Never Nothing Going On

Would you look at that?

If that isn’t Christmas breathing down our necks, I don’t know what is.

I stepped out on the front porch this morning to give Mother Nature a chance to explain Herself and couldn’t deny Her the fine handiwork.

But for that red and green enduring, it’s white everywhere.

Everything, innocent again.

I’ve a friend back home in Michigan who, if she reads this, will smile. Because I know without having to ask that, with every first snow, she too thinks about chocolate pie and Miracle on 34th Street (the original version).

I’ve another friend in L.A. who reminds me of this old piece, titled ‘Good Timber’:

The tree that never had to fight
For sun and sky and air and light,
But stood out in the open plain
And always got its share of rain,
Never became a forest king
But lived and died a scrubby thing.

The man who never had to toil
To gain and farm his patch of soil,
Who never had to win his share
Of sun and sky and light and air,
Never became a manly man
But lived and died as he began.

Good timber does not grow with ease:
The stronger wind, the stronger trees;
The further sky, the greater length;
The more the storm, the more the strength.
By sun and cold, by rain and snow,
In trees and men good timbers grow.

Where thickest lies the forest growth,
We find the patriarchs of both.
And they hold counsel with the stars
Whose broken branches show the scars
Of many winds and much of strife.
This is the common law of life.

The snow is still falling, bigger flakes now than even half an hour ago. It’s quieting everything and making all the schools call it quits (except ours, of course lol). It’s like a big freeze-frame.

But this photo one more time, which I saw when I stepped out on the porch, way over on the far side of the house and very hidden by the boughs of the giant pine tree towering over it. And the color and the fact of it reminded me, again:

There is never nothing going on.