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.

Heir to Carroll

So, not being wildly shy of that age, which I am told, in China is considered when a woman comes into her power - that lovely time when the movement of the moon is nothing but a beauty to be observed and not a calendar to be counted - and I am faced with the phrase perimenopausal.  I take pleasure in the sound of words and my pleasure in the sound of that is at the level of 'yuck'.  So I decided to make up my own word for the waning of my moon.  Chási̱ is Greek for waning.  So I am in menochási̱. (meno-kah-see)

Today's Count: little red dress

I biked today.  I biked yesterday, the first time this entire year.  That little flavour of normalcy. The sun wanders across a blue deep enough to drown in and turns the stones of the campus buildings honey gold and yellow.  After a cold snap we are enjoying fall.  A real fall, all warm and yellow and blue and breezy like a caress.  And red dresses.  I saw the first one as I rounded out from behind the construction site that has been made of the forest near Arts.  White and red, like a dress from the Wizard of Oz, colour come out of the black and white sequences.  Light on the wind, it swayed.  It was hanging from the tall elms of the avenue of elms that lead to the bowl.  Then I saw another, and another.  The first was the only one with white. All the others were red, bright, deep, black, silk, linen, rayon, cotton, smooth, rough, embroidered, beaded, long, short, wide skirted, slim, open backed, high necked.  All adorning hangers strung with fishing wire from the trees and swaying in the breeze.  What do they mean, asked a young co-worker.  What do you think they mean?  She wasn't sure.  We were at an art gallery last week which displayed and explained its display of paper glued together in blocks.  Left me cold.  But red dresses hanging in the daylight, every variation of women:  red, texture, passion, death, bleeding, restriction, beauty, strength, silent, loud, brilliant, flexible, tethered, but moving.  This has meaning.  And through this meaning walked students and profs, the small colourful people from the daycare, the green velveted university choir.  And me.

New Books

Fall brings in the new books again and this week I have a student perennial:  Microwave-Assisted Sample Preparation for Trace Element Determination (Science QD 139.T7M45 2014):  Pizza.

Today's count

Four tiny pink people, will little pink hats.  One tiny green person, with a little pink hat. On the big green lawn.  One big blue person, with no hat. Oh look they have been joined by a teeny tiny blue person with a green hat, and a very tall white and black person - with no hat.  For shame with our big examples.

Yesterday's count:  Waiting for the bus, four houses for sale - if you have 2 mil to loose you can buy all four, one dignified woman in her little go machine with her shirtless male companion standing on the running board and driving, and her little dog, Cleopatra style in the basket.

Today's Count

Five adults, eyes lowered, fascinated, moving slowly, while a tiny creature, just barely surpassing dad's knee and eschewing the carriage on offer, demonstrated it could walk (and vocalize) all on its own: thanks very much.

Just the Right Amount of Strange

Round about March my body decided to alert me that it has just used the last of the iron in my body:  splat.  So I have spent much of the last few months housebound.  Slowly recouping, but still my range of power has only expanded to eight blocks.  But this week I went along to a friend's place in south Saskatchewan and when I came home, my home was just the right amount of strange.  Not a place I had been trapped for months, but, my home.