Just Joy | unwinding

• I'm tucking Mads into bed and singing him "Frosty the Snowman" and "Rudolph" at his request. I keep flubbing and forgetting lyrics, and he indulges me and forgives me with giggles.
• Wolfman stops the car at the end of our drive way so I can hop out and tend to our overflowing mail box. I have a suspicion as to what has so filled the box and skip back across the street. Wolfman's yule gift has arrived, one he did not ask for, but which I am so excited to give him.
• Sitting in the Tribeca vignette with my work family, discussing the finer points of The Jerry Springer Show. Joe explains the currency of "Jerry beads" and Dennis asks, "Well, are they at least Jelly Bellys?" There is a long pause while the image of women flashing cameras for jelly beans flashes through my mind, and then I laugh until I'm crying, a long, intense belly laugh that feels like medicine.
• I happen to sit down in the break room to eat lunch just as Ron is finishing his, and he holds out a plastic sandwich baggie with two pieces of his wife's chocolate fudge to share with me.
• I am on my break at work, have just walked twenty minutes to buy a cold Italian sub on white  bread and am eating it in my car, staring at the sky and skeleton trees through the windshield, listening to Ulaan Passerine's "Unwinding," lettuce falling onto the deli paper unfolded in my lap.
• The moon is already up, though the sun has not set yet, not quite. The ground is white with yesterday's snow, and I stand against the brick wall of the house watching my boy, wearing his Batman mask and his winter coat underneath his cape, running from fence to fence in the yard, flourishing his cape, crunching the layers of hard snow and ice under furious feet.

Ulaan Passerine, The Great Unwinding