Solidly dark. Too early for light. The neighbors’ garage door creaks open, groaning, pulling itself upright and gaping, until it stops with a click and silence pushes back. I fall deeply asleep again. Then, ice cracks and pops under the slow roll of tires backing up and my eyes startle open. I hear the purr and wait of the motor, the gears shifting, the car putts down the street. Silence. Again I am deeply asleep. A branch rubs the siding on the house, outside my window, the scrape familiar, insistent. The wind is rising already. I shoulder myself over, flipping like a quarter, shove my pillow deeper into the crevasse between my neck and chin, push my eyes shut. The rest of the world, I imagine, sleeps soundly, huff- breathed and warm. I am only partly awake.
A photograph comes to mind, one I am sure I’ve never seen before, yet there it is in my head on this early, dark, morning. It’s a black and white snapshot, a young woman, head turned to the left, at her shoulder the face of a bundled baby. They both have tweed hats, her thumb-sized pin curls poke out as if pencil-drawn on her forehead. She is laughing with someone who isn’t in the frame. She clutches the baby’s thigh and hugs it close to her ribs to balance him along her shoulder; he has one small starfish hand bare — his mitten dangles from his coat sleeve and he’s found the break in her collar, laid his hand beside her warm throat.
I wonder, in my bed this morning in the dark, “Was I ever that happy? Will I ever be that happy?”
All autumn long I kept up, some days with ease, some days with tremendous effort. Now, in November, retrospectively, and if I do say so myself, I can crow that I pounced rather effectively through these days, like a sleek and chubby cat moving smoke-like and lightly around the trunk of a tree. I handled the season change with aplomb — end of summer straight into fall.
But this morning I no longer feel cat-like. This morning I lie in bed before dawn and think to myself, “There are too few days left.”
Holidays in America, whatever — whichever — are coming. Sometimes it feels like they approach like the thud of footfall from an old Godzilla movie — shudder, thump, thud, shudder.
And maybe that’s the problem, too much America in the end-of-the-year months. We are a country of brilliant individualism, capitalism and consumerism. We do things big. Big Holidays, Thanksgiving, Christmas, the Festival of Lights, Kwanzaa, Hanukkah, New Year’s Eve, the Year of the Tiger.
What would it feel like to peel back the layers of all the Big we think we need?
I think it would feel scary. I think it would make us wonder if we could ever be that happy, and we worry that we’re not happy enough already; we worry that everyone else is happier; we worry we will fall asleep — or wake up — with some sort, with all sorts, of regret. Taking hold of the small moments, stopping long enough to be loose ends, listening inwardly — even if all we think we hear is an echo — is something we run from.
Which is odd, because ultimately such moments, though they may feel finger-doodlingly empty at the time, if you stick with them, will fill you up with a sustaining joy. Reflection and gathering are hard work — they demand that you take hold of small moments gently, instead of Godzilla stomping all over them, and demand that you pay attention enough to fill those very moments with soul-work, with longing and spirit.
The woman in the picture? She could be anyone. My answer to the question — Was I ever that happy? Yes. Sometimes. Will I ever be that happy? Yes, but not always. No matter how fast I run around. No matter how well I pull off all the Big. It is not the Big that will make me, or you, happy. It will be the small moments made worthy by virtue of our attention and our willingness to slowly step into them.
E-mail Fort Collins poet and writer Natalie Costanza-Chavez at grace-notes@comcast.net. Read more of her essays at .
