Maybe a polar icecap

Last night when I got home from the train station, I sat here at my desk with tears streaming down my face. I had just spent 6 hours on the train with an ever-increasing sense of dis-ease, a gut feeling that I was traveling in the wrong direction. I wanted to stay where there was Christmas and family and friends and enough people to play board games. I didn't want to come back at all, and when I got to my apartment I felt exhausted and rained-upon and not at all happy to be back.

Today at work I was the only one in the building. The organization whose building we share is closed for the holidays, our secretary is on vacation, and the bosses had a travel recovery day to shake off their jet lag. My entire interaction with other human beings today can be summed up as follows:
Me: I'll have number 35 to go, please.
Lady at Asian take-out place: That'll be three-fifty.

But! Now I am sitting at my desk (again) and tears are streaming down my face (again), but for a different reason now: because now my mouth is full of oyster crackers and Christmas cookies (the American and the German variety) and my hands are full of Christmas cards and my eyes are full of emails and my heart is just plain full. I am overwhelmed again. Somehow these email messages and these taped-up boxes arrived at exactly the time when I needed them the most, which leveraged their emotional impact exponentially, sending me off into this torrent of happy-tears, which are, let me tell you, a welcome change from the other kind. I feel like somebody just sent me Bermuda and the Metrodome. And maybe a polar icecap.

All of you who worked at camp will remember the Love Box skit. It's the one that portrays (through melodrama and bad acting) an invisible box that grows bigger when people around it are nice to each other and share things, and smaller when (you guessed it) people are not so nice to each other and don't share things. I did not manage to send any Christmas cards this year. I tried to write a Christmas letter to send to everyone, but even that is languishing around half-finished, chatting it up with my other unsent documents. I bought things and didn't send them, finally settling for "well, I'll give it to them when I'm home in February." And yet will you check out this Love Box of mine? It is approximately the size of Montana. Call it what you want (I call it grace); it's utterly unfair and I hope all of you got a big huge dose of it this Christmas.