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| A little bit of snow. |
Monday we had what is known as Raw Weather – damp, cold, and gray. The kind of weather that makes you want to hover around the wood stove all day. And to help us be able to do that, Daniel and I finally got a load of firewood. We borrowed a truck and went up to Shongo, New York, and got a face cord (a face cord is 4'x8'x16" of stacked wood) of seasoned maple and cherry wood. We stacked it on the back porch where it will stay nice and dry and convenient during the months ahead. I hope to get more wood. My plan is to fill one of the bays in the upper barn with it. I think we’ll need at least three full cords (a full cord is 4'x4'x8') to get us through the winter.
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| Wood stacked on the back porch. |
Daniel and Raven were going to leave on Monday, but they stayed on an extra day with us and I’m glad they did. It was nice having Daniel’s help with the firewood. The house didn’t seem so sad after the Thayns departed with Daniel and Raven here. When they left on Tuesday to go back to the Foster’s house in Toledo, the house seemed too quiet, so I put on Christmas music and turned the volume up. Now that it’s December, we’ve expanded our Christmas music play list and added the Winter Solstice albums to the Celtic Christmas albums we were already listening to. The list will keep expanding as the holiday season sets in. We love Christmas music.
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| Good-bye to Daniel and Raven. |
I finished my last Calvin and Hobbes book last week and finally began reading Homer’s Odyssey. It was quite an abrupt change. I know the Greek myths. I have a nice set of Robert Graves’ Greek Myths that I’ve read. I know the basic outline of the story of the Iliad and Odyssey, the Trojan War, the adventures of its heroes, and Odysseus’ long journey home afterwards. But I did not know the details of that journey and what I did know was not presented to me in Greek dactylic hexameters. [I won’t attempt to explain what a dactylic hexameter is, but suffice it to say Greek poetry does not rhyme, it’s all about long and short syllables.] I own two translations of the Odyssey, one is a prose translation done in 1889 by Samuel Butler, the other is a more recent translation done in 1996 by Robert Fagles that retains Homer’s poetic structure. I chose Fagle’s translation. It is quite compelling. While reading it, I have the urge to chant the lines out loud, which is how the poem was passed down for many generations before being written down late in the eighth century B.C.
ἄνδρα μοι ἔννπσα, μούσα, πολύτροπν, ὄςμλα πολλὰ
driven time and again off course, once he had plundered
the hallowed heights of Troy.
Many cities of men he saw and learned their minds,
many pains he suffered, heartsick on the open sea,
fighting to save his life and bring his comrades home.
But he could not save them from disaster, hard as he strove —
the recklessness of their own ways destroyed them all,
the blind fools, they devoured the cattle of the Sun
and the Sungod wiped from sight the day of their return.
Launch out on his story, Muse, daughter of Zeus,
start from where you will—sing for our time too.
And so the story begins and goes on through six hundred and two lines of hexameters, an ageless adventure.
Last week someone abandoned some kittens in our neighborhood and two of them made their way to our house. They were cute and spunky and very friendly, but we have a strict No More Indoor Pets policy that we put in place after Pancho, our last dog, died. But we couldn’t just ignore these kittens. We fed them and gave them a place to sleep in a box in the shelter of the cellar stairs. I like cats. From Gregory and Figaro, the first cats I remember having as a child, to our last cats, Tina and Midnight, whose graves are marked in the woodland garden, I’ve loved many cats. But I’ve changed in my advancing years. I don’t want to deal with litter boxes and shedding hair and scratched furniture anymore. These two kittens reinforced my determination when they started climbing up the screen door on the front porch and damaging the screens while trying to get into the house. When I went down to do the chores, they raced along underfoot and almost tripped me several times. We sent out word that someone needed to come and take them and give them a nice home. Finally a lady came by yesterday evening. We were glad to give them a nice home.
The raw weather continued through Wednesday when the wind picked up and brought us a driving, cold rain. Later that night the temperature fell and the rain turned to snow. It wasn’t much snow. Out in Washington where my sister Nancy lives, they got several feet of it. Ours wasn’t even an inch – not enough to make things look at all festive. So we had snow on the first day of December. Then on Friday night it rained again and every vestige of snow was washed away. If I ever want snow, it is in December. For the last five years, our Decembers have not been very snowy. This year I’m hoping, as I always do, for a white Christmas. All week it looked very gloomy outside, but in the evenings when our Christmas lights came on, things seemed more cheerful. Seeing the festive lights shining in the dark lifts my spirits.
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| A momentary break in the gloom at sundown. |
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| A break in the gloom at sundown. |
On Saturday we attended a special matinee at our theater in Coudersport. We went to see the film, I Heard the Bells, a new film that tells the story of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and how the poem/carol came to be written. It was a good film, very uplifting. Longfellow has always been one of my favorite poets, a love that started in the fourth grade with my beloved teacher Miss Charlotte Conley. And I Heard the Bells is one of my favorite carols. To make the film even more special, the main star who plays Longfellow, Stephen Atherholt, is a native of Gold. I know his parents well. He was there at yesterday’s matinee and we got to meet him. If you have a chance to see this film, I highly recommend it.
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| At the show with Stephen Atherholt. |
When we got home from the matinee, we were in a Christmas mood, so we put up our indoor decorations. All the garland, lights, nativities, and knickknacks are in place and things look very festive. Now all that remains is to get our tree and decorate it. That will be this Saturday. It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas at our house. Now we just need a little snow.
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| Amid all the decoration boxes, assembling the menorahs. |
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| After decorating. |
It is sunny today, but cold. It’s December so we began singing carols in church. I love Christmas carols. We are back from church and lunch is cooking – fried cabbage and bacon over rice. It smells amazing. This is Fast Sunday and my stomach is growling. When we got home, I turned on all the garlands and inside decorations. I’m listening to my favorite Tabernacle Choir Christmas album. It’s beginning to look and feel like Christmas.
