Winter

I wonder how I will deal with winter this winter. I don’t like it. I looked at the weather map to ascertain Christmas in Wisconsin. Christmas in NE Ohio should be quite nice and thirty-ish. Wisconsin is a longitude higher, and colder. Stuck in there between two giant, cold bodies of water, where the soil is thinner and the growing season shorter.

Ann lives in the midst of a lot of farmland, and I must say, the crops look mighty fine in the summer. You can perhaps see, I’m close to the end of Prairie Fires. It draws together close to a century of research and history of the geography of the Great Plains. The impact on natives of western expansion is treated, though lightly. However, that was not the intent of the book, or those were the sections that caught me dozing. I will be reading it again. I’m taking Seedtime on the Cumberland to Wisconsin to read.

The good news about winter; it is the zenith of fall, the apex of the roll to green leaves and spring flowers; the beginning of getting through January and February. That makes the news from Washington no better, and does not lighten our responsibility to resist and protest. I read a small bit about a resister getting through to his congressional office to lodge his protest, being heard and having his comments written down.

Perhaps we are past the days of Paul Ryan shutting down his devices of communication, resulting in postcards to his driveway. But, no time is a good time to lighten up on DACA, tax overhaul fallout, continuing sexual misconduct allegations.  I thought about America First, the other day, as America leading the way among a bunch of rutting deer, banging heads, tangling anglers and leading a world display of strutting, pardon the diminution of nouns, cocks.

Civility, decency, diplomacy are diminished or discarded. This country once set a better standard for behavior. Now we seem to be leading the charge of oafs. Holding our cell phones, I might add. Let’s all have a nice Christmas and New Year, and then start the roll again.  Let every representative know our collective opinion of this tax bill, and ACA repeal.

That seems to be my holiday wish, lucid or not. We will enjoy Laura’s first plane ride and have a good week in Wisconsin. Along with my new book, perhaps I’ll learn how to use my tablet. And, remember my Blogger password.

I could not invent a metaphor for winter that involved a ground level snowball in Washington, D.C., so enjoy Frazz for the intrinsic meaning you always find.