Category: Morning Meander

I can feel her snuggling in smugly to December.

She’s a “one room cabin” — plus bathroom, plus the crawl space upstairs which we use as two bedrooms, plus the dark addition which we use as entry and storage and pantry and workshop, plus the light addition (doesn’t have all its walls) which we use for construction materials.

She’s a one room cabin whose welcoming reach exceeds her grasp.

She’s over the moon to know there will be celebrations here soon, more celebrations, more confluences of quests and calendars.

She’s warm, she’s bright. My house is ready for the holidays.

The years have blurred a little.
I measure time by the cycles, where are we on this turning?
but how many of them have gone ’round… that is not so clear.

It’s gorgeous snow, though,
so that’s all to the good.

Snow makes a muffling stillness, calling me into the darkest days with
Peace,
Sleep,
Rest herein.
Lookst, she says, I have made thee a blanket.

To gather the clan
to give thanks,
to howl
and love.

To fast,
to feast,
to speculate
and to tell stories from the field about our speculations.

A weekend passed in good company
with only one incident of vehicle vs snow
and one clear time of “we will all go to our separate laptops to recover”
and a larder full of leftovers
and now quiet.

Quiet, aye, and warmer and fuller with more beautiful pages in my book of days.

It takes absolutely no extra effort to type “How can I help?” in a subject line.

It could be the difference between crushing anxiety and a lifeline to hope.

Her hard day of work complete, she looks for friends with whom to share wine and words and feet-up.

My day of work not yet begun, across the globe, I take my coffee to her back yard,

and we chat about things that do not matter, for it is the chatting which matters, the presence.

The love.
That is the only thing.

across the moon.
I rose in dark to see it,
but though I fancy myself a woman of science who loves the mathematical dance, the clockwork, the beauty of the shadow moving on its appointed rounds…

Still I found myself cheering for the moon
to emerge, whole and stronger,
clean and shining,
from the dark.

And weeping, of course.

I spoke with an Element this morning,
not one of the hundred eighteen,
one of the five-or-so.

I mentioned that I was mortal and it was not and it asked, “Is that why you love me?”
On reflection, it is.

“You are the fire that my grandmother knew, and her mother, and her mother…”

You do not list the fathers, the fire said.

So I thought about them. A sea captain, a handful of soldier/farmers, a banker, a doctor, and — let’s be absolutely clear — probably a hundred branching generations of farmers, that’s how the world has stayed fed.

The fire was right. I don’t often think of them, just my Dad. It’s the grandmothers whose hands I see when I am working.

I just heard that one for the first time.

Well, then.
An afternoon to prepare enough ingredients for six stews, stowed in the freezer.
A day for clothes to dry on the line.
A week to enjoy the farm share and the bread share. Perhaps this winter I’ll take on a baking day.

That takes a day. Mid morning to make the sponge, noontime to complete it, early afternoon punch it down, mid afternoon shape it, late afternoon bake it, just before five, take a third of it to The Diagonal Family and a third of it to The Angel Next Door. At suppertime, eat it. Yes. I will add a baking day to my attention economy and eschew probably five hundred advertisements in that time.

Market that, manipulative strangers.

And in between these acts of love? While the sponge rises? Knit a sweater, one loving row at a time. That will take a month or two or three.

I choose to spend my attention on these acts of love.

Today I am grateful for the words
Which flow from pen and keyboard
And often from voice box, but not so very many of them are connected to one another and that’s all right

Today I am grateful for the words which flow so quickly that I do not need to think and what is important is reading them afterward to see the message from the hinterlands of my brain or even from someone else’s story.

Today I am grateful for the words whereby I learn the stories and tell the stories and share the stories and wait for them to come back around, changed yet constant.

Today I am grateful for the words.

I apologized for the sound of thunder and the fire gently crackling and offered to turn it off — canned noises which I had turned on for comfort.

The friends gathered electronically into my one-room cabin from across the globe said, “No! Please leave it on! We like it.”

We like feeling cozy by the fireside and we like knowing the rumbly storm is out there. It’s the perfect condition for cuddling up with a story,

even the blank page kind.

I cannot remember seeing the moon so very fine and slender a sickle, though I must have done.

It is dark later and later, though, and there is always tomorrow. Let us hope the clouds stay away.

Not peacefully still, but waiting
to see
what will be made out of last night’s
dreams and words and breaths and workings and promises and realizations.