Happy New Year

Winter in Erie is definitely a time for solitude and to be at one with nature. Interestingly enough, men go off and do things, like ice-fishing, together but still keep their peace and distance.

There is a quiet beauty that winter creates with its

cool shades of grays and shades of blues as if to provide us all with a serene canvas to decompress the thoughts and many issues of the past year. I like the idea of being bundled up, hands cold, breath stirring the air all the while feeling that every fiber of your body is screaming how very much alive you are.

Three Pieces on the Smoke of Autumn by Carl Sandburg

..I lean on an ash and watch the lights fall, the red ember glow, and three muskrats swim west in a fan of ripples on a sheet of river gold.. . .

Better the blue silence and the gray west,
The autumn mist on the river,
And not any hate and not any love,
And not anything at all of the keen and the deep:
Only the peace of a dog head on a barn floor,
And the new corn shoveled in bushels
And the pumpkins brought from the corn rows,
Umber lights of the dark,
Umber lanterns of the loam dark.

Here a dog head dreams.
Not any hate, not any love.
Not anything but dreams.
Brother of dusk and umber.