Skywatch Friday: Night Watch, Advent

Skywatch Friday

Wordless Wednesday: Celebrate

Life is good--and so much better than the alternative, as a good friend is fond of saying!

Wordless Wednesday

My World Tuesday: Iced

When I was young, my parents had my sister and me out on our boat in Long Island Sound every weekend, or so it seemed. We grew up with a healthy respect for the water. It seemed dad and mom had us wearing our gigantic, puffy, kapok-filled life jackets longer than any other kids around. We took swimming lessons for years--way longer than was necessary, or so my parents knew we thought because we said so. Being in and around water in all kinds of weather taught us the power of nature. (Water taught us that indifference can be a form of cruelty.) So many memories of growing up around water came to mind when I came across the leaf in the top photo when I was out for a walk on Saturday. It seemed caught between rising to the surface to catch a breeze back onto dry land and never again moving. The whole business of being a leaf in the water had been arrested by the water itself. There was the leaf, powerless, and the water, powerful. I caught my breath and held it for as long as I stood there. I have been that leaf.

My World Tuesday

Today's Flowers: Do Not Water

This is one of the three wreaths the kids in my origami club created the flowers for this Christmas. This is a simple origami figure, but it confounded some of the children, nonetheless. They worked hard, though. And they got their, helping each other and occasionally crumpling a flower and tossing it aside. This group of eight or so sixth graders includes children with a wide range of abilities and attention spans. Helping them sort the flowers for the wreaths, I was struck by how their personalities came through their work. They we had a big pile of flowers to work with, each child emerged from the mass, individual and beautiful (and, in some cases, in need of a little repair). Merry Christmas.

Today's Flowers

One Single Impression: Cobwebs

"There and there.
Be careful.
Cobwebs."

That is the conversation
In the woods
When it is warm.

We are not worried
About the spiders

But the art
The symmetry
The balance
The beauty of the
Completeness
Of the web

And the thin lines
That keep this delicate
Universe
Intact.

It is not ours to take.

Humbly,
We bow our heads
And make our way
Around
The webs.

The completeness
Of the thing

Is part of our day.

We want it.

One Single Impression

Blog Your Blessings: Snow Day

King Moonraiser is explaining that there is no place for Rudolph and his friends on the Island of Misfit Toys, that they really must return to the land of the living and make a go of it, and my daughter says, "Can you leave this on? I like it in the background."

Bedtime on a snow day a little more than two weeks before Christmas, and the miracle and the magic of the run up to that holy day are tucked in with the sleepy child, the better to dream and feel the peace of the routine of Christmas.

Our snow day gave us the chance to enjoy all of that. Together, Dell and I watched Miracle on 34th Street, The Grinch, and Rudolph and listened to three or four CDs' worth of music. And none of this junked-up contemporary hooey for us. We invoke the dead at Christmas: Burl Ives. Bing. Mitch Miller. There is only one way for the "Little Drummer Boy" to sound (because it is a song about humility, not about Alicia Keyes....). No rock stars here. (OK. Cheryl Crowe, but we don't know who let her in....)

The movies played and we put out the decorations we enjoy the most, wrapped the rest back up for another time, assembled our tried and true white vinyl tree that is the last word in tacky but suits us just fine, and filled out Christmas cards for the people we love. Truthfully, we don't love the same people, so she picked up where I left off, though we didn't exactly plan it. Just that symbiotic mother-daughter thing, maybe.

She wrapped presents for her friends, we went for a long tramp in the snowy woods. She discovered that even large, wild animals pee near trees. This seems to be the walk we take after every first snow, though the discovery of the wild yellow snow was a new thing.

She went out to play with a friend, she held the neighbors' new baby, she came back and made presents for the child and the older sister, who is her friend. We ate dinner and the apple pie I made for her because the stuff was there and she was busy playing.

That was the day that fed the dreams of good sleep. Thank you, Mother Nature.

Blog Your Blessings

Skywatch Friday: We Do Tacky Real Good

Skywatch Friday

Wordless Wednesday: Guardian Angel from 'The Book of Deer'

Wordless Wednesday

My World Tuesday: Bookish People Looking after Their Own

A friend thinks it's strange that I want to live in Waterbury, where I spend most of my life anyway. People are violent--they beat each other for food stamps, babies roll out 3rd-floor windows--and there is a madness about the place we can attribute only to the water. There are brown fields everywhere. This is a wasteland.

I like to think of the place as idiosyncratic. It is to rich in too many ways to simply be mad. I mean, consider the quirky Christmas decorations above. Idiosyncratic, right?

Richness. Look below: In the center display window of a bookshop on Grand Street is a request for food for people who don't have enough this time of year. Here we go putting the other guy first without the slightest danger of personal gain. Yes, I like it here, where people like the woman below are not going to the aiport or train station with their luggage but to the next safe place with everything they own in tow. The people at the bookstore noticed that, obviously. And they're appealing to the lawers, civil servants, and others who frequent their coffee shop to think about it, too. Curse the darkness? Not me, and not when the light is so good.

My World Tuesday