The Christmas decorations will start to come down after this weekend, The Feast of the Epiphany is Sunday, January 7. I intend to respond to the impending winter blues and January blahs by visiting a couple of fly fishing shops just because I can. I may or may not buy anything but I do need to get out and peek at what’s on the counters and shelves and in the bins. Aside from everything else, it helps keep my mind off the approaching need to file taxes. Today’s major accomplishment is likely to be that the quarterly estimated tax payments got mailed. Just in time for the Republicans to waste them by forcing a government shut down.
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| December’s bulbs will soon yield January flowers
Photo by J. Harrington
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In a week or two I’m hoping to see flowers bloom from the winter bulb garden that arrived as a Christmas present last year. The picture above is from last year but not last Christmas’s present. This year’s growth, from last Christmas’ present, is about the same as that in the picture. If, like me, winter’s cloudy, cold, dreary weather gets to you, I highly recommend trying an indoor bulb garden as an antidote. Watching plants grow and bloom is a very different experience than weekly watering a “house plant.” For the moment, we’re enjoying the white blooms of an amaryllis that will help us celebrate through Epiphany weekend. There’s also a handful of bulbs from prior years that failed to grow this year. I think we may have failed to get them their cold, dormant period by keeping them in the house all year. We’ll see what the Better Half has to say about that.
The Laughing Child
When she looked down from the kitchen window
into the back yard and the brown wicker
baby carriage in which she had tucked me
three months old to lie out in the fresh air
of my first January the carriage
was shaking she said and went on shaking
and she saw I was lying there laughing
she told me about it later it was
something that reassured her in a life
in which she had lost everyone she loved
before I was born and she had just begun
to believe that she might be able to
keep me as I lay there in the winter
laughing it was what she was thinking of
later when she told me that I had been
a happy child and she must have kept that
through the gray cloud of all her days and now
out of the horn of dreams of my own life
I wake again into the laughing child
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Please be kind to each other while you can.
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