Grandfather Cub
How a chance crossing of paths out on the red dirt gave us a new outlook and a mantra for 2024.
I slipped into it like a well-worn glove. Or a swathe of wet clay. Or a glossy floor of tail-bone shattering tiles on a rainy day. Whatever metaphor we go with here, it’s a slippery one. I’m tempted by the cliche of “slope”, but I want you to catch the image of a steep embankment slick with ankle deep mud, water still running over the surface in hurrying rivulets, a few tufts of hardy grass but not enough to prevent the inevitable careen towards the bottom.
“The bottom of what?” you ask. I slipped back into the habit of wanting.
It was always going to be treacherous country: coming back from nine weeks of living in little more than a tent straight into December, the king daddy month of wanting. I mean, say what your want about Christmas. I too champion the holiday of giving and peace and homemade biscuits. My kids can finish the lines at the end of the movie when the Grinch makes a toast to “kindness and love, the things we need most.” They, Iike the rest of us, are already proficient at paying the right lip service then expecting a payout come the 25th.
With me sliding uncontrollably down the mountainside of wishes and wants and grandparents literally piling on under the tree I found myself fantasising that the Grinch would visit our house on Christmas Eve so we could all wake up to hold hands and sing in the first light about how we don’t need more stuff. *sigh* If only.
This story relies almost exclusively on contrast though and in all my slipping and sliding I’ve slipped right past the providing some context on the space I was in before the festive season in suburbia swept me down the gully.
We had been on an extended camping trip. That feels like a pithy description because it turned into something much more profound, but it’s also accurate.
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