Spare me the drama

It is not that cold in my house. I walked into the family room and was about to flop on the couch when I notice a lump under the blanket (Ok, Ok, yes, I had neglected to fold it and put it on the back of the couch.) There she was all tucked in. How she managed it is beyond me. I think she is trying to tell me something. But I am not listening.

Cruising the streets

One of my favorite things to do at this time of year is drive around the neighborhoods to look at the Christmas lights, although perhaps I should say displays. Lord knows they are bigger, bouncier and more animated than ever. After dinner with friends last week, we drove on snowy roads listening to Nat King Cole sing Yuletide carols. We crept along admiring and often laughing at what people had done to their homes.

Some houses had no decorations that we could see. Others were subdued with only a lighted tree in the window. Most of them though had some outside lights. There were the ubiquitous white lights everywhere from icicles to those shrub nets. One house had an enormous lighted palm tree. (We actually stopped and backed up to get a better view.) Many houses had articulated reindeer or angels. We paused to see if they would move or not---whooping in delight if the angel’s wings flapped or the reindeer munched the snow. The little girl in me still prefers the multi-colored lights. It is so much prettier in the black and white winter night.

I have to confess that I dislike the craze for inflatables. But my friend in Minnesota had a good point. They do look nice in the daytime when the holiday lights are not on. Most of the blow-up ornaments are holiday specific. The snow globes are even clever. I have seen one left over Halloween inflatable of Garfield and a random Scooby though. Odd. Why would you still inflate them?

My house? Well it has candles in the windows and the tree upstairs this year. The tree will come down after Epiphany but I will leave the candles in the windows until late January.

Rotten Hippopotamus

Long ago in a fever-induced state I declared that the medicine I had been forced to swallow tasted like rotten hippopotamus. My little sister agreed. We called it RHM. Whatever that medicine was has been lost to time and childish memories. (I am not even sure why we had to take it.)

Sissy called to tell me she had a bad head cold, needed a nose mitten and generally felt it was an accomplishment to get out of bed and lie on the couch. I asked her if she had taken anything. She said she had tried something new. You are supposed to dissolve it in liquid and then lick the spoon. When I asked her how it was, she said it tasted like RHM. Ah, good old RHM. I have not thought of that for years and years.

You know those medicines that are so foul-tasting that you have to take them leaning over the sink because you are not sure if they will stay down? The one that comes to mind, for me, is Nyquil (the green one not the red one. The red one is RHM with a cherry overlay-far worse. I have broken a sweat just thinking about it. shudder.) DayQuil does not work for me. Neither does the stuff in the capsules. Plus they changed the original formula for Nyquil so not only does it taste like RHM it doesn’t work either.

Sigh.

I hope my immune system is up to snuff this year. Excuse me; I gotta go wash my hands, again.

September

The light has changed.
Even with the visor down
The sun’s dying embers burn my eyes as I drive into the west.
The creep of darkness has begun
and will not end until the brittle cold of the longest night.

Leaves are changing
Sun kissed touches of gold and red decorate the hillsides
Glowing in the long light,
Splotches of nature’s paint that will soon run together
then turn brown and fall away.

There is a chill in the air
The kitchen floor is cold now in the morning.
When I skip across it in my robe longing for the first sip of morning’s heat
I am still warm from the comforter pulled up in the night
My bare feet are icy.


Change is good, it is inevitable.
It comes on so slowly that we do not notice
until
one day it seems to have happened over night.