A Special Message from December's Cats to Concerned Readers

All two or three dozen of you, wherever you are.

A nice halo effect in the late, late afternoon light before the sun winks out behind the ridge.

It’s been a long slog since I last posted. There was a surprise hospitalization and death in the extended family. Right after that, a grueling intestinal flu bug hit my nuclear family, and nearly canceled Thanksgiving. 

On the bright side, I’ve made splendid progress with the last novel in my zombie apocalypse series, if only as a shelter against the emotional impact that eventually all but paralyzed me these last couple of weeks. 

Ginger Puff lost her sibling, Smudge, towards the end of September after a particularly relentless rainstorm, leaving her the sole survivor of a small litter of runts. In the last few months she’s grown, her eyes are clear, and her fur looks good. Ginger Puff is the great success story of our taking over the feeding of the neighborhood ferals. There are so many cats we knew and named that simply stopped coming around. If I had the money I’d trap them all and get them fixed and full of shots. As it is, all we can do is leave kibble and water out for them, and hope for the best.

Ain’t nothin’ but a thing, as they used to say in U.S. Navy basic training. We’re getting through it, and I expect Christmas to be a very fine thing this year. As Charles Dickens noted in my favorite essay on the subject, “What Christmas Is Like as We Grow Older,” we exclude nothing on this day. Christmas is a celebration of light and life amid the dark and hopeless cold. We raise our glass of cheer, but keep an eye on the wood stove. The dark and hopeless cold are as much of a part of our season as that fire. The point is to accept that—and, like the dark and cold, don’t let it take over.

We mourn our dead. We celebrate our living. We exclude nothing.

At left, the Great White Galoot, whom I used to call “the Yeti.” She’s actually been around since we moved in last year. My wife and I suspect she was once someone’s cat, but was later abandoned. At right, another Original Feline who came with the house, Clarence the Cross-Eyed Siamese.

Our ordeal of November reinforced the urgency of finishing my various projects while also throwing sand into my gears. The paralysis is wearing off. I’m moving again.

Here’s hoping you have a bright and happy Christmas amid the stresses of your life, routine and otherwise. As I’ve observed so many times before, you only get so many of them. Two people close to me observed their last Christmases in 2016. They had no idea.

She gives us these heartbreaking looks like she wants to be let inside. Given that we already have five cats indoors, this would not go well. Galoot doesn’t get along all that well with the other ferals to begin with. I have to put her kibble on the other side of the porch from the others.

Frankly, I’m happier not knowing for myself. You grasp the concept, though.

Have a Merry Christmas, and a blessed New Year.

The Real Ghosts of Halloween

It’s by no means a profound thought, but it occurred to me this morning as I took the Halloween decorations back out to the garage that Halloween makes a good practice run for Christmas.

It’s the same setup. Decorations and candy and costumes are in stores nearly two months before the actual holiday. (The candy and other Halloween seasonal items appeared at my local Safeway in mid-August.) The movies and TV specials are hyped. Parties are thrown and attended. No gifts bought or given, though. This is the practice run.

Eventually, unless you’re one of the many young adults spending the actual night of the event getting inebriated while in costume, you might be home for the thing Halloween is actually about: three to four hours of waiting by the door for the trick-or-treaters to come.

I got all of two pages edited and a couple of lines of a poem started when the pen started drying out on me. (All four colors! Actually, it’s just a super-cheap pen I picked up for free at a job fair, so I got what I paid for.) Then it got too chilly to sit still, so I went inside.

What 31 October means as I get older: the dying light of a dying season, as the old year’s life fades into a long interregnum (at least here in Colorado) of cold, dry, brown death until next year’s life takes hold. Happy Halloween!

Like Christmas, these weeks of lead-up culminate in a few hours of actual observance on the special day. Halloween, with its 5 pm - 9 pm window for trick-or-treating, probably lasts longer than Christmas for most people, whose entire Christmas proper is less than one hour spent around the tree tearing the paper from presents, before wandering off to watch television.

It’s probably just me and maybe half a dozen other people, but I always feel a tinge of melancholy among the celebrations. I’m reminded of Halloweens past, when I used to escort my small children about our old north Colorado Springs neighborhood. I remember when that neighborhood used to be a lot quieter and friendlier, in happier, more stable economic times.

I’m over the hardest part, which is the crushing sense of irrelevancy one feels when one’s children no longer needs him to take them through the neighborhoods. Still....

I’ve been turning this around in recent years by reminding myself again that this is a fool’s despair spiral. Neighborhoods change. Everything changes. Children grow up, as well they should. We all grow old, if we’re lucky. 

“For soon all shall go dark.” Is that gothic enough for ya?

Halloween 2017 went quietly, as it did last year. We saw maybe all of ten trick-or-treaters, most of them small children. I would have liked to have seen more, but maybe that will change over the years. Everything else has.

And so we begin the run-up to Christmas. 

The large secondhand store along the main drag where I live traditionally closes the day before Halloween and opens a couple of days later in full Christmas mode. It’s the only place that does this in town that I know of, and it doesn’t come across quite as “Oh, dear, Christmas decorations right after Halloween!” obnoxious as one might think. It’s just what they do.

I’m blessed to live in a small town, without broadcast television leading us into the temptation of leaving the set on to blare commercials for whatever fad toys/gadgets/etc. the Lords of Commerce seek to promote this season. My wife will decorate the house accordingly after Thanksgiving, which is our tradition. We stand a good chance of having both our grown children home for the holiday.

“But first, we must enter through this door.” [*evil cackling laughter*]

You’d think this lack of external stimulation would slow the days down for us, but I’ve noticed it has the precise opposite effect. Charles Bukowski was right, as always, the days really do run like wild horses over the hills, so much so that my ghosts are falling behind me. As they should. The Good Old Days are now.

See you next year!

An Abbreviated Autumn, Part 2

...in which I’ve saved the best for last. The sun through these leaves makes for nature’s own stained-glass masterpiece. Over 50 years of these things for me, and they never get old....

All of the following photos were taken two days after the last post’s batch, which turned out to be the day before that night’s snowstorm and hard freeze that would kill what was left on the trees before it had a chance to change. Then came the winds....

One of the great pleasures of this short season was to come upstairs into the master bedroom in the late afternoon to see the sun blasting through the golden Lombardy poplar leaves through the west-facing windows there.

At the window with the screen pushed back.

Looking up at the same trees, but from down in the yard. There were no bad angles in this light.

Over on the west side of town, and now I notice the Lombardy poplars dominating this post. Although these trees are native to the regions bordering the Mediterranean Sea (hence the “Lombardy”), they were brought to this part of Colorado for use as windbreaks. Lombardy poplars grow tall and fast, and I’ve yet to see one break. The local forestry folk would rather people would stop planting them, as they supposedly have a relatively short life as trees go, but in an area where the wind comes at you as ruthlessly as it does on or along any mountains of respectable size, these trees are a godsend.

There’s never any sense in getting angry over the weather, but the relentless, bullying winds that came after to strip what was left all blew all sense from my door. I can handle the extreme cold, along with how my south-facing office bakes like a Dutch oven in the summer, but going outside only to get repeatedly slapped upside the skull and bodily shoved around wears on my nerves after a while. 

‘Tis the season. 

The Indian Summer that wound out the last full week of the month has made up for the unsettled week that came before. Although the remaining leaves are, for the most part, dull brown, they fell in a drips of one, two, and three all around. I want to say it sounded like crackling fire—that is the easiest analogy for the season of yellows and reds—but it was more like the slow drip after a wave has washed over. It proved very calming to stand out on the front porch and listen to this as the sun melted into the western horizon.

An Abbreviated Autumn, Part 1

In which I present photographic evidence that it was no less lovely for what it was. Consider:

All photos in this post were taken on Friday, 6 October 2017, before the snowstorm of 9 October and the subsequent freeze cut the fall color season short.

As of this writing on 28 October, these trees are bare. But they blazed gloriously for their time.

One thing suffers as another benefits. I let this blog go over the month of October not only out of despair for having enough photos or—and more to the point for me—not having much of anything to say about these same views of the same Colorado high valley farm town where I live. 

Despite the dark start to the month, October 2017 has been very productive in terms of putting chapters of my latest novel to bed, and sketching in the details for how I want my contribution to the zombie post-apocalypse genre to end. I put Chapter 13 to bed the night of my birthday, Chapter 14 went down sometime last week, and I’m dangerously close to wrapping up Chapter 15, bringing me to the midpoint.

It’s taken me over a year to get this fire going again. For the first time, I’m confident about finishing this. When? As always, I don’t dare jinx myself. I’m just happy to build a compelling story, with completion in sight. Once I’m done with Chapter 15 I’m into part three of the book. We’ll do a couple of chapters of Fun and Games, the Darkest Hour, and then the bloody resolution.

One windstorm after another not only knocked the leaves off the trees, it took out a fair-sized aspen. This is before we went through that week or so of Windstorm of the Day.

Chapman Park, on the far west side of town, is my go-to for walking the long perimeter trail. Sadly, the daily afternoon windstorms made it almost impossible to approach sometimes.

The leaves did look pretty in the wet red clay of the trail. Note that most of these didn’t even have a chance to change color before they were ripped away by the insistent gusts.

There are other projects coming together, and although I’m more confident of them now than I was, say, a week, ago, there’s no point in bringing them up until I’m ready to unleash them on the public. Meanwhile, the thing to do is to empty my photo folders and brace for November.

West of the park and across Prospect Avenue, by the farthest western point of town. After this, there’s a hotel with a drive-in movie theater, the Regional Electric Cooperative, and miles of gorgeous Wild West high country until Del Norte, with the San Luis Regional Landfill somewhere in between.

It doesn’t bear too much thinking about, but for the short summer, and the even shorter autumn, October itself has proved to be the longest short month so far. I suspect the three chapters I put away had something to do with my temporal discombobulation. I’m just so happy to get things done for a change.

Walking east back home, but looking back. 

I love when the green is just getting ready to go over to gold...

...one can really lose oneself in it.

I had a feeling the seasons were taking it easy on us last year. Of course, the weather is a capricious thing wherever you are, and no more so than 7,600 feet up into the Colorado high country, surrounded by mountains of 11,000 to 14,000 feet. However it goes down this winter, I need something to show for it. Back to work, then.

From the “Don’t Be Sad That It’s Over, Be Glad That It Happened” Files, Case #11,942

A gentle reminder that, for all the casual cruelty we witness among people every day, for all the horrors depicted in the news, there is comfort, there is love. 

As seen on the Facebook page Alone with the Horrors: Horror Fiction.

We do not know who thought to commission and install this memorial to his or her pet over a century ago. But most of us have had that one dog, that one special cat, that one pet who was more than a pet, who was more loyal than blood. We look back across 107 years, and we grieve with Dewey’s unseen, unnamed caretaker, because we know the same things. But we should also take joy that, for 12 years spanning the turn of the 20th century, and just before the Great War, there lived a cat named Dewey, who loved, and was loved. And somewhere out there in the madness of our own century, a similar tale lives. As it was in the beginning....

Towards a More Splendid Retelling of a Holiday “Classic”

Yes, those scare quotes are there for a reason. Happy Halloween.

Fortunately, Charlie Brown had a trick-or-treat bag full of rocks. Which is the one part of that half-century-old holiday TV special that’s always bothered me...honestly, what kind of neighborhood is this where everyone seems to know who you are, even in costume (granted, it was full of holes), and the adults managing the candy of every house drop a rock in your bag while giving the rest of the children candy? (Don’t even get me started on the soul-crushingly depressing Christmas special.) 

Fortunately, this meme redeems the Great Pumpkin storyline. Here, the adults of Charlie Brown’s neighborhood recognize Charlie Brown as the Chosen One, though they dare not speak of this in front of their cruel and hateful children. For Charlie Brown is mankind’s best hope to resist the emergent Great Evil Foretold, who was prophesied to appear to them as a neurotic, but preternaturally articulate and intelligent kindergarten boy with a somewhat off-putting predilection for sucking his thumb while rubbing a dirty blue blanket on one side of his face. 

That Linus and and the eternally outcast Charlie Brown were the next best thing to best friends makes the showdown all the more poignant. For only one can walk away....

State of the Apocalypse: Mid-October 2017 Report

If I’d knocked this post out on Sunday like I sorta wanted to (but not badly enough, apparently) I could have called it the Ides of October Edition. Like that means anything.

Storms over the Sangre de Cristo range. All of these photos were taken during the last days of September, which was rainy, windy, and all around messy for a place that’s supposed to be a high alpine desert.

As it is, its been a stormy start to autumn in the high valley, in more ways than literal. I was excited for the resurgence in pageviews due to my posting photos of the high valley scenery around where I live, and posting it to local groups on Facebook. Once I recovered from my initial giddiness though, I quickly realized I can only do so many photo essays. It’s just as well we had that hard freeze after the 9 October snowstorm to brown all the leaves that had changed. 

In the same general location in west Alamosa Country off of US 160, looking south across the highway.

Looking in the same direction across the same highway, but eight miles west, on the far end of Monte Vista, looking at the swaths of color on the San Juan Mountain foothills.

For a while I felt somewhat obligated to take my camera everywhere I went. It’s rather nice now to just go out on a walk and not have to stop to get a photo of That Really Pretty Thing That Shines in the Light Just So. Although there are plenty of locations worthy of extended shoots that I expect I’ll get to sometime, I know I won’t be throwing photo essays up with enough regularity to justify it as part of my planned Patreon fundraising.

Boughs catching their cold fire beneath gloomy skies.

How to go about running my Patreon campaign has been tormenting me for the last couple of months. I won’t go much more into it than that. It’s just something I have to deal with until it’s dealt with.

The quiet poetry of fallen leaves along a sidewalk. They’ll chatter merrily enough once the wind picks up.

Meanwhile, there’s the book to finish writing, or at least get as far as I can until I absolutely cannot avoid rattling my cup and passing the hat for one more minute. So far, so good on that. I don’t know what else to tell you.

In August I was startled by the bright red flash among the green. Here it’s completely gone over, but by the end of the weekend it was bare.

I like how I’ve got the Ghosts of Autumn Past, Present and Future in this shot.

Like a splash of blood along the fence. Autumn’s sanguinary sacrifice...okay, yeah, that’s troweling it on a bit thick. Enough!

What with the foreshortened autumn after a too-brief summer, finding the waterlogged corpse of a feral kitten in our yard after three straight days of cold rain and wind, and me now closer to 60 than I am 50 years old, the melancholy streak in the fabric of my reality is a little wider than I’d like. Still, we soldier on, and take our rainbows where we find them.

SOON.