December 4, 2005
Sunday 

One of the things I like most about being online is the variety of communities I can be part of. Last year, through Holidailies, I found Karen’s journal. Now, through Karen’s, I’ve found Tidings of Danger and Mayhem, a site which provides writing prompts and invites links to what you’ve done with them. As Karen says, as if there weren’t enough to do, here’s another set of holiday-themed prompts to write and post.

For today, their first in December, they introduce the Native American concept of the Winter Count. Members of a tribe would develop pictographs representing the group’s activities over the last year (a “winter”) and someone would have the charge of interpreting the drawings in words, which became part of the tribe’s oral tradition.

In early November I’d set myself the task of reading all of the Novembers in all of the written journals I have, going back to 1983. (1983 to 1992 are in a single folder labeled “prehistory.” From 1992 on I have top-bound spiral notebooks, seventeen completed, a more or less continuous roll of my introspection.) The plan was to read the Decembers in December, the Januarys in January, and so on. Winter Count has changed the plan a little.

Above is one of the pictures from the first roll of film I shot with the Canon EOS Rebel SLR I bought at the beginning of January as my big Christmas present. It’s of three trees that stand on what is known as Stray Winds Farm, a 290-acre tract near where I live that is the last large undeveloped space in Lower Paxton township. It was the home of a local contractor who died a number of years ago. His widow passed away in the last few years, and I have always known that it is only a matter of time until the rolling acreage, some of it planted in wheat, some of it in forest and thicket, some of it in the wide lawn that sweeps down from the house to a pond, would be sold off to developers.

That happened in October. The tract was divided into nine parcels and auctioned. I figured I had at least a year before anything would take place to change the landscape. Developers need time to submit plans to the township and seek permissions and make other arrangements. At the beginning of November, when I first began to feel that my seasonal depression might be significant this year, I made a decision to drive through the tract (east on Paxton Church Road, north on Crums Mill, east again on Macintosh) every single day that it was practical, even if that meant taking a roundabout way to get to the supermarket.

Last week I saw, in a portion of the property about a hundred yards east of the stand of trees pictured, rows of stakes with red flags flying, earth movers, and gashes in the sod that looked like channels ready to receive sewer pipe.

In looking through my pictures and my notebooks from last January, I realized that much of what I was concerned with was change, and trying to hold on to things that might not always be there. I’d photographed a stone fence in the neighborhood I lived in as a very young child, the crèche in the church we attended then, the red doors of my high school and the unusual house not far from there where a classmate lived in those days. My mother’s best friend died in January, her husband of seventy years a few months later. I fell deeper and deeper into a sadness of the soul and the body that it took a health scare in February to snap me out of.

I’m glad I reviewed last January earlier than I’d planned. When I saw the changes to Stray Winds last week I stopped going that way, unwilling to face the inevitable right now. It’s a gray day today, and they say snow is coming tonight. I need to go out to the supermarket for the things I need for my party ham balls and lasagne that I’m ready to prepare and freeze tomorrow. I think I’ll take the long way.