Many Things Have Happened

A boy ordered some bacteria through the mail, and now they have arrived. You may ask yourself why a person would need to buy bacteria, when all he really has to do is open the refrigerator -- statistically speaking, that is. Apparently the average American refrigerator houses several million times more bacteria than the average American gas-station restroom, though on second thought, maybe that's less a statistic than a damned lie. Still, you hear things like that, and not all from the makers of Clorox. Now, when I use the words bacteria and refrigerator in the same sentence, it's not necessary to assume that I'm speaking in a specific sense of any particular refrigerator of my personal acquaintance:  merely statistics (or damned lies), you know. Of course, it's not necessary to assume otherwise, either. At any rate, as the boy suggested, he had to have something to go in his petri dishes, and here we are.

So now we have these bacteria, cunning little red ones and cunning little green ones, in their cunning little test tubes. Their presence has given rise to a whole new set of household rules, to the effect that thou shalt not cultivate e. coli on the kitchen counter. We have rules about gas burners, too, though it occurs to me that we might just have recycled the rules about the backpacking stove, since it's virtually indistinguishable from the little gas burner that came with the chemistry equipment -- for that matter, since we had the gas burner first, I wonder why the backpacking stove was even necessary except that, as the boy suggested, he had to get something for Christmas. Besides petri dishes, that is.


*

A girl came home from her first semester at college. I am frequently amazed all anew at the fluidity of a concept like normal:  one minute you're lying in a hospital bed, holding a little red burrito which a stranger has just handed you and saying to yourself, "Just exactly what have I done to my heretofore agreeable life?" The next minute the burrito is calling you long distance to say that the philosophy final is over, and that the young man to whom she has become appended wants to leave Dallas by 6 the next morning to drive thirteen hours to Atlanta to his parents' house, then four more the next day to bring her to your door, and you realize that there's an entire world beyond the walls of your own house, and it's not you rattling around in it footloose and full of a sense of infinite destiny, but the burrito. You, rather to your surprise, are the one in the house, waiting to open the door and let some of the infinite destiny back in, to grace you with its gilded presence for a few minutes, until the phone rings and something else claims its attention.

And you may ask yourself, Well, how did I get here? 

And also, Was it ever really otherwise? 


*

A mother, two boys, a girl, and a dog went hiking together on the Feast of the Epiphany, in short sleeves and a blond wash of sunshine. Their hike began in a place called Confederate Laboratory:  it really is called that. I couldn't make that up. Confederate Laboratory proper is a cluster of little old houses which grew up around an 1820s cotton mill by the South Fork River, which used to run so thickly with eels, so they say, that men had to chop them out of the mill wheel with -- I'm not sure what, actually. Axes might have broken the mill wheel, so maybe shovels? At any rate, you never hear about eels in the South Fork River any more, and as far as I know, they don't feature in the traditional local cuisine as they do in East Anglia, which until the seventeenth century was one big eely fen, over which the Isle of Ely (literally, the Isle of the Island of Eels) rose like an unlikely hematoma, crusted with a cathedral. At some point after the trouble with the South Fork eels, another variety of trouble broke out, and the mill community became, for some reason, a site on which medicines were compounded, hence the current name.

The trail follows the bed of a defunct railroad leading -- as all roads lead in these parts -- to Gastonia. We have friends in a place called High Shoals, which is bigger than Confederate Laboratory but not much, through whose woods a rusted section of this railroad still runs. In the olden days, when the storefronts weren't so empty, people from High Shoals used to take the train the full five miles to Fiat to do their shopping. In those days, as now, Fiat was the big doings in this neck of the woods;  in those days, obviously, the doings were bigger than they are now. Now the tracks are mostly gone, and where the trains used to clatter you can stroll in relative silence, with the gray trees whispering around you and the river, below the mill dam, exhaling noisily over its shoals and scattering light.

There's a place by the water where someone has strung a rope on a tree limb, for no more nefarious purpose than to swing out on over a deep spot and let go. I suppose you could also use it to shimmy up to the place where all the fishing floats cluster like grapes on the barren tree. I sat on the bank looking at this strange fruit for several minutes yesterday before the realization of what they were broke upon me. It was the Feast of the Epiphany, after all. While I sat gazing at the fishing floats caught in the tree, the girl with me, who had worn wellie boots without socks and, in consequence, developed the predictable blisters, waded in the mud in her bare feet. She didn't have to go into the water to wade;  floods had deposited plenty of silt right there on the riverside rocks, and not all of it had cracked in the sun into a sort of crumble-edged tile floor. The girl amused herself for some time in not only mud-wading, but also digging up these mud tiles with her fingers -- they came right away in satisfying handfuls -- patting them into smooth black grapeshot, and lobbing them into the water. Meanwhile, one of the boys expended the respite from walking in rummaging through his well-stocked pack for a piece of moleskin with which to remedy the sororal blisters. Probably he had the backpacking stove with him as well, not to mention the gas burner;  it's not for nothing that the other Boy Scouts call him Wal-Mart. The second boy, the one whom I'd tried to persuade to wear a fleece pullover, because after all it's January, for pete's sake, and who had turned out to be right after all, feinted at underbrush with the walking stick his brother had lent him, to shut him up about the sword he had wanted to bring and been forbidden. The dog panted and walked around and around on the end of his leash, winding his legs up in it until he was effectively hobbled. The sun shone down beneficently on us as it would shine down on any oddly assorted fivesome in a lull in the action of a Dickens novel.

It's still Christmas, various people remarked at intervals, in tones of incredulity.

*

 It is still Christmas -- at least it was, and as the American Church celebrates Epiphany tomorrow, I'm loath to take the tree down even now, though I'm mortally tired of it. Yesterday, after we came home from hiking, I had the front door propped open to admit the dulcet air, and then I looked at the Christmas tree shining away in its corner with the tattered leavings of Christmas morning still clustered around its base, and one of these things was not like the other.

Of course, that's the thing about the Church year:  it does run counter to everything, including the weather and our own feelings. In Advent, when the rest of the world is riding high on the holly-jolly jingle-bell flood tide that started running around Halloween, we're supposed to override our convivial Christmasy impulses with a sense of eschatological longing. Hard as it is to accomplish at the time, it occurs to me that that's somehow far less difficult than singing O Come Let Us Adore Him on the third of January, when everyone else's tree has long since vanished into the county landfill and even we, who keep plugging the lights in day after day and forcing down whatever remnants of chocolate we happen across, feel that we've done this already. Can we fast now? Please?

It's not that we sweep it entirely away, of course. The Holy Family and their adoring retinue live on the mantelpiece until Candlemas, when Epiphanytide officially ends and the kings depart into their own country by another way, involving bubble wrap. Some winter dark will close in on us, even as the days stretch out languidly towards another round of Daylight Savings. We might have snow. Still, it's hard to swim against this sudden current of spring feeling which makes me want to throw things out, throw open windows, and let the fresh honest daylight in again.

But then, maybe we're not supposed to swim against it so much after all. Maybe we're supposed to drop our nets and follow. New year, new season, new life.