And those who can remember when the night sky was a tapestry
In the afternoon there was eggnog, in the evening there was roast beef, and after dinner with my parents and my husbands and ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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 withspatch 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.
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.
no subject
We went for a walk on Christmas night and I swear the fat crescent moon got lower and brighter as we walked, like it was a boat trying to swing in close to offer us a lift.
no subject
The aurora this year was heavy on currants and sultanas and delicious.
The Mermaid of Black Conch sounds **great**--might have to read that myself. (Robert Macfarlane too, but it's his rivers one that's on my list first.) And a partly oral, hyperlocal history? Wonderful!
People found incredibly thoughtful books! The Robbins Farm Park in particular amazed me. At the moment I am between the Macfarlane and the fenland weird.
Not to mention being blessed by a shooting star.
A grace note.
We went for a walk on Christmas night and I swear the fat crescent moon got lower and brighter as we walked, like it was a boat trying to swing in close to offer us a lift.
I don't doubt it. In Hirsh Glik's "Dos Zangl," it's a זעגלשיף—a ship with sails.