Remodeling Santa's runway

With today's melting, we can almost see the driveway's dirt surface. The road, not so much. It's ice covered. At least for now. There have been and will be some other changes that may complicate Christmas this year even more than normal. I hope Santa's GPS includes latitude, longitude and altitude. This year our roof is about four feet higher than it was last year, and the TV antenna isn't exactly where it was either. Even if Santa doesn't have GPS (or does he?), Rudolph's nose should help Santa navigate these changes. For what it's worth, avoiding home remodeling in December is highly to be recommended. Installation of new windows requires moving everything away from the walls. Our heavy drapes, which help keep out the cold, are down and being cleaned, since they needed to be moved out of the way anyhow. All of this is creating human navigational challenges with the furniture already having been rearranged so we could fit a tree in the living room.

living room Christmas tree

Photo by J. Harrington

Everything hanging on the walls will be taken down while the siding is being installed. I don't know if you've ever been in the kitchen of an old Norwegian farmer who hoarded newspapers and things. You walk through the aisles to get to the kitchen table. That's what I fear we're going to be coping with just before and after Christmas. The best solution I've come up with so far is to modify and adopt the perspective of small plane pilots. Any landing remodeling project you can walk away from is a good one. Now that I think about it, the landing part will apply to Santa time and again one magical evening soon. We'll have the cookies out in hopes that the changes don't scare or confuse him away.

Toward the Winter Solstice

Timothy Steele, 1948 

Although the roof is just a story high,
It dizzies me a little to look down.
I lariat-twirl the cord of Christmas lights
And cast it to the weeping birch’s crown;
A dowel into which I’ve screwed a hook
Enables me to reach, lift, drape, and twine
The cord among the boughs so that the bulbs
Will accent the tree’s elegant design.

Friends, passing home from work or shopping, pause
And call up commendations or critiques.
I make adjustments. Though a potpourri
Of Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, Jews, and Sikhs,
We all are conscious of the time of year;
We all enjoy its colorful displays
And keep some festival that mitigates
The dwindling warmth and compass of the days.

Some say that L.A. doesn’t suit the Yule,
But UPS vans now like magi make
Their present-laden rounds, while fallen leaves
Are gaily resurrected in their wake;   
The desert lifts a full moon from the east
And issues a dry Santa Ana breeze,
And valets at chic restaurants will soon
Be tending flocks of cars and SUVs.

And as the neighborhoods sink into dusk
The fan palms scattered all across town stand
More calmly prominent, and this place seems
A vast oasis in the Holy Land.
This house might be a caravansary,
The tree a kind of cordial fountainhead
Of welcome, looped and decked with necklaces
And ceintures of green, yellow, blue, and red.

Some wonder if the star of Bethlehem
Occurred when Jupiter and Saturn crossed;
It’s comforting to look up from this roof
And feel that, while all changes, nothing’s lost,
To recollect that in antiquity
The winter solstice fell in Capricorn
And that, in the Orion Nebula,
From swirling gas, new stars are being born.

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"Being There" for Christmas

the mystery of Winter fog

Photo by J. Harrington

The temperatures above freezing are a treat. The cloudy, overcast skies, not so much. Next week I'm planning on some trips to spots along the St. Croix River to take pictures and see if there's open water. Others have already set a nice pattern for me to follow. Some very nice photos of the Minnesota River's ice formations can be found here. Then there's Greg Seitz' recent piece about the Wonder of Water in Winter. For reasons I can't quite pin down, his photos make me think of what I felt like when I was in grammar school, just starting to explore the woods and waters around my home. It was a feeling of fun and excitement that I now recall with very fond memories. One of my all time favorite writers, Gene Hill, has captured a "grown up" version of those feelings in the passage below:

"But the truth, to my way of seeing it, is that those who love the bits and pieces of being there—the sweetness of a singing lark, the way one whitetail can suddenly fill up a clearing, the fearsomeness of a sudden storm, and the almost unbelievable sense of relief when we’ve gotten out of a very sticky situation—have to have a sense of the magic of it all, a belief in the intangible and unknown, and no small degree of unquestionable wonder."

a stream to explore

Photo by J. Harrington

The kind of "Being There" that Hill writes about doesn't fit neatly under a tree at Christmas, all wrapped in paper and ribbons. If it did, I would wish for nothing more, or less, than a multitude of Being Theres for those of us who love the outdoors and those who share that love with us. Those shared feelings beat socks, ties and slippers all out and are only enhanced by being accompanied by a puppy, dog, friends and family.

Christmas Night

By Conrad Hilberry 

Let midnight gather up the wind   

and the cry of tires on bitter snow.   

Let midnight call the cold dogs home,   

sleet in their fur—last one can blow   

the streetlights out.   If children sleep   

after the day’s unfoldings, the wheel   

of gifts and griefs, may their breathing   

ease the strange hollowness we feel.   

Let midnight draw whoever’s left   

to the grate where a burnt-out log unrolls   

low mutterings of smoke until   

a small fire wakes in its crib of coals.

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Thanks for visiting. Come again when you can.
Please be kind to each other while you can.