Winter Solstice

The longest day of the year, significant to my ancestors, my people, those who endured in silence the things that make me wince and retreat. I love this day, and I do not love what comes after it…the gradual truncation of the nights and the incremental encroachment of more and more sunlight, until that day comes, that day that comes every year, that day when I go out into the world of men and hear a stereo in a car or see a female dressed like a camp follower or wade through deluded suburbanites jamming the aisles of the store where I’m trying to buy a spark plug and they’re trying to buy tomato plants in effing March.

I sat at Bonnie’s grave today for a while, massaging my aching knees and talking to her of things I won’t tell my wife or my handful of blog readers or my best friend, he who tends towards the March Tomato Buying Crowd anyway. I talked to her about this un-Christmas, and about the twin millstones of my job and my age, and I looked through the arch of saplings and listened to the rifle reports from one holler over, and I stood and walked to the fence line and watched a thin horizontal line of smoke from the fireplaces down there as it hung in a horizon-hugging line, close to me, out of my reach, close to me, out of my reach. I could not make it move with a puff of my breath.

I will go up into the woods again once it’s full dark, just to commemorate in my own eccentric way the passage of time, of season, of age, of significance. For now, I sit and move my stiff fingers on the keys while my wife fries chicken drumsticks and listens to The Carpenters, and little Dixee sits at my feet, intuiting that I am considering bathing her and then setting upon her with the clippers, just as I did many years ago with another of our dogs, Sophie. Sophie the pooch, with her mouthful of Steve Buscemi teeth, survived the experience, but she was marked with zipperlike scars, which my wife covered with a disturbingly colorful doggie t-shirt. Problem was, my wife didn’t know that rainbows have been co-opted by a group at odds with the things outlined in that first Book o’ Moses, and so poor Sophie was subjected to being clipper-mauled and involuntarily outed, all in the space of one monumentally misguided afternoon.

But why am I writing about such things when our globe is a-warming? When people are hurting, dammit?

Because the nights are about to start shortening. and what will distract me then?

This is one of the Sundays of Advent. And the young fellow who promised to bring me a truckload of firewood did not keep his word. But I’ll bet he went to church.

~ S.K. Orr