December 13, 2005
Tuesday

My birthday is on March 9. At left is a picture of the flowers my daughter’s boyfriend brought me, and the little votive candle holder with a flying cardinal on it that she gave me. I turned 58 this year, but I left the bottle of Heinz 57 ketchup that Lynn gave me last year on the bookshelf in the kitchen.

March began with about eight inches of snow on the ground from February’s last shot the day before. My journal indicates that I’d taken steps to shake out of the depression that seemed to have so strong a hold through February. I joined a gym and was exercising three or four days a week. I started going out on Tuesday nights to a writing class on revision. So many community writing classes are geared to beginners, and I’ve outgrown that. This class had serious, experienced fiction writers, and I got a lot out of it. I managed to complete a manuscript and submit it as my admission materials for another year at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.

And I began reading, mostly about Wyoming. I read Karol Griffin’s Skin Deep, about her accidental development and career as a tattoo artist, two novels by Mark Spragg, and some essays by Gretel Erlich, a California filmmaker who gave up that life for the more rugged pursuits of ranching in Wyoming. I also read Annie Proulx’s second collection of stories set there.

As I remember it, I felt like myself again. I was tired of winter foods — apples and raisins, potatoes and onions, rutabagas and turnips — foods that are so hard or dry that you can harvest them in late summer and still have them hanging around at Easter. “I want bright, juicy fruit now — mangoes and papayas, pomegranates, peaches, the orange flag of my disposition. It’s going to be a mango-bango year,” I wrote in my journal

And yet, had I not just reviewed the 25 long-hand pages I wrote in March, I wouldn’t have remembered this, written on March 26:

“I picked up a penny on a parking lot yesterday. Date: 1972. This is the worst I’ve felt since 1972. I feel an isolation and an estrangement from everyone.”

Today is the feast of Saint Lucy, a rich maiden of third century Italy who, legend has it, converted to Christianity and then refused to marry the pagan to whom she’d been betrothed. Because her eyes were gouged out as part of her torture for refusing to renounce her new faith, she is known as the patron saint of the blind. Under the Julian calendar, December 13 was the day of the winter solstice, the longest night of the year. Thus did it become Saint Lucia Day and, combined with pre-Christian light festivals in northern countries where the darkness is most pervasive, became a celebration of the beginning of longer days.

If I had not fallen into this “Winter Count” set of prompts, I would not have endeavored to read all of my private writing from last winter. It’s given me some clues to how I can better manage the tendency to sink into a winter funk. The veil of depression I felt hanging over me the last several weeks has lifted (or at least gotten a little thinner), and I enjoyed the things I did today to get ready for my party.

I see a real mango-bango year coming.

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