Wise Men and friends advance on the manger.
Epiphany at last, and for real! It's also my first daughter's twenty-eighth birthday, which seems incredible. She was born in the small hours of the day, after an evening's hard labor, fetal distress, and an emergency C-section: a long, skinny baby who was apparently gray and refused to pink herself up by crying. I say apparently because all this was going on offstage while I was being reassembled. From the beginning, though, she was a girl who knew her own mind and was not to be rushed. We wish we could rush to her on her birthday, but must satisfy ourselves by sending love, like the Wise Men, from afar.
I'm feeling better today and plan to cook a leg of lamb for dinner tonight. As usual, my plan is developing every minute: I'm thinking a Persian-flavored dinner for four with lamb as its centerpiece, in honor of the Magi: something along these lines. I still have chocolate and some little stocking stuffers that didn't fit on Christmas, so I'll make up a parcel to go beside each plate. I'd meant to order Christmas crackers but didn't get around to it, so I guess we won't do that. And we have champagne that we didn't drink on New Year's Eve, so that will go as well. It's good and chilled by now, anyway.
I'll set a festive table in the dining room, even though only four of us are dining. The Christmas tablescape is still in place –– just add Wise Men.
The star still hangs from the chandelier, where it's been awaiting its great moment since the last days of Advent.
I'll break out the good silver and the sterling goblets one last time this season, and we'll make merry together.
UPDATE: I did break out the good silver and the goblets; the lamb is marinating in its "spicy fat" rub, and so are the cumin-roasted sweet potatoes. I wound up changing out the table decor a bit, so that I can stand to leave it for a while –- we take down the overtly Christmasy decor, chiefly the tree, after Epiphany, but I leave Nativity scenes up until Candlemas.
Using ALL the runners this season. This one my mother brought back to me from Russia the year we moved into this house:
It's kind of sad, in a way, to be setting such a sparse table for such a festive night. Hard not to remember that twelve days ago we had nine at table. But it is what it is. We'll have a good time with the people who are here, and we'll be grateful for their presence with us while we have them.
Wearing today (feeling like Lady Misrule, a little, and also like the personification of a King Cake):
I did raise the exposure for this shot, so the colors show up better: purple bamboo swing dress (over a bamboo slip for extra warmth), turquoise-and-charcoal-striped bamboo leggings, teal cashmere cardigan, dark-green wool socks (juxtaposed with everything else, they look pretty neutral), Birk Floridas for in the house. I'll probably put on boots to go out. Wet hair. All clothing items secondhand except the slip and the socks.
Here I appear with a dog growing out of my hip.
As I've said before, I don't often wear colors this bright, because they tend to overshadow me. But this is my mood for the day. In truth, I'm still a little tired from being sick, although I slept magnificently last night and feel much more myself –- so maybe my color choices for today are more an exhortation to a mood, and not the actual mood I started with. At any rate, I don't always reach for these jewel tones, and they may not be, objectively speaking, my very best colors, but I feel pretty good in them anyway. My outfit is heavy on dark-color-pattern –– my four-way medal is about the only really light thing I'm wearing, but it's there, so I'm saying the whole thing works.
Redrafted my terza rima poem from the other day, so that it's assumed the proportions of a terzanelle, though it's really still more terza than nelle, since it lacks the refrain lines that define the villanelle. The structure is five tercets and a quantrain, though I think what I'm going to do is break the final line out into its own one-line stanza –– it's both the b-rhyme of the quatrain and the a-line of the first tercet, so it ties the poem off satisfyingly (I think, at this moment).
So the rhyme scheme looks like this:
aba bcb cdc ded efe faf a
The lines started out in a very, VERY loose pentameter, but I've tightened it up a good bit. Not strict iambic pentameter, but lot closer to that, a lot less like Hopkins' "sprung" meter, with all those extra unstressed syllables rushing in so that he had to mark where he wanted the stresses to go.
It feels good to be working on poems daily again. Last year was such a prose year that I feel pretty tapped out in that department: no new stories for now. I can't even think how I'd begin another novel, but lines I can write. I've also been playing around with another of the traditional Welsh rhymed syllabic forms, the rhupunt, which looks like this (each letter is a syllable; the ab and so on indicate rhymes):
x x x a
x x x a
x x x a
x x x B
x x x c
x x x c
x x x c
x x x B
You can keep going on in this vein for as many stanzas as you want, adding a new rhyme for the first three lines of each segment, repeating the B rhyme in the fourth. The lines are short, only four syllables, so it's a pretty tight, difficult form in which to try to say anything. It lends itself far more to a kind of mesmerizing lyric impulse than to more linear narrative –- you can't really tell what happens in this form.
I am actually hungry, which is a good sign, so I think I'm going to eat something, then contemplate my tablesetting and meal preparation.
Happy Epiphany!
ALSO: Today's clothing tracker
And Dora, looking glamorous and hoping you find somewhere to sit that's as comfortable as this chair she's claimed:
