If any season of the year feels like it speeds along, it’s this one between Thanksgiving and the end-of-year holidays. Days are short, activities plentiful, and to-do lists long. It feels like we all have a lot of balls in the air.
At our friend Pat’s house, more than balls are in the air. She has quite a few birdfeeders, and the birds are happy customers. Alas, they do not account for all the aerial comings and goings. The squirrels are just as enthusiastic about Pat’s feeders as the birds are.
Grey squirrels were especially busy chowing down while I was there this week, giving me a closer, longer look at them than I’ve had before. Their fur is fantastic–long, thick, and almost silvery. And, like the other types of squirrels around here, the grey ones are working hard at putting on weight for winter. One, temporarily replete, shot off its feeder, in between the slats of the deck railing, and landed on the deck, an impressive bit of maneuvering. The next one was too plump to duplicate the dismount. When it had eaten its fill, it had to leap for the top of the deck rail. Not much margin for error there, but Plumpy nailed the landing.
Next door to Pat, inanimate objects are flying through the air. A house is being built, and not via standard construction. It’s prefab. A crane mounted on a Kenworth is swinging great slabs of concrete into position. Workers walking around on the tops of walls—and, one imagines, workers on the ground as well—fasten the pieces in position. It’s remarkable to watch and progress is fast. Pat’s taking lots of photographs for the five-year-old who will be living in the house, as he hasn’t been around to watch the process.
In the predawn darkness at our house this morning, there was a ponderous presence in the Norway spruce outside a back bedroom. It was a hawk, moving slowly into the nearby maple. I approached the window to look for identifying features, but there wasn’t enough light and the hawk glided off out of sight. It put me in mind of all the deaths we’ve had in our parish in the last couple weeks. There have been six, including one with particular meaning for us.
Sometimes it seems that, in this life, we experience each other as presence in the predawn darkness. We look for what defines us. When we are fortunate, we find it. Whether or not we are blessed in this way, all too soon one or the other of us glides off out of sight. It is our sure and certain hope that the light is better where we’re going, and that we will bask in that light together. “And even at the grave we make our song: Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.” Amen.
When we were kids, coming home from wherever the family had been, my sisters would fall asleep in the car. Dad would carry them into the house when we arrived. Not me. Not even as a babe in arms did I sleep in a car. On the other hand, what could be better than being carried in by Daddy? Once I saw how the system worked, I feigned sleep at the end of the drive. It wasn’t that big a stretch; I was drowsy anyway. And it worked a treat.
Our dog works a similar con. He knows that, if he seems to be sleeping at going-to-bed time, Daddy will gather him up and snuggle him into his little bed. Accordingly, when Rascal thinks the time is at hand, he suddenly feigns sleep. Deep, deep sleep. The dog takes no halfway measures. If you lift him while he’s “sleeping,” his body is limp. We cottoned on to what he was doing as soon as he started doing it, years ago. But the dog clearly enjoys it, and my husband doesn’t mind putting him to bed.
Rascal outfoxed himself with this routine last night. He got into some particularly nasty burrs earlier in the week, and we’re still getting them out of his fur—a process to which he strenuously objects. Once the dog was deeply “asleep,” yesterday, my husband started to work on a burr. By the time the dog figured out what was going on, the burr was out.
Whereupon he demanded the usual payment: one Milkbone, payable immediately and in full. The treat occasioned the usual joy and lolloping about and tossing of the treat into the air. And the losing and rediscovering of the treat. Doggy delight, both downstairs and up. Followed by sudden deep “sleep.”
16 December 2022