As a boy I never mastered the yoyo. I could make it snap up, slap neatly into my palm, and I could make it “sleep,” which on lucky occasion let me “walk the dog.” But that was it, and so the siren call of more expensive, more obedient yoyos never reached my ears, stopped as they were with impatience.
5:44 a.m., December 21st. I am up for this moment. No sleeping now. Even as I spin at the very bottom of the year. Solstice, and the closest I can get to my inner pagan is recall of childhood and its taffy of time, all stretched and sticky….why is everything and everyone so slow so slow so?
“You will see,” said my patient grandmother, whose arthritic toes overlapped each other, giving her a wobbly gait; “you will see.” Already, I was on to whatever my little marimba mind noticed. Climbing smartly up my string and slapping into the palm of my next impulse.
These years later, back down at the base of light’s slow ebb, I pause, and in the snow-sheen of 1/8th-light at this hour, I can just read the opening paragraphs of “The Pond in Winter.” It is, I know from readings and readings, the right line of words into this day; I spin down its opening sentences…skip the quotation (blasphemy, I know)…and arrive at a favorite sentence:
After a still winter night I awoke with the impression that some question had been put to me, which I had been endeavoring in vain to answer in my sleep, as what — how — when — where? But there was dawning Nature, in whom all creatures live, looking in at my broad windows with serene and satisfied face, and no question on her lips. I awoke to an answered question to Nature and daylight. The snow lying deep on the earth dotted with young pines, and the very slope of the hill on which my house is placed, seemed to say, Forward!…
Then to my morning work. First I take an axe and pail and go in search of water, if that be not a dream. Thoreau, Walden
Here on the shortest day, to begin “my morning work,” to be awake even in the time of sleep, when much and many are bedded down. That, of course, is the book’s work too. Well, “first I take an axe…” and, as an essay I read long ago pointed out, this beginning is an unusual sentence for Thoreau – it is, like the blows of an axe, single syllables, with the exception of its two syllable goal, “water.” Deliberate, singular work, that is how we start. With it we uncover water, Walden water!, elixir. One after another – steps, words, breaths – “Forward!”
More day to dawn
I do see – answer to my earlier grandmother – even on this shortest day, when “dawning Nature” is taking her time with the light. Down here at the year’s end I am spinning, but I am not sleeping.