Wishing you seasons full of happiness

Were it not for our persistently cloudy skies, about 3 am this morning we could have enjoyed seeing December's full moon, known as Little Spirit Moon by the Ojibwe and Shedding Horns Moon by the Lakota, according to my copy of the Minnesota Weather Guide calendar. The dogs and I were taking our early morning constitutional about that time. As Minnesota sports fans, we have lots of practice with the phrase “wait ’til next year.” This year we’re in a typical Minnesota pattern of really cold and sunny or warmer and cloudy and often snowy. Yesterday and today are like the latter.

Proof that it’s been cold can be seen on local lakes where portable ice fishing houses are popping up like woodland mushrooms in a wet spring. While doing seasonal errands, we noticed the houses on not just one, several local lakes. I’ve tried ice fishing years ago. I’m too restless to sit still in an ice house or on a deer stand for the amount of time required for success.

Christmas thumbprint cookies: bet you can’t eat just one!

Photo by J. Harrington

Slowly we’re making progress with Christmas shopping. The Better Half [BBH] just finished baking Christmas cookies, including lots of raspberry thumbprints and lemon bars(?) for me. Plus I still have more than a dozen white chocolate, cranberry scoop cookies from Taste of Scandinavia. My holiday wealth isn’t measured in gold!

On our way to the barn yesterday, to visit and feed the Daughter Person’s horse, the BH and I spotted a flock of three to four dozen turkeys in a field along the way. I don’t recall ever seeing that many in one place before. They were foraging during our drizzle/ snow showers and had disappeared by the time we were returning home.

It’s now less than a week until Winter Solstice (locally 3:20 am CST). At the moment we’re in that shoulder season between the start of meteorological winter and the solstice. I’ve already reached a point at which I’m looking forward to Christmas and to days starting to lengthen just before then.

Happiness

Jane Kenyon
1947 – 1995

There's just no accounting for happiness,
or the way it turns up like a prodigal
who comes back to the dust at your feet
having squandered a fortune far away.

And how can you not forgive?
You make a feast in honor of what
was lost, and take from its place the finest
garment, which you saved for an occasion
you could not imagine, and you weep night and day
to know that you were not abandoned,
that happiness saved its most extreme form
for you alone.

No, happiness is the uncle you never
knew about, who flies a single-engine plane
onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes
into town, and inquires at every door
until he finds you asleep midafternoon
as you so often are during the unmerciful
hours of your despair.

It comes to the monk in his cell.
It comes to the woman sweeping the street
with a birch broom, to the child
whose mother has passed out from drink.
It comes to the lover, to the dog chewing
a sock, to the pusher, to the basketmaker,
and to the clerk stacking cans of carrots
in the night.
       It even comes to the boulder
in the perpetual shade of pine barrens,
to rain falling on the open sea,
to the wineglass, weary of holding wine.

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