Christmas Eve
10-12 inches of snow on the ground, two or three new
breezy winds and clearing skies
the temperature is in the teens
It is quiet tonight at our little airport out here on the edges of the continent. I can almost feel the hush stretching back behind me, ahead into the night where midnight is rolling across the eastern seaboard. It will be four hours before it arrives here.
Time is suspended these last few days as the earth pauses in its cosmic dance, caught at the farthest point of its arc before slowing tilting back sunward, back toward the light and warmth. Tonight that warmth seems but a faint memory, like a recollection of childhood. Cold air is pouring down from the pole, howling across the plains and worn hills of Siberia, streaming through the gaps in the bright chain of the Aleutian Islands that bars the Bering Sea.
It is beautiful on the satellite loop: from space the force of Nature takes on a stateliness that belies the power and brutality of the arctic air mass. It is thirty below in Fairbanks right now. At Nome, it is only ten degrees below zero but the winds are gusting to 25 knots and the town is swathed in blowing snow. Here on our protected peninsula, next to the open water, it is eleven degrees and falling.
I mutter a prayer for all the creatures who are in the wild tonight, that they have snug dens to hunker down in, waiting for a more forgiving season.
Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.
"Now they are all on their knees,"
An elder said as we sat in a flock
By the embers in hearthside ease.
We pictured the meek mild creatures where
They dwelt in their strawy pen,
Nor did it occur to one of us there
To doubt they were kneeling then.
So fair a fancy few would weave
In these years! Yet, I feel,
If someone said on Christmas Eve,
"Come; see the oxen kneel,
"In the lonely barton by yonder coomb
Our childhood used to know,"
I should go with him in the gloom,
Hoping it might be so.
--The Oxen
Thomas Hardy
That poem brings to mind a certain moment from a holiday season when I was in college. At the annual presentation by the music department, the baritone of my heart's desire sang a version of that poem, looking so perfect and sounding so pure, standing alone in the spotlight in the dark maroon velvet of his choir robe. I longed for him for several years, pretty much from the moment early in my sophmore year when I first saw him perform in the special quartet he was a part of. That Yuletide season when I was a junior, I thought I was getting closer to him, thought there were possibilities. He was supposed to come by my dorm room later than evening for some wine but we got our communications mixed up...
Ah, but it is just as well nothing ever came of it for undoubtedly it would have ended badly. He was never meant for me. Neither of us would have been happy.
Still, that moment in the darkened auditorium with him shining from the stage remains a fond holiday memory.
breezy winds and clearing skies
the temperature is in the teens
It is quiet tonight at our little airport out here on the edges of the continent. I can almost feel the hush stretching back behind me, ahead into the night where midnight is rolling across the eastern seaboard. It will be four hours before it arrives here.
Time is suspended these last few days as the earth pauses in its cosmic dance, caught at the farthest point of its arc before slowing tilting back sunward, back toward the light and warmth. Tonight that warmth seems but a faint memory, like a recollection of childhood. Cold air is pouring down from the pole, howling across the plains and worn hills of Siberia, streaming through the gaps in the bright chain of the Aleutian Islands that bars the Bering Sea.
It is beautiful on the satellite loop: from space the force of Nature takes on a stateliness that belies the power and brutality of the arctic air mass. It is thirty below in Fairbanks right now. At Nome, it is only ten degrees below zero but the winds are gusting to 25 knots and the town is swathed in blowing snow. Here on our protected peninsula, next to the open water, it is eleven degrees and falling.
I mutter a prayer for all the creatures who are in the wild tonight, that they have snug dens to hunker down in, waiting for a more forgiving season.
Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.
"Now they are all on their knees,"
An elder said as we sat in a flock
By the embers in hearthside ease.
We pictured the meek mild creatures where
They dwelt in their strawy pen,
Nor did it occur to one of us there
To doubt they were kneeling then.
So fair a fancy few would weave
In these years! Yet, I feel,
If someone said on Christmas Eve,
"Come; see the oxen kneel,
"In the lonely barton by yonder coomb
Our childhood used to know,"
I should go with him in the gloom,
Hoping it might be so.
--The Oxen
Thomas Hardy
That poem brings to mind a certain moment from a holiday season when I was in college. At the annual presentation by the music department, the baritone of my heart's desire sang a version of that poem, looking so perfect and sounding so pure, standing alone in the spotlight in the dark maroon velvet of his choir robe. I longed for him for several years, pretty much from the moment early in my sophmore year when I first saw him perform in the special quartet he was a part of. That Yuletide season when I was a junior, I thought I was getting closer to him, thought there were possibilities. He was supposed to come by my dorm room later than evening for some wine but we got our communications mixed up...
Ah, but it is just as well nothing ever came of it for undoubtedly it would have ended badly. He was never meant for me. Neither of us would have been happy.
Still, that moment in the darkened auditorium with him shining from the stage remains a fond holiday memory.
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