Night will be longer than day for the next six months, and even the days will be colder.
But, as a better poet than I once wrote, well, you know that it’s a fool who plays it cool by making his world a little colder.
So how do I avoid such foolishness?
Listen to the wind chimes. I hung them under the window to remind me of music every time the breeze blows.
Pet the dog, who just walked over and sat by my side. “Every dog is an emotional support dog,” said the internet meme, and she reports for duty every morning, even when her body language tells me she herself is melancholy. I suppose I am her emotional support human.
Sit in the sunshine while we have it. Maybe I’ll go out front to the rocking chairs.
The Equine Ox is upon us — that day when light and dark exist in equal measures, sort of like some folks think about humans.
There is light in us and traces of a darkness beyond understanding, but just as light grows gradually day by day in the dead of winter, the forces that lead us to light can never be full extinguished.
This week I got my first new pair of glasses in many a day — has it been as many as five years? All I know is I’ve needed stronger glasses for many a month. Reading has been more of a challenge lately, especially the fine print, and it’s a relief to see the page clearly again.
It wasn’t as dramatic a change as the day in Hobby Lobby, three days after I got my first pair of glasses at age 47. The eye doctor had perceived my eyes had never quite worked together, my 20/10 eye doing most of the work while my weaker eye came along for the ride. At first everything looked wobbly and askew as my eyes fought the new glasses, until that day in the store when my brain said to my eyes, “Oh! You’re trying to see in three dimensions, why didn’t you say so?” And suddenly I perceived the depth of the aisles, unfolding like an accordion, as the little prism Dr. Pease ordered finally connected my eyes as intended.
I saw that the Viewmasters and 3-D movies didn’t look weirdly artificial as I always had assumed; no, they were cleverly converting two-dimensional pictures into a semblance of real life. And I was in awe of the technology that convinced my lazy eyes to work with each other at last.
Imagine that time hundreds of years ago when eyeglasses were high tech.
Part of my morning habit has become to play Hurdle, which is like Wordle except you solve five words: The solution becomes the first guess of the next round, and the four solutions become the first four guesses of the fifth word — at that stage you have two shots to get it right.
I’m also a fan of Wordler, which is like Wordle except you can play as many times as you want, unlike Wordle and Hurdle where there’s only one puzzle per day.
The other day I combined the two games: I used the Hurdle solution to start Wordler, and then I kept using the solutions to start another game.
I could have gone on for a very long time, until the solution to one puzzle was:
WRITE.
Being a writer, to me this felt like a command from another plane of existence.
WRITE what? The possibilities are endless. I can describe the early autumn chill like the first bite of a cool apple, or I can describe the whine of traffic coming and going Doppler-like on the road up the hill from here, or I can describe the morning fog that I wasn’t sure was my eyes or the air.
WRITE what? I can work on tomorrow’s blog post or I can advance my science fiction saga or my Christmas story.
WRITE what? I can just pull a random poem out of the ether, or develop a random scene from any old where, or rage against the machine — that silly machine is always up to something worthy of a good seething rage.
The bottom line was pretty clear, however: WRITE something that fills the page with writing, because that is my calling, after all, and those who don’t heed their calling are, well, heedless.
And so I wrote, which was a better use of my time than an endless game of Hurdle, believe it or not.
