I'm melancholy tonight.

This doesn't happen very often anymore.  I used to be a very sad person--I was clinically depressed, but I also just had sort of a melancholy temperment.  That all came out in the wash.  Pretty much no one would call me a melancholy person now; I think that I tend to be perceived more as sort of...deeply cheerful and kind of silly. 

Now and again though, I have a night when I sort of get to thinking on old things. When it seems very much as if my dead are close.  My uncle, Ted, A.  A, of course, is not dead, but is just as gone.  And before is hard not to think about--before the war, before A went crazy, before, before, before.  The thing is, we all have our befores, even if the thing that divides present from past is something much more ordinary than a friend dead, a friend lost.

When I was younger, I imagined a sort of stranger, darker, edgier adulthood for myself.  But now I'm a lawyer, and I bake and knit and can jelly with my husband, and I'm a Sunday-School teacher.  And I'm almost never sad these days.

It's a good night for movies, and red wine, and the scarf I'm knitting for my husband.  It's my first time with cables, and so far it looks good.  We're having an all home-made Christmas, and this is what I'm making.  I wonder what he is...