Made Visible

Step forward, chin up; daylight is returning and has increased from the eight hours, twenty minutes of the winter solstice to ten hours, eight minutes for today, February 16th.  Tomorrow, the 17th, it will have increased by a substantial four minutes.  

Subtle indications point out that I am not the only one who notices; the indoor plants are leaning more towards the window and sending out shoots; the cats, bless they hearts, are shedding.  Combing takes place twice a day and if I wanted a sweater of cat hair, now would be the time to gather the softer undercoat that is coming out in clumps.

This increase in light causes the human heart to thump a bit louder; in spite of continued ice storms and snow; having an increase of light sings a song of renewal as the planet revolves around the sun.  During the winter months, the earth tilts so that the solar rays are aimed at the Tropic of Capricorn south of the equator, giving Australia its summer in December.  As the earth wobbles back, each day the sun climbs higher in our northern sky until June 21, when it will point directly at the northern Tropic of Cancer during the noon hour.  We are in flux, and as has happened for millennia, the days are growing longer in light, as the whole puzzle wheels through the sky towards a temporary stasis.

I am grateful.  The winter is dark, we travel slower because of weather, trudge with heavy boots, bundle in insulating layers that restrict movement.  Here in this latitude, we shed our winter skins gladly, quickly, ready; even so, there is more precipitation of the frozen kind to come.  Yet with the increasing light, it’s time to emerge from snowy doldrums; I don’t mean to say that it is a season of eternal dormancy, for a walk in the snow at night is filled with crystal flakes, alive and radiant in the light cast by moon or flickering streetlamp.  Last night, here in the middle between harbor and downtown, there were bunny tracks, the familiar hopping pattern marking a search for food where the summer vegetable gardens grow.

I can get in trouble with the management, but some surreptitious carrots may be dropped in the furrows.  If only they weren’t so bright orange against the white.  Night is an excellent veil for dispensing criminal carrots; my friend in another complex faces the same threat, so she compresses raisin bread into doughy balls and tosses them behind the hedges that sing with sparrows.  But the rabbit prints were lovely last evening, and did glimmer, sparkling, in the remnants of a waning moon.  With hands in pockets, or clasped in warmth, a walk in the snow can be energizing, making the summer invisibility of rabbit tracks appear, an exposure of the life that goes on around us unseen but for these soft imprints.

There is so, so much that our human senses cannot detect going on, extending through this earthly plane.  The generalization that love never ends is complicated, immeasurable; yet it provides humanity with an analogy of expectation that those who are now invisible to us still exist.  Their footprints come into view in some everyday thought, in memory, a note found in a drawer.  Daylight returns.

The snow has stopped, the sun is setting to rise again tomorrow a bit earlier; the night is a respite full of whispers and silence, murmurs and images.  Gather the hours as you would the wild red strawberries that crowd the fields just before summer solstice, string them as beads on stems of grass, a chain of life.  Hold the composition close; tell, remember.  Sleep will plait time into woven stories, and form pleasant dreams that become gnomons of counted chapters.   Untether.  Tuck under covers.  Dream...