Today's count

January in the imaginary age of climate change.  Two boys (that's just what they are in their twenties) out in the bowl playing Frisbee- in their shirt sleeves.  Puddles and the wind ruffling them like little lakes. The rising walls of a great white castle.  Bucket after bucket of snow packed around and then the chinks between the smooth forms filled.  It is in my view now, alone after the completion of construction.  A good four feet high.  The last row of bucket shapes showing like crenelation around its top. My ornamental asparagus putting out more shoots, climbing the window under the sun which has finally cleared the tops of the buildings opposite. A sun that goes down, as well roll away from it, almost an hour later than it did a month ago at the solstice.  Winter: more and more light.

A.E. Matheson 2016

Rejoice the Return of the Sun

It is First Longer Day.  

For me, the most important day of the year.  

Yesterday, winter began, the shortest day of the year.  

From here on out the days get longer.

Rejoice.

9 sleeps

Theoretically I did not walk from the Law Library to the Main Library in my sandals, it is winter after all and in reality, not theoretically, it must be two feet of snow and minus twenty C.  But I enjoyed my theoretical walk.  It was to the Christmas potluck.  I baked a bread sun to celebrate the upcoming First Longer Day...nine sleeps.

Just got the phone call. The sun won second prize in the yummy eats contest.

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.