Writing on New Year's Eve

I'm not sure what that post title means, other than that I'm writing - and it's New Year's Eve.

Two and a half years I worked on this memoir. With the draft done, I am trying to find the focus for the page-by-page review and revisions. But I am surrounded by the memoir, where it came from, the journals, original documents, cards and letters, nostalgia things, the genealogies - boxes and piles of the stuff.

How do you put this mutli-generational story away?

But the rooms want clarity; they want some empty space, they want room for a little detachment, a longer view, so that I can open the memoir again from page one...

Author: Jack Frost

Before the clarity comes the chaos,

When words seem to fail...reflections on darkness and light

Winter solstice. We mark the longest darkness here in the north. But the promise of emergent sunlight heralds not yet warmth but rather the beginning, the deepening of the long cold of winter.

My  neighborhood...

How often here in Wisconsin that brilliant returning sunlight of January is accompanied by the coldest temperatures of the year. They go together.

Like today. I live along  Lake Michigan so we didn't get hit by the big snows here, mostly a lot of rain. Under the clouds all week long, our temps have hovered much above normal. The lake is unusually warm for this time of year, which is why we are having trouble turning precipitation into snow. When the sun reappeared just now, as if making a grand entrance on the stage of the solstice, I realized how long its been since we've seen it. And it comes on the tail end of the storm, on the howling winds of a night cast into cold, darkness, and silence as the power went out.