An Cultural Experience
Dec. 25th, 2012 02:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kaberettI made Marillen- and Zwetschgenknoedel over the weekend; this evening, I roped the woozl in to help me make my first Nusspotitze. We're still working our way through the last bottle of Inlaenderrum my Grossmutti brought back from Austria.
My mother will get to eat fresh Potitz for breakfast on Christmas day, and I am just a little weepy about how much that's going to mean to her.
The woozl, meanwhile, is being very good-natured about the extent to which in-group conversations with my mother tend to involve three or four different languages; references to Visigoths and caterpillars getting mixed up with one another; especial family in-jokes and word-plays; and the like.
I... do like it when friends get to meet my family: I like people having the opportunity to see where I came from, in several senses, because - I am the ghost of my own past lives (thank you, CN Lester), and some days that history weighs heavy on my shoulders, and some days I feel like it's all that's holding me up.
It's been a hard year and a long year and a year I'm emerging from in a far better state than the one I entered it in; I've loved fiercely and gently, I've laughed, I've cooked and I've fed people, I've curled up with my books and I've sung my heart out. I'm a little older and a whole lot wiser and - tonight, right now, I can recast hollowness as dormancy.
I didn't start this post meaning to talk about depression, but apparently I want to, and I think what I want to say is something a little like this: the days are short and the nights are long and it huddles close for warmth, but: love lives again, that with the dead has been: love will come again like wheat that springeth green.
The solstice has passed, and so too will this: and in its wake I will remain myself, and I will become someone wholly new.
My mother will get to eat fresh Potitz for breakfast on Christmas day, and I am just a little weepy about how much that's going to mean to her.
The woozl, meanwhile, is being very good-natured about the extent to which in-group conversations with my mother tend to involve three or four different languages; references to Visigoths and caterpillars getting mixed up with one another; especial family in-jokes and word-plays; and the like.
I... do like it when friends get to meet my family: I like people having the opportunity to see where I came from, in several senses, because - I am the ghost of my own past lives (thank you, CN Lester), and some days that history weighs heavy on my shoulders, and some days I feel like it's all that's holding me up.
It's been a hard year and a long year and a year I'm emerging from in a far better state than the one I entered it in; I've loved fiercely and gently, I've laughed, I've cooked and I've fed people, I've curled up with my books and I've sung my heart out. I'm a little older and a whole lot wiser and - tonight, right now, I can recast hollowness as dormancy.
I didn't start this post meaning to talk about depression, but apparently I want to, and I think what I want to say is something a little like this: the days are short and the nights are long and it huddles close for warmth, but: love lives again, that with the dead has been: love will come again like wheat that springeth green.
The solstice has passed, and so too will this: and in its wake I will remain myself, and I will become someone wholly new.