In the foothills of the Cascades, outside Seattle, we’re having the snowiest February of the last fifty years. I’ve been able to do my dayjob from home. I’m very lucky for that.
Fantasy, Erotica, Horror
Category: Quotidian life
I have a bit of a religion about snow.
Even when I moved to Seattle, years ago, snow was rarer here than in the Midwest. I wrote three short stories in a row about snow. I’ve written a couple of stories about (not quite) freezing to death in the snow since. The second book in the septet, The Deer Stalker, has a significant set of scenes set near Snoqualmie Pass, in the snow.
This year, my neighborhood has gotten nearly no snow.
But this evening, it’s snowing.
It had to wait to Imbolc, but it’s snowing.
The stuff in the air in the photo is flying snowflakes.
This morning, I puttered in the kitchen, making cranberry sauce for tonight, a little blurred but happy. A watery sun broke the clouds between spates of rain. My housemate, tetchy from physical pain, came in to cook, and we ran into each other emotionally.
I went to see chosen family. Everybody was busy. A fractious child snapped at me. It broke something; I had to go.
Back home, I slunk to the bedroom. I don’t even know what I was crying for—some upwelling of old pain.
My birth family fought every holiday. That’s not unusual. I don’t mean to go looking for old wounds.
I’m not a fan of US Thanksgiving, but I’ve found giving thanks is powerful.
So, thanks. Thanks to my deities and spirits; thanks to my family; thanks to my communities; thanks to all the nonhumans around me, cats and trees and mycelial networks. Thanks to the universe for beauty. Thanks in this time of work for a day of rest.
Too many people, too much work, too much arguing on the internet. I just want to run away to the woods.
And then some days I’m just under construction, and neither here nor there, like my front yard, which my friend is redoing, for love and also for money.
I’m on deadline at work, so I’m running, running, running. I still haven’t sat down and thought through the omens of last weekend. My ancestors and deities are encouraging; I make offerings; I keep running. The cats want me to play more. I want me to play more too.
Like many of us, I have a day job, which I like just fine. And it’s capitalism.
The white on the grass shows the first frost. Last year this time, it had just snowed.
I’m not a very Stars and Stripes kind of girl. I can give you an antler and a stick star that wants to be a pentacle.
I believe in the principles of the Constitution, particularly in the Bill of Rights. In that way, I am a patriot.
Do you know how important the ring finger on your left hand is, if you’re right-handed?
Or, to take another tack: Have you ever looked up cat-bite infections on the internet?
I love my Miss Onion-cat, and I have to say she is a hothead and an extremist. I heard her having a fight Saturday morning. I thought she might have caught a rat.
She had caught that deadly creature Crateribus plasticus, the plastic crate. Her claw was hooked into one, and she couldn’t get it out. She was growling and hissing.