Year of the Rat
Simona Blat I’ve heard it said that the hour of the rat is midnight—the hour that I am still on a Zoom chat with my friend, A, sharing the ways I find myself, and she finds herself, changing.
A is building fires.
I grill everything, she says. Fire is the best flavor.
A asks how I’m sleeping. I tell her it’s been hard. Having lost the structure of time, I wake up midday and fall asleep in front of the TV at three in the morning, the darkest hour of the night. I feel stressed all the time, I tell her.
I wake up with the sun, she says. What’s the point of staying up late. There’s nothing to do.
I repeat her phrase “I wake up with the sun,” imitating her cool. Like a farmer, I say.
Every morning, she goes out on the patio at eight, and a little mouse visits.
A mouse? Isn’t that a problem, I ask.
I’ve named him Caesar, she says. No problem.
This admonition from A, to welcome the uninvited creature into her life, helps me let up my own problem. If anyone will understand, it will be A.
I have a Caesar too, I admit. Palace and all.
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For the past few years, my mother has encouraged the celebration of the Chinese New Year along with our traditional New Year’s Eve party. Every year she decorates our New Year’s Eve dinner spread with a centerpiece that evokes that year’s Zodiac animal. The table, she says, acts as a place of offering, and to it she adds food that the animal would like. In the house, she places depictions of the animal and offers them up as gifts to take home: a small golden horse, a dragon holding a crystal ball, a hand-painted ceramic smiling monkey.
This past year, the year of the rat, she asked that all in attendance wear
