Wednesday, November 23, 2016..

 

I don’t really care what brand of person you are…

I would grab you by the hand, wrap you in my blue wool Chief Joseph blanket at two in the morning….to giggle and laugh in the woods..

Boots?  Necessary.  Blanket?  Absolutely.  And that is pretty much it.  

No, I am serious.

The first snowfall in Wisconsin fills me with as much.  Technically it is not the first snowfall but it is the first one of a peculiar type of snowfall in which everything about it is magic. Even at my age I am not sure of its source.  How is possible that an event so ordinary and expected seems to, every year, fill ones soul?

It’s as if Mother Nature herself woke up in the middle of the night and in the kitchen frezy of all kitchen frenzies, threw the spices from her ‘drawer of spices’ all out at once.  You know the drawer, where all the ‘real ones’ are.  Sure, there is the fancy beautiful spice rack on the counter with matching labels and windexed bottles.  But the real spices, the ones the cook actually uses….

Those are in the drawer and in the refrigerator (location dependent upon their culinary potency)..

This snowfall…it’s the one that wakes you up in the middle of the night.  It is almost as if your human body knew of the coming of snow.. wishing to tuck in earlier than normal …

It’s the time of year … just as soon as a person gets accustomed to the seasonal length of night.. then nature – no, I will say it, -when Mother Nature says ‘Enough of darkness. I have a recipe for this.’  Bam.  Out flow those hidden spices….

And that darkness is muted by the afterglow of thousands of snuffed candles, a smoke of the day, the flickering ember of a hearth’s fire…

The first snowfall at two in the morning…  It is going to be a magical winter…

Happy Thanksgiving.

Love,

S.

(just in case… i would give you the blue blanket.. it’s my favorite. the red one as seen in photo has a rather funky smell that i and various cleaning products are arguing with…  I give you the blue one…)

Sidenote… I am struggling with the last part of the other story.. I will keep struggling, but I have to keep writing.  I mean, its almost Advent….

 

 

 

 

 

 

Monday, November 21, 2016.

Dear G~d, there were thousands of them, stuck partner to partner, like bullets holding hands, inside to the outside of my favorite sweatshirt which was not so favorite at the particular moment!  No, not really thousands, but the pickers which I had somehow rolled upon during the night jabbed at my ribs and the body side of my right arm.

Perhaps I had been dreaming of battles or a last gunfight in which I was not the victor;  perhaps I had dreamed of falling among quarried granite, chiseled icy blocks of earth. A dream and these pickers awakened me in the earliest part of the morning.

Just as I had looked back at the miracle of surviving the forest, I now looked back at the field.  I picked those pickers, those smallest of bladed seeds which I admired, fascinated by the persistence of nature in their design.  They not only attached, they pierced.  I sat now on the edge of the field.  I had been so cocky early on, thinking that this part of my journey would be the easier between it and the woods.  My path through the woods had been a series of those close calls in which one cannot truly bring full awareness to until after another part of the journey has been completed. How many times could I have died in the woods?  How many times could I have been hurt, a knee or an ankle…or any number of body parts designed to last a lifetime, but given a slight miscalculation or the slightest curse of bad luck, might snap with a wafer’s delicacy.

In the field I had rejoiced at the absence of blackened pits of gnarled roots.  My skin welcomed the warmth of the sun and the sight of stars.  I could pinpoint my tree in the distance.  I could mock the evil of the darkened trees which had canopied me from storms and winds.  There had been dangers there I had never before encountered.  Trees whose fellow trees’ roots entwined and disguised slippery rocks.  None of it seemed dangerous but that had been my first mistake.

Oh, the welcoming of the feast of the field – the horizon was exposed to me and I to it.