Funny story - Christmas nuttiness.

Christmas Nuttiness

Have you ever watched a squirrel on a fall day scrambling around gathering nuts?  They dash from place to place frantic to gather all they can.  They cram acorns into their cheeks until they look like fuzzed up electrocuted rats with goiter. Nuts!  Just plain nuts!  It’s all that’s on their mind.

My wife is a lot like that at the holidays - particularly the frantic scurrying around and nuts part.  Nuts remind me of the panicked call I received to dash to the store to buy nuts while the cookie recipe was still in the mixer without the necessary ingredients.  When I came home we went nuts with joy at being rescued from the nut shortage crisis contrived from the nutty idea we should start making cookies without all the necessary ingredients.

Today my wife took the cookies to the grandkids' daycare so they could decorate their own Christmas cookies.  These were the cookies, of course, without the nuts because who knows if one of the little darlings would be allergic to nuts.  Go figure.  I wasn't supposed to be involved in this project, but in a panicked rush to load her treasure trove of cookie decorating goodies, she forgot the cookies on which the frosting would be smeared.  I save the daycare day with an emergency cookie delivery.

I am as afraid of going to a daycare center where preschoolers are armed with plastic knives and green frosting as a squirrel is crossing a four-lane road.  This is nuts!  It is frightening to see squirrelly four-year-olds with sugar sprinkles and waving frosting covered knives like Zoro.  Still you gotta hug your grandkids.  Now my clean jacket is covered in frosting and red sprinkles.  Aw nuts!  Merry Christmas, dear wife!  I’ll tell her when she stops scurrying around.   

Spend a night on an island in the Canadian woods

It Takes Time

Ten thousand years ago, a geological heartbeat, the last ice age ended.  In that time the hard rocky ice smoothed island has become home to generations of proud towering spruce, and lively, ebullient birch with clean white bark and fluttering leaves turned golden from last week's frost.

 He reclines on a smooth rock next to a mirrored lake filled with last winter's snow and billions of reflected stars from whence light traveled millions of light years to touch him. Star light above and below burn a hole in his soul.   This month's full moon slides over an island a few minutes west by canoe where loons, hatched this summer, practice their haunting calls.  Mosquitoes hatched yesterday bite him and leave an itch he will feel tomorrow.  The night's heavy dew will be chased away by the dawn but for now he shivers a second.

 The solar wind that departed the sun last week is bent toward the magnetic pole this night.  Curtains of energy light the night with shrouds of green and blue that wave and dance on the aurora's breeze.  Shafts of red light penetrate the lake and orbs of white then green drift across the sky in a kaleidoscope of endless variety.  The lights wash a day's ration of fatigue from his body.

 In the universe it was an unremarkable brief event infinitely repeated.  For him the northern lights were one sleepless autumn night.  He will remember it always which will only be for a moment.