed.

Categories: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir, Technology

Tags: Memoir, pacific northwest, Creative Nonfiction, journal writing