Gloomy Thoughts in the Festive Season
I've delayed finishing this post, which I started a while ago, because it starts out amusing enough, but gets quite heavy. It's long and filled with angst. If you're in a fragile place, consider this your trigger warning, and close this tab.
The story actually starts a century ago. Members of my husband's family have been the first and only occupants of his parents' house for about that long. Earlier this year, they made a crazy discovery in the attic: a bunch of large, framed portraits of his ancestors. Some they could identify; others are just a mystery.
Some of the portraits are downright creepy, and when we decided to throw a Halloween party, we hit upon the idea of hanging the portraits to create a spooky atmosphere.
That was the beginning of the Curse of the Ancestors.
The morning after the Halloween party, we awoke to find our basement flooded, ostensibly because a contractor had not sealed a hole, but more likely because the ghost of this terrifying person was annoyed at our flippant display of her image:
A few weeks later, a leak sprang in a different location, and last week, rainwater drowned a window well and gushed for hours into our house while we attempted to bail out our laundry room with tools like hoses, garbage bags, shovels, duct tape, and a shop vac. The ancestors were cackling from their graves, no doubt.
And then this week, for the first time in the five years we've lived in this home, we lost power for 21 hours when a combination of rain and freezing temperatures wreaked havoc on our community. I've seen plenty of winter (I grew up in Minnesota) but I have never seen this sort of weather phenomenon before. A very thick layer of ice coated every surface for two days - fences, power lines, street signs, and every leaf and branch and blade of grass. It looked like everything was made from glass, and the whole world glittered like diamonds when the sun came out.
It was extremely beautiful, actually, but we did not appreciate losing heat and having to throw away stuff from our freezer. I wondered what our ancestors had in store for us next: pestilence? Locusts? It was theoretically Vegan Vednesday, but being unequal to that challenge in the absence of heat and light and whatnot, I ate meats and dairy with abandon.
While I'd love to blame the ancestors for this one, instead I reflected despairingly on the climate change that scientists tell us is making severe weather events more severe and more common (see, for example, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/19/climate-change-making-storms-like-idai-more-severe-say-experts).
Climate change is scary in that way. A few weeks ago, I posted a photo of what I thought was an art project by my small backup dancer, and referred to it as "menacing." Imagine my surprise, then, when her teachers belatedly sent parents some photos that included her making it, along with this explanation: "Before Thanksgiving, we worked to build protective structures to shield potatoes from the elements and hungry humans. All of our structures (and potatoes) held up thanks to our careful designs!"
I had so many reactions to this information! First, "ohhhhhhh, it was meant to be menacing, and well done, backup dancer!" And then "there was a potato in there?" (Good thing I threw it away before it rotted!) And finally, and most intriguingly yet alarmingly, "might my second-grader's survival someday depend upon hiding a potato from catastrophic weather and ruthless humans?"
I worry about the climate crisis all the time, but I am not so pessimistic (yet) as to picture that post-apocalyptic scenario somewhere down the line. So my musings are tongue-in-cheek, but....still.
Reducing my meat and dairy consumption is one way I am working to avoid contributing to environmental problems. But I do struggle with the "drop in the bucket" nature of all the steps I take. Eating less meat, and walking instead of driving, and running the dishwasher when energy demand is lower at night, and refilling a bottle of soap instead of buying a new one, etc. etc. - all these stuff is sort of tragically inadequate, even if I inspire YOU to do these things, and you inspire your own friends. Don't get me wrong; I'm going to keep doing what I can, but honestly, it feels like nothing is really improving and we're all kind of screwed, because too many world leaders aren't on board. I hope I'm wrong.
And I guess this blog is a bad place to bring this up, because it is the opposite of inspiring, but: Vegan Vednesday is still so darned hard for me, every single week (even when there's no power outage). I just barely pulled it off last week, including pouring some skim milk into my hot cocoa maker, then realizing and pouring it back into the carton. My final vegan act of that day was to boil some pasta and serve it with tomato sauce from a jar. I tried to put on a good face for this photo, but as you can probably tell, it did not make me happy.
Even the depiction of the "Twelve Days of Christmas", on the wall behind me, mocks my weekly veganism. Eight maids a-milking? Forget it. Six geese a-laying? Not so fast. And I can feast my eyes on those three French hens, but I won't be savoring them as Coq au Vin.
Speaking of Christmas, I have been enjoying preparations for celebrating with a broadly "retro" theme this year. But Christmas can be so difficult as an adult, when your family is distant, literally and/or figuratively, and things weigh on you. My mom has Alzheimers Disease. With Alzheimers, you can miss a person even when they are sitting right next to you, but she's not sitting here, anyway. And when we've been alive for many years, no matter how good our lives are, I think most of us have something like that - something we have to move past in order to be merry, as is expected of us during the holidays.
But back to that other depressing topic, the environment: Unfortunately, veganism (once a week, anyway) feels like an action I cannot *NOT* take against a coming climate catastrophe.
When we fear that everything we're doing isn't enough, art is a way to cope with something as unfathomably awful as a climate apocalypse. Fiction is a hobby of mine, and I've been interested in the degree to which fiction writers are increasingly addressing climate change. The simultaneously hilarious and heartfelt Writers' HQ, for example, offers a course on "Writing in the Time of Climate Change." The New Yorker recently featured a short story by Joyce Carol Oates in which characters were all sickened by the environment. My own local writer's group just reviewed one of our member's story about an extreme reaction to some of the challenges of our modern society, including climate change.
What will or would that art look like to beings (humans?) far in the future? Will they be viewing it from a position of having triumphed or failed against climate change?
Will they gleefully hang portraits of angst-ridden me, giving me no choice but to return to haunt them?
The story actually starts a century ago. Members of my husband's family have been the first and only occupants of his parents' house for about that long. Earlier this year, they made a crazy discovery in the attic: a bunch of large, framed portraits of his ancestors. Some they could identify; others are just a mystery.
Some of the portraits are downright creepy, and when we decided to throw a Halloween party, we hit upon the idea of hanging the portraits to create a spooky atmosphere.
 |
| The ancestors bore witness to some karaoke. |
That was the beginning of the Curse of the Ancestors.
The morning after the Halloween party, we awoke to find our basement flooded, ostensibly because a contractor had not sealed a hole, but more likely because the ghost of this terrifying person was annoyed at our flippant display of her image:
A few weeks later, a leak sprang in a different location, and last week, rainwater drowned a window well and gushed for hours into our house while we attempted to bail out our laundry room with tools like hoses, garbage bags, shovels, duct tape, and a shop vac. The ancestors were cackling from their graves, no doubt.
And then this week, for the first time in the five years we've lived in this home, we lost power for 21 hours when a combination of rain and freezing temperatures wreaked havoc on our community. I've seen plenty of winter (I grew up in Minnesota) but I have never seen this sort of weather phenomenon before. A very thick layer of ice coated every surface for two days - fences, power lines, street signs, and every leaf and branch and blade of grass. It looked like everything was made from glass, and the whole world glittered like diamonds when the sun came out.
It was extremely beautiful, actually, but we did not appreciate losing heat and having to throw away stuff from our freezer. I wondered what our ancestors had in store for us next: pestilence? Locusts? It was theoretically Vegan Vednesday, but being unequal to that challenge in the absence of heat and light and whatnot, I ate meats and dairy with abandon.
 |
| Yep, I ate liquidy ice cream straight from the container, while bundled up against the chill in my own home. |
While I'd love to blame the ancestors for this one, instead I reflected despairingly on the climate change that scientists tell us is making severe weather events more severe and more common (see, for example, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/19/climate-change-making-storms-like-idai-more-severe-say-experts).
Climate change is scary in that way. A few weeks ago, I posted a photo of what I thought was an art project by my small backup dancer, and referred to it as "menacing." Imagine my surprise, then, when her teachers belatedly sent parents some photos that included her making it, along with this explanation: "Before Thanksgiving, we worked to build protective structures to shield potatoes from the elements and hungry humans. All of our structures (and potatoes) held up thanks to our careful designs!"
I had so many reactions to this information! First, "ohhhhhhh, it was meant to be menacing, and well done, backup dancer!" And then "there was a potato in there?" (Good thing I threw it away before it rotted!) And finally, and most intriguingly yet alarmingly, "might my second-grader's survival someday depend upon hiding a potato from catastrophic weather and ruthless humans?"
I worry about the climate crisis all the time, but I am not so pessimistic (yet) as to picture that post-apocalyptic scenario somewhere down the line. So my musings are tongue-in-cheek, but....still.
Reducing my meat and dairy consumption is one way I am working to avoid contributing to environmental problems. But I do struggle with the "drop in the bucket" nature of all the steps I take. Eating less meat, and walking instead of driving, and running the dishwasher when energy demand is lower at night, and refilling a bottle of soap instead of buying a new one, etc. etc. - all these stuff is sort of tragically inadequate, even if I inspire YOU to do these things, and you inspire your own friends. Don't get me wrong; I'm going to keep doing what I can, but honestly, it feels like nothing is really improving and we're all kind of screwed, because too many world leaders aren't on board. I hope I'm wrong.
And I guess this blog is a bad place to bring this up, because it is the opposite of inspiring, but: Vegan Vednesday is still so darned hard for me, every single week (even when there's no power outage). I just barely pulled it off last week, including pouring some skim milk into my hot cocoa maker, then realizing and pouring it back into the carton. My final vegan act of that day was to boil some pasta and serve it with tomato sauce from a jar. I tried to put on a good face for this photo, but as you can probably tell, it did not make me happy.
Even the depiction of the "Twelve Days of Christmas", on the wall behind me, mocks my weekly veganism. Eight maids a-milking? Forget it. Six geese a-laying? Not so fast. And I can feast my eyes on those three French hens, but I won't be savoring them as Coq au Vin.
Speaking of Christmas, I have been enjoying preparations for celebrating with a broadly "retro" theme this year. But Christmas can be so difficult as an adult, when your family is distant, literally and/or figuratively, and things weigh on you. My mom has Alzheimers Disease. With Alzheimers, you can miss a person even when they are sitting right next to you, but she's not sitting here, anyway. And when we've been alive for many years, no matter how good our lives are, I think most of us have something like that - something we have to move past in order to be merry, as is expected of us during the holidays.
 |
| I remember my mom sewing these ornaments from a kit when I was a kid. |
When we fear that everything we're doing isn't enough, art is a way to cope with something as unfathomably awful as a climate apocalypse. Fiction is a hobby of mine, and I've been interested in the degree to which fiction writers are increasingly addressing climate change. The simultaneously hilarious and heartfelt Writers' HQ, for example, offers a course on "Writing in the Time of Climate Change." The New Yorker recently featured a short story by Joyce Carol Oates in which characters were all sickened by the environment. My own local writer's group just reviewed one of our member's story about an extreme reaction to some of the challenges of our modern society, including climate change.
What will or would that art look like to beings (humans?) far in the future? Will they be viewing it from a position of having triumphed or failed against climate change?
Will they gleefully hang portraits of angst-ridden me, giving me no choice but to return to haunt them?
 |
| Don't try to tell me that my shattered measuring cup last week wasn't another example of the Curse of the Ancestors. |
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