Mid-December Morning

There has been a lull in the rain. Something close to silence falls. A few large drops of water splash from the now bare oaks and the mulberry tree. The thin pine needles release great numbers of small droplets which strike the wet ground with a faint sound paradoxically reminiscent of sifted grains of sand. Directly above, the clouds having thinned, I see their foggy remnants drift in the light of the blurrily revealed gibbous moon. The night is cold and the air fresh and still. It is late. The moonstruck carpet of yellow leaves is like autumns retreating train. I half expect to see it move as if dragged by some aging monarch passing into exile, but it lies there as still as the grass it nearly conceals. Were a breeze to arise at this moment, I would hear it as nothing other than a sigh of the failing season.

The somber mood of a mid-December Sunday morning twilight calls for a somber bit of Sunday verse:

( Winters for Nearing Winter )

(I'm attempting something with a bit of code I just learned to see if it can be used to approximate the typographical format of this poem, since I have no idea how to do such a thing properly with HTML. My apologies to you (and the ghost of Yvor Winters) if my experiment fails.)

Bright

The kitty woke me up today by loudly tossing her breakfast into the water bowl I keep for her in my room. By the time I got it cleaned up, it was too late to go back to sleep, so I got a total of about five hours. At least I got to see sunshine, as a result of these feline antics. Yes, sunshine! The sun came out for the first time in days, and the clouds changed from a gray blanket to fluffy white decorations. The price for this is the usual muddle-headedness I suffer when I have insufficient sleep. Worth it.

I also got connected to the Internet at a time when I would have been sleeping. This didn't turn out so well. There was a brief power outage, and Sluggo crashed, so he's being cranky as revenge for my failure to provide him with adequate protection. Too bad, Sluggo. Blame the cat.

Now I must go make dinner, or become even more muddle-headed from lack of both sleep and food.