september song.

Tomorrow is the first of September. It already feels cool in the morning here in New Orleans and I am beginning to dream about creating a 10 layer pumpkin sour cream cake. I've only listened to the Vince Guaraldi Trio once so far this year....it's amazing what Christmas music and a half a xanax under the tongue will do for the nerves.
Three women in my nuclear family have birthdays in September, myself included.  Last year Owl and I, after having just met, surprised my mother and drove up to Arkansas for her birthday.  My parents were throwing an engagement party for one of my sister's friends.  It was a beautiful night despite the hangover-inducing concoctions my father insisted on pouring down our throats after the margarita mix ran out.  You'd be surprised how easily Mountain Dew, red wine, and tequila go down when they all come out of a slushie machine together.  This year, my mom's birthday falls on the weekend that Ole Miss plays at Tulane and hopefully both she and my father will be here in New Orleans.  September will be a busy month - it always ends up that way.  After my parents visit, we'll be heading to Ohio to witness the marriage of one of the most wonderful creatures ever. I am very excited about this, I think we will dance and be very merry.  Then, it looks like Chicago is in the cards.....and before you know it, it's October - if all goes according to plan, I should have my Christmas cards in the mail by this time.

This year will be hard. 

Different.
But still Christmas.

My mom puts a tree up in every room of her house.
Every Christmas Eve of my mother's life she ate fried quail with her parents and her parents' best friends, Coachie & Miss Dot.  Every Christmas Eve of my life, I've eaten fried quail at my grandparents' house.  Things were always a little tight but the awkward confinement always kind of made sense, like a badly wrapped package - sweet, even in it's inelegance, maybe even because of it.  Then, in 2000, we lost my Daddy Doc to cancer.  Miss Dot followed him in 2003.  Things began to change a bit but for the most part, the basic structure remained: Cocktails would be had around 6 or 7 whilst my grandmother finished up the dinner preparations.  During this time bells could be heard from the street.  Everyone knew it was Santa. Some of the kids cried, some screamed with delight.  Although I'm almost certain there was a shift around 1995 when Santa got a lot younger, for as long as I can really remember it was my grandmother's neighbor.  He owns the funeral home up the street from her house and has a lazy eye.  Every one of us, including my grandmother, sat in this man's lap every Christmas Eve to let him know what he needed to bring us later that night.  Before he left, he would give us an apple or an orange or something.  Then, we would stuff our faces with quail.....and green beans, and yeast rolls, and sweet potato casserole, and salad with homemade blue cheese - you understand.
After dinner everyone would begin to build their mountainous territories of ribbons and boxes and the like and we would exchange presents between the non-nuclear family members.....It was always the most beautiful kind of exhaustion.  After filling trash bags with ravaged wrapping paper, the caravan now loaded down with presents would bundle up to go to their respective homes and chimneys. My mom would usually wear her fox fur coat.  When I was young and got scared or nervous I would crawl into the closet that housed this coat and inhale the soothing pheromone deeply as someone would a brown paper bag.  It smells like Christmas.   Although our family stopped going to Christmas Mass a while ago, we still dressed as though we didn't.
Some years my siblings and I forgot to leave santa egg nog and cookies.  Even when I was in college  - the absence of treats, my mother told me, was just unacceptable.  Nearly unforgivable, as far as she was concerned. I never forget now, it's just ungrateful you understand.
My big sister got married in 2005 and that was the first year the whole family didn't wake up together on Christmas morning.  She took it hardest of all.  Her poor husband was dragged out of bed that first year to arrive as early as possible so she wouldn't miss out on one moment of the only Christmas she had ever known.  Since marrying, she has added two more to our Christmas equation and it's not as important for them to arrive as early as it used to be.  Nana's house was bursting at the seams on Christmas Eve.  Because of this, mom bought a little fryer at the beginning of this year to start practicing the Christmas quail. I wish Owl could've been a part of that mayhem.
Unfortunately, we saw Santa sooner than we wanted to this year.  He laid my grandmother to rest in July.  Sometimes I think that maybe it was my grandmother's way of never giving up her exquisitely cramped Christmas tradition.  We all knew that it would, more than likely (if anyone but Nana had a say) be the last Christmas Eve at her house.  None of us imagined it would be the last Christmas Eve that we would have her at all.  My little sister was the closest out of all the grandchildren to my Nana.  She spent more time with my grandmother than any of us.  She took it the hardest.
On the morning of my grandmother's funeral my little sister disappeared for a bit.  She returned to a distracted room of of soggy-eyed bloody mary drinkers.  I grabbed her to inquire about her absence....she had gone to my grandmother's house and picked flowers.  She absconded just by herself.
Nana always had a beautiful garden.  I remember thinking it was like a jungle when I was little and we were like little monkeys....completely inundated with colors and smells.  Things to eat and pick, to feel and prick - mulberrys and mint, roses and honeysuckle.

Whitney said she wanted Nana to feel at home.  That's when I broke down.

Everyone copes in their own way.  My mom is in the best shape of her life.  I stumbled upon a blog post of my Uncles' a few weeks ago that makes me feel like he's taking it pretty well.  My mom's other brother is my godfather and recently I've gotten to enjoy the company of he and my godmother more than I have in years. I think that in a really weird way, the ever-growing non-nuclear families will be closer than they ever had, even in my grandmother's house on Christmas Eve.

I'm glad that we all have a little bit of time to brace ourselves before the holidays but, like I said, tomorrow is the first day of September.  It's going to be hard.