.Friday Firesmith

Friday Firesmith – Tis The Damn Season

by

Christmas as a kid in the 60s and 70s could be life altering. A new bike was like being able to show off a winning lottery ticket. A cool toy, like a cowboy hat or a pair of cowboy boots meant you were a cowboy. A BB gun was the end all be all for a kid back then. But everything any of us got, if we got anything at all, was designed to survive us, and it was designed to be used outside.

The exception was books, and I would have rather had a book than a bike with a BB gun mount. Books were eternal. You never outgrew a book. You never allowed one to fall into disrepair or be abused. Books were holy items, at least to me, and it was easy to talk adults into buying books.

Usually, we were out of school from Thanksgiving to Christmas, and going back to school on a cold January day seemed like a prison sentence. Teachers knew we would be jacked up and talkative for a few days, so they would have to paddle the most difficult kids to extort good behavior from the rest.

I would love to know what they were thinking with their boards and derision, and their contempt for anything other than obedient reciters of rote memorization.

A couple of weeks after Christmas the new would begin to wear off, the batteries would die in new toys, and batteries were expensive back then. By the time February arrived, Christmas was fading fast, the cold was keeping us inside, at least while the parents were watching, and we missed the anticipation more than the actual event.

The middle American Christmas was a clean looking, cheerful time, full of shiny lights and smiling adults, along with their kids in matching pajamas and a sea of beautifully wrapped presents. This taught all of us that Christmas was a Holy Event, where the good were rewarded and the poor were not. Ergo, being poor was a sin.

The kids who never had new clothes, or worse, hand me downs from their siblings, and did not come to school with Christmas toy stories, were being supernaturally punished, and we subconsciously knew it. Cliques formed around those with more and none formed around those with less.

Christmas trained us to be wary of those with little or nothing, and it trained us to accept the goodness of those who had more. After all, Christmas was all about religion, and quickly, money and toys were deeply embedded into that religion.

As the years passed, toys were bigger, more expensive, and it was no longer your parents who bought them, and one day we woke up as the buyers of presents, and our ability to buy was either something we were happy about or something we felt a deep sense of wrong if it wasn’t enough.

The star on the top of the tree had been passed to us now, and we had been trained to think of good and evil as a matter of which you could afford.

Merry Christmas,

Mike

Friday Firesmith – Full Moon Snow Globe

by

It’s nearly light enough to read without artificial means this morning. Three o’clock is too early for some people, but for Aqaba, the Cat Unexpected, it’s a good time to be petted. It’s my fault, really, I woke up, felt a warm spot next to my leg, and reached down to see if he was okay. Purrs told me yes, then he got up and walked on top of me, laid down, and I could feel his purring in my chest. My heart and his, close together, our bodies sharing heat in the half lit room.

Wrex Wyatt came over to see if the cat was getting more pettings than he, and suddenly, I was fully awake.

Dogs and the cat get fed, I start coffee and breakfast for me, and then Budlore Amadeus, Jessica Elizabeth (Come Here!) and Aqaba Thomas, go into Mom’s room to sleep. Wrex Wyatt sleeps on my chair.

I go outside, because the full moon calls to me.

59 degrees will keep mosquitoes away, and the night air is calm, still, and the only noise is the sound of the clouds slipping across the sky, blocking the moonlight, then releasing the silver to coat the trees and the pond, once again.

I’m at the bottom of an ocean, it seems. The sky is a 3-D liquid world, the stars almost touchable, the moon just a half mile away, the clouds at my fingertips, and the world transformed into a snow globe of light and shadows.

One large cloud cast the net of its shadow over me, the house, and the trees. I watch as its edge rushes towards me, passes, and the moon shines hard enough for my shadow to play in the grass if it were noon.

I walk to the edge of the yard, and down the lane a bit, deer are standing, five or six whitetails, who sense me, by sight or smell, and they melt away.

A night bird of some sort, an owl likely, passes through the sky, gliding into the woods, death by talon, delivered by air mail, for some unwary rodent.

The moon moves through the sky, shadows dress in new angles, sharpening in some areas, blurring in another, the light cast between the tops of trees now, and slowly, the night sky darkens. The clouds ease away, if the moon is leaving, they will not stay, and the trees alone have the moonshine to play with now. The temperature drops a bit, and the stillness of the night has not long to live.

Back inside, with Wrex and coffee, I can feel the chill of the air in my clothes, feel the light of the moon on my face. The warmth of the house will evaporate it and it will be night again before I can replenish the feeling of the moon.

Take Care,

Mike

Mike writes regularly at The Hickory Head Hermit and we are fortunate to have him contribute to this site as well.