Starting With Rain

 Starting With Rain

 

 

It's 12/14, Tuesday morning, and this is the first really rainy day I've seen in quite a long time. The tarp that serves as a canopy over the carving table is old. I have to get a new one; this one leaks, and drips. Everything's all wet. I got nothing done yesterday, either. Too cold, and windy. So I'm sitting here trying to type. But Buddy the Cat decided to sit on the keyboard. Then he left, and The Most Mysterious Skinamalink took his place. I'm typing around the cat. Mary is in and out fixing Christmas decorations, and doing laundry. Rainy day stuff.

Most of the week was taken up with getting the house together for our Christmas party. Mary has a gift for turning  the simplest  preparations into art. She is a practicing Buddhist, but she goes all in when it comes to Christmas.  She took what we had on hand, some strings of lights, battery powered candles, some teddy bears, and tinsel garland, and turned the living room into a department store window.

We worked together preparing  tacos for the party,  I chopped onions and cilantro, and barbecued the chicken and beef on mezquite charcoal. Mary did the beans and rice, and I seared the tortillas. We laid out a feast for our friends. Holly brought her guitar, and everyone sang. Food, drink, friends, a lot of candy, a little music, a lot of talk. It's been a couple years, now but our home remains a sanctuary from the madness of this age. And this Christmas, oddly enough, feels more like Christmas than any of the seasons I can recall since childhood. As I type this I think of the old Peanuts Christmas cartoon, where Linus, in his understated wisdom, recites the passage from Luke. This is the core, and the heart of the season. We, all of us, know this in our heads, but for me, it has taken the better part of a lifetime to have that knowledge migrate to the heart. I could gripe that that core is buried under the noxious slime of our current culture, but I suppose it's always been so. Christmas back in '63 wasn't about the plastic robot from television. Christmas '21 is not about Amazon, or supply chains. I know that now, in a way I could not know before. I guess that's what you get for sayin' yer prayers.

 I haven't made a lot of progress on the stone. Weather, and short days cut down the available working time.

 

Even so, I'm happy with the way this piece is coming out. Going forward, the next phase will be teasing out the hollows in, and behind  the long 'snout' that drops down the front from the crest of the carving.

 

 

   Soon I'll be making the through-cuts along those troughs, and hollowing out the ball, and claw looking thing in the front. But it won't happen fast. It's Christmas. We got rain coming. It is winter, after all.

I wish for a joyous Christmas for my few readers here at the WFB. We'll do our footwork, say our prayers, and one day, God willing, see an en end to this madness and evil.