Hi - I’m Sasha and I write Short Stories from an Anxious Traveler from my RV. You can find me in your inbox every Monday. If you’d like to check out another piece I’ve written, you can see how my perspective of water has changed as I travel.
Happy Winter Solstice! Today is the shortest day of the year where I am, up here in Tennesee. For others around the world, it’s the shortest night.
On the briefest day of the year, I am celebrating the fact that we’ve very nearly made it through 2020. So very close.
I’m sitting inside of my motorhome on our bed, surrounded by handmade quilts whose colors clash violently with one another. I want to write, but instead, an empty Google Doc is open on my laptop while I’m watching the lace-like grass dance: the cool air brushing their top fringes. The fragrance of cinnamon bubbles from the stove: the perfume of the season.
If I squint, I can pretend it’s summer. That someone will be by to mow the grass. That the breeze is, in fact, warm. That if I were to step outside on the rubber-coated steps of the RV, I’d have to take off my wool sweater.
But the trees lining the slow-growing grass belie that dream. The aspen and birch are barren, and the sole spindly pine in the background is the only tree with green.
I have found myself doing this a lot this year. Squinting to see something different. Wishing for a different time. Like sitting outside with friends on the longest day of the year, lying on towels in the grass of backyards. Having a sushi dinner in a buzzing restaurant on a windy January evening. Melting at my parent’s house, with the yellowed thermostat turned up to 73. drinking whiskey with my dad, and eating chips while sitting on the couch next to my mom.
Maskless. Flying to my sister’s house so we could walk around New York together, eating bagels and stepping into speakeasies. The things I wish for. The things that I thought 2020 would bring. And so much more. All gone.
I long for a time that I took for granted. Am I taking today for granted? What if tomorrow, I look back and think, you should have taken a walk in that innocuous-looking muddy grass beneath the leaf-less tree. Or maybe I’ll think, you should have eaten that handmade marshmallow you made but tossed away. But sitting next to my nebulizer, I recognize the reality of 2020. I can take a walk, but I can not go to sushi, visit my parents, or traverse Brooklyn streets with my sister.
In 2018, when I moved all my belongings into a motorhome, it was largely because tomorrow is not promised. 2020 has given me even more awareness of that.
On the 24th, I’ll be creating what I do every year: a table full of tapas. I’ll share them with my travel and life partner, and maybe the dog will get a snack or two. After her battle with a raccoon, maybe she deserves it.
But in 2021? On this day next year, I hope I can pour red wine into glasses of not just one or two, but into the glasses of four or six or twenty friends and family. We can celebrate the longest night together.
For now, I’m watching the winter grass as the sun sets earlier than it will all year. Tomorrow, the day will be three seconds longer and I will face it in the same way I have all year. With hopes. Expectations. A walk along the river.
Cheers to you and yours this holiday season.
Thanks for traveling with me,
Sasha
Down the rabbit hole:
Saturnalia was a lively Roman festival that fell around the time of the Solstice. Celebrations lasted anywhere from 3 to 7 days. It was a holly, jolly time with feasts, gift-giving, the donning of casual clothing instead of the traditional togas, and game playing. It sounds a lot like how many of us celebrate Christmas today!
Thank you
A special thanks to fellow writers Jake Singer, Rishi Dhanaraj, Nichanan Kesonpat, and Meeta Sharma, who helped me formulate my thoughts and offered incredibly insightful edits to this piece.