Happiness takes a different shape

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Happiness as you age takes on a different shape.

Not so much setting out cookies for Santa

As cleaning up the crumbs afterward, smiling,

Satisfaction with the illusion.

Not so much stumbling down Christmas steps

To tear bright Santa-laden paper

But the settling into a rocker, after

Surveying a paper-strewn living room

In the glow of tree lights you assembled

December 26 before your children came home

When you finally had an evening

Without work.

The joy of rest.

The joy of action.

The joy of climbing a hill

With a three-year-old towing his sled

The pushing of the happy ones, screaming

Bigger even than the thrill of descent

Which is still a joy.

You want to ride the toboggan when you’re eighty.

When Alec has to protect your bones from the

slide downhill.

You want to go down, laughing.

**

I can’t imagine my own grandma

Playing with me in the snow.

She was always working.

There were evenings when we all sat

And played cards,

Afternoons when my brother and I

Sat, doing homework for Bible School

When she and Grandpa John sat

at the kitchen table with us,

and a day we wrote our own version of

the delightful ironic children’s book

Brave Daniel.

Grandpa caught the spirit of irony

And wrote, “I killed a fly.”

Grandma, the literalist, said, “I killed a snake with a spade.”

That’s all I remember from the afternoon:

The contrast of the two.

But how I loved them both

Anyway.

But I remember my grandma

As sweetness

And cookies

And an apron.

And the funniest story she had to tell

On herself was showing up at church

To be organist, slipping off her coat

And finding

her apron still around her waist.

She made the best cookies in the world

as did her daughter

my mother who inherited each recipe.

But my grandma never played.

I am working in the kitchen and

Three-year-old Alec comes to me,

“Nannie, will you play with me?”

And oh, I set everything aside.

Everything. We can microwave dinner

Or have Kraft macaroni and cheese from a box,

But oh, I will not say

“No, I cannot play with you because I’m busy.”

Because years are too fleeting and you’re already growing

So tall,

and I screwed up

Enough with your parents’ generation,

I will give anything and all I can to you,

Little one.

Not stuff, not things—I don’t have enough money

But I will play with you

Until my knees give out.