Thaw

In the morning sun
Crystal daggers melt away.
Blue beyond beckons.











(Did you know that if you mouse over the picture and click, it will enlarge? Pretty cool.)

Snow

This is the scene we awoke to yesterday morning -- inches of beautiful snow! I can enjoy it since, apart from filling bird feeders and taking warm water and food to the chickens, I don't actually have to brave the icy roads and go anywhere. The cozy feeling of being inside the tiny house inside the glass snow globe is what I like when the flakes are swirling outside our windows.

There's always the danger of the water freezing -- as it did at my younger son's house -- as it did at our house 30 years ago, a few weeks before that son was born. That January was one of the coldest winters we ever had -- school was closed for six weeks in our county and our water stayed frozen about that long. I came home from the hospital, with a fresh c-section incision and a new baby, to a house with no running water. But what I mainly remember, aside from the kitchen floor, perpetually muddy with water slopped from buckets that my husband brought from the nearby creek, was the joy of sitting all day on the sofa, holding my beautiful infant and basking in the warmth of the woodstove.

An Everyday Miracle

This is the next stop for the Christmas tree's cranberry-popcorn string. Like the pumpkin left over from Halloween and Thanksgiving and now reduced to a hollow shell, the deconstructed garland has gone down the hill to the chicken yard, there to be transmuted by fowl means into eggs for our table and rich black dirt for my garden.

It's a lazy woman's compost pile, that chicken yard -- when I clean up the garden, I take the old plants -- lettuce that's gone to seed, worm-eaten broccoli or collards -- to the chickens who gobble up every leaf and worm and bug. Almost all of our food scraps are put into the bucket that waits behind the wood cook stove and every day, when I make the trek down the hill to feed Gregory Peck and his eight ladies, the girls run clucking to meet me, anxious to see what I've brought. One old biddy pecks at my ankles to encourage me to dump the bucket NOW, while the others circle around, jockeying for position. Some of their favorite treats are rice or noodles or bread, the seeds from green peppers, and squishy tomatoes or strawberries. But what they really like is meat.

Chickens are omnivores: grain can be the staple of their diet; they appreciate green stuff and fruits and veggies; but a turkey carcass with lots of meat clinging to the bones can inspire an avian feeding frenzy.

Scientists have hypothesized a close link between dinosaurs and modern birds -- when I see the carnivorous gleams in my girls' bright orange eyes, I can believe it.

New Year's Day

And time to cook the traditional collards, black-eyed peas, and smoked hog jowl -- another of my Alabama-bred grandmother's traditions. The collards, simmered in chicken broth with onion, hot pepper, and slices of the smoked pork, are eaten "to put green money in your pocket" in the coming year. The fatty hog jowl is for good fortune, probably coming from a time when any sort of meat was scarce and fat was a source of energy, not a scary taboo.

The black-eyed peas, also cooked with the hog jowl, bring good luck. Some folks say you need to eat 365 peas (366 on Leap Years), to ensure luck each and every day. We make ours into Hoppin' John , a savory mixture of rice and onions and peas, whose name may derive from a creole dish made with pigeon peas -- thus au pigeon.

May your New Year be full of good things, whatever tradition you follow!

Breaking Up Christmas

Our family tradition, inherited from my maternal grandmother, is that it's bad luck to have the Christmas tree still in the house on New Year's Day. So I've spent all day deconstructing the ten foot fir that only a few weeks ago we were adorning.

It's a slow and contemplative process and gives me time to reconnect with each ornament as I remove it from the tree and lay it on the dining table to await the final boxing up and stowing away for another year. Old friends, these decorations, from the blue glass ball with my brother's name staggering across its surface, the glitter long gone, to the somewhat lurid pink and blue globe -- the last of a box of ornaments my mother purchased from my then boyfriend, now husband, in 1959 when his high school club was selling ornaments as a fund-raiser.

There are the simple stuffed fabric hearts that were a mainstay of the decorations when our boys were young and our dogs and cats rambunctious and there are two boxes of fragile glass ornaments inherited from my mother. A green wooden curtain ring with the figure of a baby on it marks our older son's first Christmas in 1972 and simple felt cutouts sprinkled with glued-on sequins commemorate our younger boy's stint as a Clover Buddy (FFA for the grammar school bunch.) There's a plaster Santa, carefully painted with tempera paints by my husband when he was a cub scout, and a wooden angel that was a gift from the homeroom mother when I was an eighth grader.

The satin ribbons are untied and taken upstairs to be ironed; the cranberry and popcorn is slid off the thread into a bucket for the chickens; the strings of lights are pulled off and the tree is toppled and dragged out of the house. Only a slight fragrance of fir remains -- and we are safe from bad luck for another year.

The Little People

This gorgeous boulder lies at the edge of our orchard and things live under it. Possibly a groundhog or two, maybe some rabbits or there could be snakes. But whenever I see that long dark opening, I think of Little People -- not the Munchkins of Oz but the really little people - Shakespeare's English fairies small enough to use a shed snake-skin as a wrap and his elves who make jackets of bats' wings. Or maybe the Yunwi Tsundi.

It was the Cherokees who once hunted in this area that told of the Yunwi Tsunsdi - a race of Little People living in caves of rock here in the mountains. Handsome and well-formed, with flowing hair reaching almost to the ground, they were reckoned to be kind, helping lost people and especially children to find the way home. But, the old legends warn, the Little People value their privacy and if any traveler attempts to follow the sounds of their drumming to their dwelling-place, the Little People will cast a spell that will send the wanderer even further astray, turning him around and around and bewildering him forever.

Thoughts at year's end

The word pansy comes from the French pensee, meaning thought, and on this overcast, slightly melancholy day, my thoughts are turning to losses of the past year. My neighbor Mearl, a strong mountain woman who was the inspiration for many of my characters, left us in April. Her house is empty and lonely-looking, though her children keep the yard and pastures as tidy as if Mearl were looking over their shoulders -- as she probably is.

The author Madeleine L'Engle is gone -- and I bitterly regret that I never got around to writing her a fan letter to say how much joy her work has brought me over the years. Death can be so final for those of us left behind with things undone.

Rennie, another neighbor, but unlike Mearl, far too young for this final passage, fell ill while a group of us were working on a long-postponed friendship quilt for her and her husband. She had treatment and seemed to be holding her own so, though the quilt was completed, we waited to surprise her with it at a time when her daughters could be with her. Her sudden death caught us all by surprise; the quilt was presented to her family at a memorial service.

Years ago when my father died, my brother and I were cleaning out his home. In the back of his refrigerator was a bottle of very good champagne which my husband and I had given my parents for an anniversary some ten years before. "Oh, it's so expensive," they said. "We'll save it for another time." A few years after that anniversary, my mother died and my father moved, taking the champagne with him, still waiting for the right moment.

My brother and I decided not to let this go any farther. That evening we opened the expensive champagne, poured it out into my mother's crystal and prepared for a treat.

Of course it had turned to vinegar.

Rain

"Poor man's fertilize," our
neighbor Clifford used to call rain and snow, greeting with wise approval the same weather that city folks might deplore.

After last summer's near-drought, we are thirsty for gentle soaking rains -- the patter of drops on our metal roof today is as welcome as the sound of Santa's reindeer. Just beyond the dining room window, crystal beads deck the crabapple's bare branches and a male cardinal flashes scarlet thanks.

A Time Out of Time

Because I have the luxury of not having to leave home for my work, these days between Christmas and New Year's always have an odd, timeless quality to them. And this year, with the temperature unseasonably in the fifties and green things pushing through the not yet decomposed autumn leaves, it's particularly neverwhenish in feeling.

It's a time out of time, a lovely breathing space before the New Year and all those stern resolutions. Time to peruse the books that were my Christmas gifts, to eat another piece of shortbread, to look for pictures outside in this mild weather . . .

. . . and time to write a haiku.


Italian arum -
Nudging up through gray-brown leaves,
Unfurling --Ahh! -- green!

Something New

After my recent failure to send a holiday album of pictures to all recipients of my newsletter, The Goodweather Reports (too many, too large pictures-- some servers choked on them), I'm experimenting with this blog which seems to promise to let me add pictures at will. We'll see.

The picture above (taken from my bedroom window) is sunrise at the winter solstice. The sun has gone as far to the south as it can and now will begin its journey north, bringing with it longer days.

"Growing up in Florida and in the suburbs, she had never realized how the sun paced back and forth during the year, like a restless dog on a tether. During the winter it rose far to the southeast and skulked along the ridgeline, disappearing in mid-afternoon." ( from Signs in the Blood, the first Elizabeth Goodweather novel.