Photo: Joanna Kosinska
Solar years and calendar years and lunar years aligning!
I’ve had this going around in my head to the tune or Mairzy Doats. I don’t remember where I first heard that song, but I remember the delight of slurring the words so they came out, “little lamsey-divey.”
“What the heck is a lamsey-divey?”
(lam, on the: 19th ce. American slang; to flee with haste, esp. from law enforcement;
dive, see dive bar: 19th ce. American slang; drinking den, disreputable place of resort)
“I don’t know, something to do with Prohibition! It’s just what you’re supposed to say!”
I think about all the ways and words that have come down over the centuries, stories whether written, oral, or acted out. My great-grandmother would throw a pinch of salt over her left shoulder to “keep the devil off your back,” whenever it was spilled, and took a shot of brandy for a cold. I laugh, but whenever salt spills, I still throw a pinch back. We do all sorts of weird things, and mishear, and misremember, and sometimes just make changes outright, because it suits us better.
We bring a tree into the house, or light candles, visit holy sites, eat special food, and we don’t always know why. Because it’s Christmas. Because it’s New Year. Because it’s how we bring our world back into alignment, along with the calendar.
I visited my mom at Christmas and we went through old pictures, naming our loved ones, naming our dead. I know the faces and names of people who were gone long before I arrived. After looking at all the old photos, my mother recollecting both her own memories, or her own time sitting with old photos, naming loved and lost, and me guessing and confirming that I remembered everything correctly, my mother gave me a little pin that had once belonged to her grandmother. I’d seen the pin often, even put it on as a kid, but never knew it was worn by the same woman of the stories.
The stories say, we came from Ireland, we came from Canada, we came from Japan. The grown-ups would curse in French, but the kids still knew what they were saying anyway. A girl called Anna died too young. A boy called James got the Spanish flu. A young woman with a new baby boarded a ship in Japan. But those pictures are filled with laughter, with smiles not trained for photographs, with joy and playfulness. I can’t help but laugh at some of them, and can almost hear their laughter back to me, down across the many years.
It’s a story of hard times, and it’s a story of good times. Some of the details might have faded in the telling, yet our stories give us roots, the ones from our families, the ones we tell ourselves, the ones we’ve read and loved, and with them, we can trace a path and see a way forward.
Never one for springtime cleaning, I recently learned from my mother that the Japanese tradition is to give the house a thorough scrub and airing at midwinter.
Oh, so that’s why I do it now…
Mairzy Doats, it turns out, is not even a very old nursery rhyme, as I’d always believed, but was written in 1943 (ancient history to me as a little child, anyway – it may as well have been medieval!). You can listen to it here. Some scholars suggest inspiration may have come down from a 15th century joke, wherein the English words, when run together, sound like Latin.
Exciting news coming soon, and Epiphany of a Swan Wife wraps up this week!
Happy cleaning, happy calendaring, happy new year!
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