This is the season. Live it while you can.

Somewhere along the way I've decided to think of this particular holiday season—its every single day—as a gift, which is to say not as a headlong rush.

I will have nothing to do with checklists. I will distribute the gifts as I find them—on Thanksgiving tables, at my father's door, in a bag slipped to a friend at lunch, in packages mailed way too early, but who cares.

I will dance the flawed cha cha once again, for it means time spent with friends. I will head out in the gray slash of wet weather with one of my very oldest friends, searching for barn lights and orchids behind frosted glass. I will wear sequins in a library and stand, grateful for my city, among beloved writers and clients, the daughter of one of my mother's closest friends. I will make my way to the early service at church to sit with my father and to listen to a minister whose words, so often brilliant, embraced, today, dark and light, candles and prayer, the story of a divided then freed Germany. I will set aside my writing "plans" to spend Sunday afternoon among Moravian tiles with the man I love, because

this is the season,

this right now.

I'm not waiting for the calendar to tell me when.

I'm living while I can.