Five Things to Remember from December

For  several months, I've been keeping track of five things  I'd like to remember from that month. Here's what came up in December.

 

One. Eat the heart of the lettuce first. My wise sister taught me this when she was here this summer. As a person living alone who loves to cook and eat, she often buys produce that has a shorter shelflife than her ability to eat it. So she has learned to take apart the lettuce head and eat the inner leaves, which are her favourites, first. If she ate her way into the centre, the inner leaves might be past their prime and unpleasant--and meanwhile, she’s spent days eating her less-favourite part before getting to the good stuff. It’s taking me time to think about this practice, but it’s fun. 

Sometimes changing perspective is as easy as
taking a photo from the upstairs window instead of
the "usual" one downstairs 

Two. Delay gratification. This thought seems the opposite of the previous one. It’s also something our parents insisted on. Their message: save the things you enjoy to be rewards after doing the things you don’t enjoy. Dessert last, always, if ever. Eat treats one at a time. Et cetera. I’ve loosened up some over the years. But it’s still important to me—in writing, for one thing. I’ll delay the gratification of sending a piece out for possible publication (oh the dopamine of hope!) until I really truly can’t see how to make it better. 

So learning the difference between the first thing and the second thing might be helpful. I'm not sure I can always tell by looking, though. Anyway, I'm eating the good parts of the lettuce and cabbage first.

Three. Here’s a related one: do the hard task. Don't procrastinate. When I have a task that I dread and therefore postpone (often requiring a phone call), I give it more power than it really has. The whole thing could’ve been done in five minutes. This also applies to doing regular small (hard) tasks so they don't become a gigantic hard one. If I were to keep up logging expenses and income from my husband‘s books, tax time would be less onerous. Theoretically, anyway. Perhaps I'll find out this year!

Four. And another related one: small jobs often spawn big ones. For example, call to make an appointment for a routine checkup. Yay, hard task done. But your bloodwork shows high cholesterol or blood sugar issues or some other thing. So now you have to make other appointments, other phone calls, other chores. The "reward" for doing the hard task is more tasks. This too is a fact of life. It often happens with the unpleasant things: financial, health, and yucky chores around the house like cleaning.

So again, perhaps the trick is to learn the difference between the things that really do disappear when you do them regularly as small jobs and the things that spawn new jobs and become adjusted to the fact that this is what life is like.

Five. And hey Presto, there’s my fifth thing. What's hard isn't necessarily the thing itself--it's how you see the thing. Boy that sounds like a platitude my parents would share with me when I was mad or discouraged or disappointed or depressed about something, but unfortunately, sometimes they were right. Sometimes. Not everything important and difficult can be waved away by an attitude adjustment. But if it can, maybe changing perspectives is worth a shot?

Come to think of it, Mrs. Miniver's Christmas chapter (from which I got the epigraph for Making Up the Gods) addresses some of these distinctions. To read Mrs. Miniver for free, click here. 

Periodically (sometimes weekly, often not) I post on Instagram about (some of) the books I read. This month, I posted about the following books:

• Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel
• Lies I Told My Sister, Louise Ells; Like Water for Weary Souls, Liisa Kovala
• Roy Blomstrom's Silences: A Novel of the 1918 Finnish Civil War; The Devil's Violin: Myllysilta's History; The Iterations of Caroline; Start with a Shovel: Poetry, Prose, and Plays; and Cradle of the Deep, by Jeanne LeCaine Agnew (my mother). These are all published by Shuniah House Books, with Roy and I began with help from my sister, Sue Agnew (and copious support from cover designer and author extraordinaire H. Leighton Dickson).
• The Correspondent, Virginia Evans

Bye, 2025. Hi, 2026.