The darkest night of a dark year

     It comes as no surprise that 2020 has been a dark and difficult year. A global pandemic and its economic fallout, a public extra-judicial execution leading to weeks of protests, gangs of armed thugs storming statehouses and threatening officials, the ugliest US election of my lifetime capped off with weeks of legal and extra-legal maneuvering by a vicious lame-duck president and threats of martial law. This year also brought the deaths of six former colleagues, three of them near my age, a former student, and two church friends. The day before Halloween, a friend died of Covid, and the list of those who have tested positive grows longer by the day. A few days ago, the son of an old friend finally succumbed to the progressive neurological illness that had been weakening him for decades. 2020 has brought a litany of losses.

    This year's winter solstice coincides with the great conjunction, the planetary lineup that has been called the Christmas Star. Many of us had hoped to head outdoors to see it, as we here in the Mid-Ohio Valley climb the Turtle Mound every year to view the solstice sunset as the Hopewell did. Unfortunately, today brought lowering clouds, rain, and what for a while sounded like ice pellets, so no stars or sunset have been visible. Today has indeed been a day of darkness, and tonight will be the longest night of the year.

    But the period of light begins growing longer tomorrow, even though our area is likely to be too cloudy for that astronomical fact to be evident. The various weather channels at least predict sun for Wednesday, with rain and snow expected to follow. And this is just December, so we can expect several more months of winter. 

Winter, of course, brings some gifts. The juncos are here, and there have been a couple of pine siskins at the feeder in the walled patio. Chickadees are omnipresent, and this downy is a regular visitor to the suet feeder.

    The major gift for all of us is the rollout of a vaccine for the novel coronavirus. People in the next county over are beginning to receive it, although our local hospital cannot manage the temperature control needed for the Pfizer and will have to wait for the less-fussy vaccine. As an under-seventy retiree, I will not be in the early groups to be vaccinated and will be spending the winter literally at home. That, too, is a gift. With no yard work to do for the next few months, I may finally sort through the last few boxes belonging to various deceased relatives, not to mention the last boxes of files and oddments brought from my campus office four years ago. The file cabinet purge and reorganization may finally be finished (just in time for another year's worth of records to need purging, no doubt). 

    Winter also brings time to just be, if we will let ourselves. That may be my next project.

On this the darkest night

I have noticed over the years that late December seems to bring posts about loss, and this one is no exception. Since June, five women in my circle of friends and acquaintances have lost their spouses to death, two suddenly, and several people lost parents. This morning I attended the funeral of a dear former colleague's mother, a woman who, I was shocked to realize, was a year and a half younger than my late first husband, whom I cannot imagine as a man in his eighties. The greatest shock, however, was the unexpected death of a friend made more than forty years ago, when we were university students. Charles was the most gifted of our cohort, his work exhibited in a solo art show the summer after graduation, an event that proved the highlight of his life. The ensuing decades were not generally kind.

The winter solstice of course calls us to consider darkness, both as literal fact and as metaphor. We often leave for and return from work in the dark. There are fewer hours in which to accomplish the outdoor tasks that managed not to get done in the months when we wanted to do them. These short days find many of us less inclined to venture out in the evenings, the dark being so dark. We spend more time at home. Many of us turn inward, away from the outer world, at least for a while.

Similar things are happening in the non-human world. While a lot of life is still pretty lively, given the action at what I foolishly call the bird feeders, many things have gone underground: roots, seeds, larvae, hibernating animals. Humans are not the only beings who retreat from the cold and dark.

Still, even though the coldest months are ahead of us, tomorrow the days will slowly--so slowly--begin to lengthen. And today, on a hydrangea noticed on my way to a solstice observance at a site where the ancient Hopewell observed the same phenomenon, there were green buds.