Winter

Six weeks of not much to say. First day of winter last week but already the dusk lingers longer into the short afternoon, sun already embarking out of South for North on the long journey which will carry it all the way through June.

Much needed rain, daffodils showing green through the too-warm earth, but the season hasn’t arrived yet. There’s a cold bite coming. It never misses, if it only reigns for a day.

Another Christmas passed. Stockings hung again from the old mantle riddled with traces of tacks, nails and staples which suspended the dreams of generations of children grown old, grey forgotten. In places the mantle is now a narrow long slit, so many Christmas stockings over the years.

The day is always special, a measure of another year, a hallmark for the next. The older I get the less there is about Christmas that matters than the sounds and laughter of family and friends. If there were no such holiday we’d surely invent it, an excuse to infuse light and warmth into gray days , cool nights

There comes a time each winter when the winds howl out of the north, across the ridges and up the hollers herald the cold. We haven’t seen it yet, but it’s coming, sure as the spring to follow.