STILL CHRISTMAS

A FEW FLAKES DRIFTED slowly down on Christmas morning,  leaving a dusty sparkle on the ice of the lower pond.

As I shot the picture, I noticed that the wind had snapped another pine in the lower woods. Investigating, we found the downed trunk in several thoroughly rotten sections, with the telltale hen-of-the-woods mushrooms growing up the side.

Nature never takes a holiday.


And on the music system, Yo-Yo Ma's joyous holiday party of several years ago, a CD entitled  Songs of Joy and Peace. You can find pieces of its back story on MySpace and You Tube snippets, and can listen to samples of the finished product at the title link above.  It's wonderful music to play over the holidays.  Great joyous riffs, punctuated with endless variations on Dona Nobis Pacem. 


No matter what holidays you celebrate, what we all share is this common gateway to the new year and the rising sun. It's a new chapter, a new start.  May the coming year be a good one for you.

A ROSE FOR CHRISTMAS

WHEN I WAS AN EVEN LESS EXPERIENCED GARDENER, I believed the catalogs and magazines that assured me the Christmas rose, Helleborus niger, would brighten my Christmas garden. Over time,  I learned that in New England it blooms somewhere near Easter (depending on the moon and the vernal equinox, which combine to make Easter the most movable of holidays).  But this year a local market has outwitted Mother Nature by stocking potted plants they say we can enjoy now and move outdoors "when the ground thaws."

I have a wonderful assortment of hellebores, including some treasures from Heronswood, and I'd love to have this beauty join them. Wish me luck. Gardening is always an adventure.

So this is my experiment for the season -- along with the snippet from an awesome four-foot coleus I got from Cecile, a wonderful local gardener. When I admired its dramatic show in a large pot near her front door, she promptly reached over and snapped off a generous shoot for me.

But you know, even if I don't manage to keep the hellebore viable in the dry heat of the house in winter, it's a delight to have it at Christmastime.

SODDEN SOLSTICE

DRIVING OUT ON SOLSTICE MORNING, I found the world new-washed by the middle-of-the-night gully washers.  All was fresh and green – more mid-April than winter solstice. And it reminded me that every event (paradoxically – or is it?) contains its opposites. Very yin and yang. The strength in the weakness, the softness in the sturdy. The wisdom of the I Ching: there's always another side to consider.

THE DAY WAS balmy, holding its breath almost, while shoppers jockeyed for parking spots, butchers and fishmongers darted behind counters wrapping parcels, and the merchants breathed a sigh of relief to see their shelves emptied.

In the evening, a widespread band of rain moved in with intent to soak, and it has continued all night. I've come to depend on our faithful NOAA display to understand the greater context for the scene outside the door. Beneath the leaf mulch, the spring bulbs should be sending out healthy roots.

Across the bridge, the mosses are a mottled carpet of green and rust in the woods -- a perfect flooring for the bare season, covering the earth until the snow arrives.

THE SHORTEST DAY?

THE CHRISTMAS REVELS, mentioned yesterday, commemorate the darkest days of the year, and mankind's immemorial efforts to "bring back" the disappearing sun.

But is this really the "shortest day?" Perhaps not, when you look at the "hours of daylight" for our zip code:

Date	Sun Rise(AM)	Sun Set (PM)	Daylight (Hrs/Min)
12/17	7:08	4:14	9:06
12/18	7:09	4:14	9:05
12/19	7:10	4:15	9:05
12/20	7:10	4:15	9:05
12/21	7:10	4:15	9:05
12/22	7:11	4:16	9:05
12/23	7:12	4:17	9:05
12/24	7:12	4:17	9:05
12/25	7:13	4:18	9:05
12/26	7:13	4:19	9:06
12/27	7:13	4:19	9:06
12/28	7:13	4:20	9:07
12/29	7:14	4:21	9:07
12/30	7:14	4:22	9:08
12/31	7:14	4:22	9:08
1/1	7:14	4:23	9:09

So every day from 12/18 to 12/25 is the same “short” length, 9 hours and 5 minutes (yes, certainly, the seconds may vary). But look how flat it is: it takes TEN DAYS for the daylight hours to rise again to 9 hours and 6 minutes. It’s a “time out of time” when change ceases to happen. (The same thing happens at the summer solstice in June, when the long days are with us for a 10-day period.)

The other notable trend is that sunrise comes later each day throughout this period although, blessedly, the afternoon sun lingers longer each day. And perhaps the best news is that we gain a full hour of daylight during January, which pushes the sunset back past 5 PM.

But in the meantime, we can enjoy the delights of the season -- the magic of snowfall, sunshine on new snow, enjoying a brisk walk or a cross-country ski, then returning indoors to warm by the fire, to read and laugh and plan for the warmer days ahead. And savor that evocative phrase from the I Ching:

I have a good goblet

I'll share it with you.

BUMPS IN THE NIGHT

Winter rumbled in at 12:30 a.m., with lightning and window-rattling thunder -- more like a summer night than the start of the cold season.  Ponds are already overflowing, and the neighbors' vernal pools are at higher levels than they ever are in late April -- missing only the tadpoles and other creatures that populate them in the spring.

Wave after wave of heavy rain pounded on the roof, nearly drowning out the sound of the town's emergency  horn:  1 -- 4 --- 7, the code for Sunset Road. Shortly afterward the cry of sirens as volunteer firefighters responded to the call. Lightning must have struck.

Commenting on the strange weather, someone recently observed that the North Pacific rain forest conditions seem to be migrating to New England. I for one am glad this isn't snow, for we'd be shoveling out a couple of feet tomorrow

DAYS DWINDLE DOWN

A TIME FOR KEEPING CLOSE TO HOME as nights are long and days are brisk. There's ice on the pond, and the evening brings owls' lonely hoots from the woods as they seek companions for the winter night.

This year we managed to get to Cambridge before the Christmas holiday to see the original Christmas Revels (which has now spread to Washington D.C., Seattle, Portland, Oregon, Houston and other points) for a rollicking three-hour "time out of time" that opened the holiday celebrations with great cheer.  

And Ludwig von Beethoven had the good grace to be born on December 16, which led our local public broadcasting station, WGBH, to throw a gala birthday bash of works well-known and rare. They've posted a video of a delightful WoO (work without opus, not part of the official Beethoven catalog) 152 No. 8, "Come Draw We Round the Cheerful Ring" with renowned tenor William Hite in an arrangement for piano, cello and mandolin. And the entire concert, which includes a fabulous performance of the "Les Adieux" piano sonata No. 26 by Gilles Vonsattel, as well as a memorable Hite-Vonsattel rendering of the song cycle "An Die Ferne Geliebte," is available in an audio-on-demand link at the same website. We were fortunate to be sitting in the second row of the visually and aurally gorgeous Fraser performance studio, but enjoy recapturing it from the Web.

There's a sense of bustle this year, as folks who've trimmed back in recent seasons are engaging the short-day season with great gusto -- to drive the darkness away.

HERDING TURKEYS

THE TURKEY HERD evolves as the seasons change.  In spring, there are individual turkeys wandering through the ‘hoods, but by fall, they amass into giant throngs, 20-30 strong.

Our town has some 4800 human residents (318/square mile). I don’t know how many deer and coyotes we have per square mile, but I can recall about 25 or so deer bedded down in our “back 40” during the deep snows last winter, and the local paper had a shot of five coyotes who gathered in the backyard of one resident for a noonday portrait.  Our own deer completely enjoyed our hospitality: they ate everything in sight, and walked single-file along the stone wall along  the back edge of the property.  I hope that deer spoor makes a good fertilizer, because we had plenty of it.

Each year around Thanksgiving, turkeys begin to herd up.  We’ve seen them in groups of 1, 2, or  maybe half a dozen  throughout the spring and summer, but now they seem to seek safety in numbers, and the herds can grow to 20 or 30 in the fall.  Not just on our street, but all over town.
 
Down East Street there’s a dependable flock with a population of at least 12 that inhabits the front yard of a certain gray bungalow.  And I had to stop and wait the other morning as a group of (I counted about 22) sauntered (again, single-file) across the road while traffic waited in both directions

We got a blurry shot of the herd as it crossed our driveway: it’s hard to grab a crisp shot when the turkeys are in full retreat. They move fast. Perhaps they know that Turkey Day is approaching.