It seems like I just sent out a Journal – oh, wait, I did on Thursday when we got back from Utah. Not much has happened since then. We had such a great time on our trip. Now we are home again and we’ve settled back into the usual routine. In some ways it is comforting to be home and to get back to the old schedule, but it is also sad to realize that our much anticipated time together is over. I don’t know when we will be together again. Some of us will be together for Christmas, but not all of us. I wish we all lived closer to each other.
There was snow on the ground when we got back and it has snowed some more since then. Seeing the house in the snow on Thursday morning took me aback for a moment. I’d forgotten how different it looks now without the pine trees around it. The snow reveals all the creatures that come to visit. There are tracks of birds, rabbits, deer, a skunk, a dog, squirrels, and a cat in parts of the yard.
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| One year ago (top) and now (bottom). |
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| Deer tracks all over the yard. |
When I went down to do the chores on Thursday afternoon, I found a dead and mostly eaten hen. Bob Jones, who took care of the flock while I was gone (thank you Bob!), actually found it and left it for me to see. He said he thought it was a possum as there were possum tracks in the snow around the outside of the coop. I disposed of the remains and decided to close the door to the coop for the time being. The chickens don’t like to go out in the snow anyway. Before I could close up the coop, I had to drive out twenty-two starlings who had taken up residency inside. They are dirty birds. They poop all over the walls from their perches in the rafters and eat up the chickens’ food and foul their water. I’ve never been able to figure out a way to keep them (and the sparrows) out of the coop. Closing the coop to the outside will work for a while and maybe it will discourage them from invading again.
It seems there was lots of bad behavior by wild animals while we were gone. A red squirrel moved into the woodshed in our absence. I startled it when I went out on Thursday morning to fill the bird feeders. It ran up and hid among the boxes stored on the shelves. I discovered that it had chewed holes in the lids of the buckets where I keep my sunflower seeds and had been living the good life gorging itself. It also chewed holes in several of the boxes on the shelves containing Christmas decorations. I tried to encourage it to go back out into the wild, but it would not cooperate, so I resorted to poison. All the bait disappeared, but I still saw it hanging around the bird feeders, so I think it must have stored the poison blocks wherever it has its stash. This morning Hannah spied it at the bird feeders again and promptly dispatched it. She’s a dead eye like most of us.
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| What happens when a red squirrel moves in. |
December is a busy month. We have a church dinner on the 13th and a concert on the 14th. This is a short month for school. Our Christmas break is a full two weeks long this year – something that seldom happens. We’re off from the 20th to January 6th. Our Christmas will seem a little strange this year. We are celebrating early on the weekend before. It was the only time that worked for all of us. And we are celebrating it down at the Thayn’s house. The Fosters will be there and Josiah will be there from college. I don’t know who will actually be here at our house on Christmas Day. It looks like it might be just me and Stacey. If that happens, it will be the first time in our married life that it will be just the two of us.
Yesterday we began decorating inside the house for Christmas. The outdoor lights have been up for a few weeks, but we just started turning them on this week. Yesterday we put out the Nativities and the knick-knacks – snowmen, Santas, nutcrackers, etc. [When I started taking the boxes full of decorations down from the shelves in the woodshed, I found a large squirrel’s nest on the top shelf made of shredded cardboard and paper napkins. When we opened some of the boxes we found where it had been storing some of its seeds. One of the camels in one of the ceramic Nativities was full of them. I’m glad the squirrel is gone.] We spent a long time untangling strings of bells and lights and garland. We won’t put up our tree until Miriam gets home next week. Decorating for Christmas is a very nostalgic activity. Every little bauble and ornament has a story connected to it and we like to rehearse their histories as we set them in place.
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| Some of our Chrismas knick-knacks. |
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| More knick-knacks. |
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| One of our Nativities (Mary, the Angel, and the Shepherd Boy are all missing a hand). |
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| Another Nativity. |
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| The biggest Nativity. |
Today is a quiet day. We are home from church. Everyone is just relaxing. Stacey and Hannah are fighting colds. We all need a long nap – the perfect way to spend a winter Sabbath afternoon.
