December

Sunset on a luminous, oyster shell of an evening after a week of dark, cold rain. Everything has a soft, sourceless glow that raises the spirit without lifting the mood.

It’s the anniversary of my mother’s death. I have been dreaming and daydreaming of her. Or perhaps I should say I’ve been dreaming around her. No image of her comes, no memories, no presence. Instead there’s an absence that seems to have something of personhood - mine? hers? Not a ghost but a haunting certainly. Trying to articulate this feeling is like describing a texture divorced from touch, a perfume divorced from scent that. Like recognizing a person, knowing them well but being unable to recall their name. She comes to me as a flummux. A not quite.

At The Grotto – a local Christian attraction, statue park and chapel. Thousands of lights, all colors, wrapped around hundreds of trees. The tree tops are cold fireworks but the supporting boughs and trunks are bound as tightly as prisoners. The place is full of smiling people drinking chocolate, listening to a choir in a chapel with pink walls, fake gold chandeliers, a mural of the Christ arisen that looks as if someone took the image from a dime store novena candle and painted it on the wall. Throughout The Grotto are various shrines for immigrant worshipers. Spanish/Mexican saints, Vietnamese, Lithuanian, Russian and others. Outside the park flyers giving information for tracking and reporting ICE activities are taped to fences and street light poles. I watch a woman carefully pulling them down and putting them in a cloth bag. This area lays just outside of central South East Portland. It’s an area of blue collar homes, fast food restaurants, shabby bars, strip joints, massive Christian Billboards. It’s also very much an immigrant neighborhood. I don’t know the extent of ICE activity here but there are a greater number of flyers for immigrant support and neighborhood action than most areas I visit in the South East Area.

Earlier this month we learned that Mike is in remission. The diagnosis came almost exactly a year after the first terrible announcement that he had cancer and treatment must happen fast if he was going to have any chance. I can’t help but drawparallels with the coming solstice. I know that remission is not a cure and that Cancer doesn’t give a fuck about calendars but we have more hope in this moment then we’ve had all year so I’ll hold on to the notion that Mike’s health will grow with the light. I’ll also willfully abandon this line of thinking when the summer solstice comes round. Mike’s position is different of course, caught between the terror of cancer and the terror of hope - an equinox of sorts, whether Vernal or Autumnal remains to be seen.

Solstice. Before bed I lit a candle and made a prayer to light. At the close of this particular year it seemed necessary. I’d like to think I no longer believe in invocation or prayer but when light is concerned I know better. Whatever I believe, my body always prays to light. The hard part of the solstice is the knowledge that light is returning but it takes a long fucking time. There is no denying the singular, lonely power of a candle in the darkness on a winter night, but against the darkness of this country, this year of cancer and death, the flame seems so small. This year we need a procession of candles, torches maybe, bonfires, burning it all down. The shadows gather around my candle as if they will pounce and smother it. There’s a trick though for moments like this. Blow gently toward the flame, just enough to make it respond. The shadows will quiver as if afraid of the breath you give to the fire.

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