Today I upheld a long-held tradition of avoiding the office holiday party. Fortunately I did not have to work today anyway, so it was easier than in years past. No awkward standing around ogling the pile of identical desserts or excruciating white elephant swaps for this one.
December is the only month I enjoy walking around cities. When I used to live in Washington DC, I tried as much as possible to wander the nooks and crannies alone. There is a pleasant sense of cosiness that comes when everyone has emptied out to return to their families somewhere else. The sky is grey and the sunlight is watery and thin and it feels as though it could snow any minute. There are deserted parks to stalk through and empty museum corridors to peruse and warm interiors of bookstores and shops to take the chill away.
Instead, today, I wandered some neighborhoods of Tokyo I hadn’t explored before. December here is surprisingly…autumnal. It is like early October in upstate NY, which is sort of hard to reconcile with my mental image of what winter should be. The only thing that is the same is the gloaming hour’s move to four o’clock.
And a long time before the holiday parties came to be avoided and before I ever moved from my hometown, I remember my carroty-haired grandmother keeping the living room a tropical 80 degrees by feeding the wood stove every hour. And I would look out the window and see it was already dark, that the faintly buzzing sodium light on the lamppost in front of the house was already switched on, that golden light spilled from the windows of the barn where my father was carrying out the evening chores.
Often, my mother would let us play outside in the dark, especially if it were snowing…the yard’s bushes and trees transformed into fantastic shapes, the unbroken expanse of soft whiteness piling up. I would lie on my back in the snow which felt good and pleasantly cold through my coat and snowpants and gaze up at the thick flakes plummeting down from the star-covered skies. It was dizzying, as if the very heavens were joining the earth and if you stared long enough upwards, you lost all sense of up and down and coming and going. I felt truly sorry for children who grew up in places with no snow who could never experience such a thing.
It all comes back to cities in the end…under this dome of artificial light known charmingly as Tokyo, from far across the years and space, I miss the stars most of all.
