After the Solstice

The saga of Winnie the Pooh ends with the story of Christopher Robin outgrowing his bear.

It begins like this:

Christopher Robin was going away. Nobody knew why he was going; nobody knew where he was going; indeed, nobody even knew why he knew Christopher Robin was going away. But somehow or other everybody in the Forest felt it was happening at last.

It ends:

In that enchanted place at the top of the Forest, a boy and his Bear will always be playing.

Enough.

I don’t want to live in that story any more. Barbara is history, and in a certain sense even the grief is old news.

Persephone is setting down her pomegranate. I can feel it.

This afternoon I am going to make my hair pretty. I am going to buy presents for people I love. I am going to call my mother and cajole her into letting me come over and bake cookies with her. In the living room, my father will be watching football. I’ll yell from the kitchen: Did we score? Which team are we for? Tell me again, what’s a tailback?

Tonight I have plans to see Granny Dances to the Beat of a Different Drum, the annual Christmas show of the Cleo Parker Robinson modern ballet troupe. This year, Cleo worked a tango into the show. I would like to see that!

But I won’t. I can feel it. I will be here. Fingers on keys, feet in shoes. Absorbed. Fumbling. Cobbling together bits of beauty first one way, then another...

...

PS As it turned out:

Because I took too much time finessing the final paragraph, I was late to my hair appointment and had to rebook. My mother has gone to bed with a headache. The parking lots are so crowded I am not shopping. And I missed the turn to get on the highway to go home. Melinda called to say Hi and I invited myself over for the early part of the evening. I'm dithering over whether afterward I should make an appearance at the Tango House to demonstrate that I'm not taking sides in the latest TC battle, or if showing up there would be interpreted as taking sides. And there's still the appendix of my book to finish, which I promised the publisher a month ago. And dinking around with the proposal for the next one, which I don't really want to write, but it just keeps rearing its head. Good grief.

Tonight, wherever I end up, I dance!