12:49 a.m. Another holiday has come and gone and once again, I am glad.

Because of reasons too impolitic, too ancient, too painful, and too self-centered, I don't have a holiday frock to wear. I don't have a holiday centerpiece or a method for behaving at 2 p.m. when the sun has tilted. Or 11 a.m., for that matter, when the morning still holds crinkly promise.

Whenever they show the weekend wrapups and the holiday footage on the news, they are filming a foreign land and speaking in tongues I don't recognize. In the kingdom of my past, there were no holidays. And no days off, either.

I remember being in trouble because I "did not know how to sit in a chair properly." My feet never stay on the floor and my legs automatically swing over the arms if they're padded and then I slouch down until my backbone is cradled. This used to offend my mother mightily.

The photo I'm posting tonight is from our official "front room," or maybe we can just call it the library because it's full of books and straight-backed chairs, but yes -- it's my front room. It is, of course, the most formal room in the house and of course I never go in there except to dust and to vacuum up the really wonderful webs from the daddy longlegs. Never the spiders themselves -- just their webs.

I suppose I'm still waiting for that formal invitation.

Oh, sometimes I sit there for a minute or two if I'm looking something up in an encyclopedia or watering one of the plants, but in no time at all something will call me into the real rooms of the house -- the phone will ring or the email will beep or the microwave will chime or the tea kettle will toot or the dryer will honk. And all the while I linger in this space I feel -- totally and absolutely -- that I am in trouble.

I don't want to get caught, you know.

It's true, it's so true: I don't have a clue. I don't know how to relax. I can't just sit still ...

One of the discoveries in any relationship is learning to just what degree your new mate is a lazy bum or a workaholic. This is not information freely shared when you are still dating, sometimes because we don't know ourselves well enough and sometimes because at that early place in the relationship, we're too intense on being interesting and pretty and pleasant to be around.

But once there's been some cohabitation, one person will spend more time lounging about than was previously suspected. The other will not know how to have fun. Friday evening will loom bigger and emptier each week and there might be tears; Saturday and all its good daylight hours will be disputed, sometimes for years. Sundays will be spent in gloom or in making up, depending.

And holidays will be the hardest of all -- again, depending. On family sizes and driving times, special foods and unnamed, unrealized, unmet expectations.

I remember, once, a short time (maybe it was an entire week) when I was blissfully happy. I had a temp job stuffing envelopes and I was doing a pretty good job of it. Each day I would come home tired and confident that I had achieved the goals I was hired to meet. I felt deserving of the bed I fell into each night and since I was new and temporary and working in the lunch room on a picnic table, I was unnoticed and thus not ensnared in office politics.

It didn't last, of course. I had to open my big mouth and make friends and eventually ... well, let's just say that I didn't ever sleep as well again. No more dreams of stock rooms full of every shade of Xerox paper then manufactured, and reams of it, too. Plus matching nail-polish jars of Liquid Paper and enough Post-its, pencils, expensive Rollerball pens, staples, and steno and legal pads to inspire the most hopelessly timid of writers to write, write, write!

I still have a few of those jars of Liquid Paper for sentimental reasons, but the delete key has made them obsolete. The delete key hides all our flaws, vacuums up long strings of loose words and spilled guts before they can do any harm. The delete key makes a front room out of my lunch room and no one's the wiser. Little blinking editor beneath my pinky finger, making me look succinct.

So today was a holiday. There was a time when we had Easter hats. They were crisp, veiled, bowed, beribboned and be-flowered with soft petals and erect stamens. Then, they went on top of your head and you couldn't admire them or know if they were wonderful.

I am a writer, but I can't see my own words from your side of the window. I hope they look okay.