December blog = bad magpie. I’ve spotted a hundred beauties, absurdities, ironies, mysteries, and even picked up a few, but none of them made it back to the nest. December is an errand-heavy month, and nothing makes squash of ideas like errands. Today was like this: teeth, laundry, windex, coffee, email, straighten, litter, library, chiro, bank, Rx, sandwich, vacuum, laundry, broccoli, baby socks, dog, trash, dishwasher, tea, mailbox, rice bowl, computer, Pulp, pack.
But in between straighten and litter, something really great happened.
A long time ago I found an insect fossil on the beach. I’ve found a few of these over the years, with waxy bits of wing or abdomen visible, and they are all cool, but this one was amazing: a pale gray stone, a black thorax and all four wings stretched out, and so perfect you could make out the membranes on the wings, and the thing is trapped in a web, and the web is trapped in the rock.
I brought it home and kept staring at it. I made J and my mom look at it about ten times each. And then I lost it. I searched for days. I did that stupid thing where you feel a loss so much you think it couldn’t have just happened, there must have been an actor, and I blamed the cat, and also, though I didn’t say it aloud, decided a thief must have broken in and taken my fossil instead of the computer.
Almost two years passed. I still thought about the fossil. I decided I was remembering it as being more awesome than it was. And then I found a second almost perfect one, a sort of negative to the image of the one I’d lost. It had a light body and tattered wings caught in a dark rock. I decided I shouldn’t hold onto things so much, especially things I had stolen from nature, so I gave it to my niece.
We have house-sitters coming, people I haven’t met, and I wanted to do what I could for them about the dog chair. I sort of fluffed and punched pillows and sniffed but not too deep, and then I thought, what the heck, I’ll vacuum under the seat cushion. And there, amid the kibbles and coins and drifts of sand and unspeakable crystals of cat litter — there it was! My pale fossil! My lost beauty! My sign to let go but not forget, and to have faith in memory and imagination, because it was every bit as splendid as I remembered.
I’m actually not packed, though Pulp is playing, and the plane leaves plenty early, and the dog’s best outfit is wrinkled. So I bid you goodnight, and good holiday, and good year, dear magpies, dear fossils. See you in 2011!
