Space By The Fireside

It's dead serious, this time between Yule and Imbolc. It's the time of the year for forging ahead, for making real accomplishments.

I'm exercising like a mad woman and reorganizing files and writing articles and cleaning out the ritual room and taking charge of my health and doing v. serious things and moving money around and doing magic outside the Capitol and taking all of the cold-air steps that will seem too serious to approach in Spring. I'm standing in a garden stripped to its bones and conjuring its flesh as deeply as I know how to do.

And, yet, the v. best part of my life, the place where I am really living, the locus of my magic is the spot where G/Son teases me by pretending that he's going to eat the Soy Dough snakes we've made on his dining room table while Son and DiL do errands. We say, "Yucky!" and we say "Silly Nonna!" and we laugh until we get the hiccups. The place that matters most isn't where I do law or where I live in a circle or where I garden or where I foster revolution or where I dance. The place that matters most is the place where I change a diaper and discuss who has a penis and who has a vagina and read a story in the intense Western afternoon sunlight as a way of putting a tiny mancub down for his afternoon nap. Not a new skill. I put his father down for just such a nap, oh, thirty-three years or so ago. It feels so right and so good and it connects me so strongly to my ancestresses.

Here I am. I, too, am old. I, too, am looking back. I, too, remember what it's like. I, too, I too, I too, gentle the new generation into a nap, into a milk-drunk sleep, into a long rest in the strong sunshine. I lived long enough for this. I, too, I, too, have come to this place of the grandmothers. Move over, old ones. Make room for me. I've brought my knitting. I've brought my DNA. I've brought my progeny. Move over.