15 sleeps

I stand in the crabapple grove, with five magpies arrayed on the branches with the brown apples, all of us enjoying the sunshine of a short afternoon.  I think, two weeks, fifteen sleeps. And when I wake up on the fifteenth day it will the First Longer Day.  The best day of the year for me, perhaps, when viewed that way, the most sacred day of the year.  It is the day that fall, our long fall into darkness, is over, the sun stops and turns, and returns.  Winter begins.  The Light grows, as though in a mother's belly, until in early February, even the sleepiest of us awakens to awareness that the days are getting longer.