Prudence with Snow

A Solstice dispatch on time, trust, and letting go, The Little Prince, my favorite Winter Solstice Books, Last Christmas

Our beloved cat, Bug, has been anxious for a long time. She’s wired that way. We brought her home as a kitten within a couple months of moving into our home eight years ago. She sleeps by my head most nights, but only when my arm is outstretched at a certain angle. She learned to live with a puppy, then a baby, she adapted, but she was still anxious and occasionally combative. Earlier this week, I brought her to live with my aunt who lives in a small cottage on Prudence Island. She’ll have a quiet home with a view of the bay and a doting person who will be home most of the time.

I have a hard time letting go. I feel deeply. I remember everything. I empathize with inanimate objects. I still remember a dream I had when I was five or six in which I lost a stuffed animal that had been a gift, a baby Kermit wearing a red sweater, I searched for it all over our neighborhood, within the drooping canopy of a giant weeping beech tree in the park down the street, behind a dumpster in the parking lot of the movie theater. I can pull up the dream like I had it last night. That toy had been in my care. I can’t remember if I had even really ever physically had Kermit or I had just dreamed it into being. It doesn’t matter now, does it? It’s the feelings that linger.

I stayed at a cousin’s house on the island after dropping Bug off and only slept for a few hours on the couch in front of the wood stove. I woke throughout the night to feed the fire. Night lingered, darkness draped, the glow of the embers a tether to morning.

I love these short days. I love the darkness and the tradition and the habitual nature of winter. I only long for summer when winter drags on and on and on into spring. But we’re not there yet, we’re here, on the darkest day of the year.

Two of my favorite books that capture the winter solstice were written in Cambridge.

The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper is a classic in children’s fantasy. Cooper, who lived in Cambridge for many years, has said she wrote this book longing for the Thames Valley in rural Buckinghamshire where she grew up. I wrote more about The Dark is Rising and Susan Cooper in this post about nostalgia.

Winter Solstice by Nina MacLaughlin is a book of essays that so beautifully and honestly captures the time and light around the solstice and what it means to not just be alive but really living with all your senses. Right now. I’m lucky to call Nina a friend and last night a group of us got to hear her read from Winter Solstice in Eva Zasloff’s studio barn in Arlington before Louisa Stancioff lulled us into the night.

When I woke the next morning on Prudence, the sun was out and it stayed below freezing for a few hours. I made coffee and drove to the west side by the old stone dock and felt the wind on my face. Then I parked at Picnic Tree Beach where two ducks and a seagull floated in the gentle bay waves just beyond the marsh grass and where the golden morning sunlight reached over the island making long winter shadows cast by the scraggy windswept trees.

If you don’t talk to your shadow, you should. At least say hi. Or wave. Dance a little. Mine on this morning, in this place, with this light, reminded me of The Little Prince—a nickname my Italian friend, Lisa, gave me when she taught me how to eat with a fork and knife like a proper European twenty years ago when we studied abroad in Copenhagen together. Sometimes, especially around this time of year, as I move through my days, the light will have a certain quality to it—dim, northern, inviting—and I’ll be there, then. For a few seconds, I get to be back in Copenhagen in the fall of 2005. It feels like a wave gently crashing then receding or like flying through a cloud.

When I was a teenager, my grandmother who lived on Prudence told me she wanted me to write a book that helped adults remember what it was like to be a child. I’m working on it. Years later, my wife pointed out that many of my favorite authors also wrote/write for children. It’s true. In my own writing, I strive for a type of accessibility that comes from ageless truths.

Almost five years ago, I walked alone around the entirety of Prudence. It took me eleven hours to cover the twenty-two miles. I had been beating myself up for not having “produced” anything from it yet, which is the exact opposite of the whole point of the walk. I let this go recently—the angst and guilt and pressure. And that is exactly when a path opened up for me. Last year, my friend Hannah asked me if I was writing a memoir. I laughed uncomfortably. The very notion of that felt unbelievable and uncomfortable to me then. Who am I to write a memoir? After finishing a novel and being sucked into the unforgiving vortex of how to sell my book and then trying to figure out what is actually selling in the marketplace, I was stuck on what to work on next, so I asked myself the question: what is something only I can write?

My aunt has a cast iron dragon that sits atop her gas stove and puffs steam into the room. So far, when Bug is not sleeping in the closet, or nested in the window looking out at the bay, she is cuddled up with the dragon.

The darkest time of the year feels like a good time to let go and trust.

-Caleb

PS. When I need to be reminded how to write an essay or tell a story, I reread Nina, Susan, or Hannah’s work.

PPS. One of the wildest Christmas parties I’ve ever been to was in Denmark twenty years ago. Jimmy Eat World’s version of Last Christmas was played on repeat for what felt like hours. People were falling off tables, taking shots of Fisherman’s Friend, and pouring Carlsberg Jul over themselves. Here’s Louisa Stancioff ‘s version: