As Semester Ends, Winter Takes Hold

Alison is halfway through her final paper of her first semester in the anthropology program at MSU, I am poised at the foot of a small mountain of essays I regrettably required my students to write, and the north wind is blasting 13 degrees of Fahrenheit across 6 inches of snow at 30 miles an hour.

One day last week, two hours before my hard-drive died dead as a doornail, dead for a ducat, dead, I backed up everything on my computer that I had been warned a month earlier to do--which is to say that I came within two hours of losing two years' work. Similarly, yesterday I dropped the mower deck and mounted the snow blade on the tractor, twelve hours before this year's first significant snow fall arrived. This is some good luck, but I'm definitely shaving too close.

Since gun season closed, some deer have returned from their hiding places in Canada, or wherever they went for those two weeks. You can see how wary they've become: the one above still looks up into my tree stand even when I'm not there. I sat in the tree stand with my bow last evening for ninety minutes or so, knowing the weather would be turning too cold soon. But I did see one deer (80 yards out), which I take as some encouragement to hunt regularly between now and January 1, when all the hunting stops. I am committed to adding one more deer to our freezer before that day comes. (One of my wicked friends [don't tell Alison] has already intimated that a muzzle-loader might be in my future. Shhh . . .)

All of the firewood you see in the photo of the house above was hand-stacked by Alison, who is surely one of my favorite people. My hunting duties this year demanded so much of my "spare time" that I was most lamentably prevented from helping her move some four full cords of wood. And it's so warm and snug in the house today that I just might make her something special for dinner--except she already has something in the slow-cooker. Maybe tomorrow.

On Thursday, we will drive to Chicago, where Alison will work. Jenny flies in on Friday, we all drive home on Saturday, and on Sunday we're having a "Christmas" gathering of Millers and one Krieger. There will be venison stew among the various offerings.

The caterpillar still puzzles my philosophy.