And those who can remember when the night sky was a tapestry

[sovay]

In the afternoon there was eggnog, in the evening there was roast beef, and after dinner with my parents and my husbands and nineweaving, there was plum pudding with an extremely suitable amount of brandy on fire.



At the end of a battering year, it was a small and a nice Christmas. There was thin frozen snow on the ground. In addition to the traditional and necessary socks and a joint gift with spatch of wooden kitchen utensils to replace our archaically cracked spoons, I seem to have ended up with a considerable stack of books including Robert Macfarlane's Ghostways: Two Journeys in Unquiet Places (2020), Monique Roffey's The Mermaid of Black Conch (2020), and the third edition of Oakes Plimpton's Robbins Farm Park, Arlington, Massachusetts: A Local History from the Revolutionary War to the Present (1995/2007) with addenda as late as 2014 pasted into the endpapers by hand, a partly oral history I'd had no idea anyone had ever conducted of a place I have known for sledding and star-watching and the setting off of model rockets since childhood. The moon was a ice-white crescent at 18 °F. After everything, as we were driving home, I saw the unmistakable flare of a shooting star to the northwest, a stray shot of the Ursids perhaps after all.

Comments

[mrissa]

I said when unwrapping my gifts that nothing says Christmas like the English Civil War but Robert Macfarlane may be equally, if differently, festive.

[sovay]

I said when unwrapping my gifts that nothing says Christmas like the English Civil War but Robert Macfarlane may be equally, if differently, festive.

"Look – five forms moving fast through the forests to Ness.

"Look – here it comes, its bones are plastic, it builds itself from pallet slat & bottle-top, rises from sift, is lashed & trussed with fishing line. It is drift: it has cuttlefish nails & sea-poppy horns, it breathes in rain & it breathes out rust.

"Look – here he comes, his bones are willow & he sings in birds. He rises in marsh, slips forwards by ripple & shiver. Between his tree-ribs birds flutter, then swoop ahead to settle, sing, quiver. His head is a raven's, his eyes are wrens' nests. By day from his throat fly finch & fire-crest & in anger he speaks only in swifts.

"Look – here she comes, her skin is lichen & her flesh is moss & her bones are fungi, she breathes in spores & she moves by hyphae. She is a rock-breaker, a tree-speaker, a place-shaper, a world-maker.

"Look – here they come, their eyes are hagstones & their words are shingle. They rise on the shore, rock-cored, flint beings, scattering chert to signal their passage, sending stones through time to foretell their seeings.

"Look – here as comes, who exists only as likeness, moves as mist & also as metal, cannot be grasped or forced, is the strongest & strangest & youngest & oldest of all the five, slipping through trees, past houses, rolled by the wind at years each minute – rolled by the wind as if through time & in it.

"it, he, she, they, as

"All five know where they must go &
with what they must grapple &
where they must go is to the Green Chapel"

FINE TECHNICALLY NEW YEAR'S BUT SERIOUSLY HAPPY CHRISTMAS.

(It is exceedingly weird to read someone with whom I have no other connection but I can tell he read Robert Holdstock just as imprintingly as Susan Cooper and Alan Garner and I'd put money down on Heaney and Hopkins from this passage alone. I want to see what happens when he reads Greer.)