All the UPS drivers have gone home to their families with their shorts and their socks, and the gravel road out front is quiet tonight with no crunching of wheels or deliveries: the grocery store is closed but they’re getting ready to go out and freshen the displays, and I had to go in to check on the kids, to ask how it was, this Christmas: and then I went out to the hot tub with the bistro lights to see what was there but it was the same, and remembered this day last year in the west of Cork, in Ireland, St. Stephen’s Day, everything closed, how good it felt to not feel like we had to go anywhere because we couldn’t, and still I went out for a walk, I got rid of our uneaten ham and went up the road to see what I could from the top of the hill: and it looked about the same as it did here today with the fog, the dark and the green (that’s how Dawn describes it), and why we crave such simple things like wool and candles, and sleeping in (and wine), and the sound of a dog by our feet twitching, a cat looking demure—by the time we get to winter it’s like winter’s already over and it’s just a slow, soft launch to spring. The hard part of winter is the loss of light but come January you get a few minutes back every day and it’s not like nature doesn’t notice that, not like we don’t either.

Categories: prose

Tags: Boxing Day, Memoir, pacific northwest, St. Stephen's Day, traveling in Ireland, west Cork, William Pearse writer, winter solstice