“Write it on your heart that every day is the best day of the year.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson
“What a wonderful thought it is that some of the best days of our lives haven’t even happened yet.” - Anne Frank
The newest of the evening stars slip slowly over the eastern horizon of the now naked and weathered White Oak Mountain. The first stars of the evening in the eastern sky are rather dim but still brightly evident as far away lights. How far away exactly is seemingly incalculable, but surely the source of the light generated is further away than is humanly fathomable. Yet to the naked eye, they are still there. Again, they are still there.
There are evening clouds in the now starkly dark old oak and the walnut. The branches look twisted and odd in the dark light of the ending day. It appears that the branches have been bent, twisted, maybe even ravaged by July lightening one, too many times. Still alive, but oddly bereft of any semblance of straightness, as if some momentous source has spared them for another winter, bared of the leaves and nuts, that now litter or nourish their steady roots.
The grill slowly smokes the venison tenderloin wrapped in bacon. You’re careful to stand out of the way of the dense, shoulder high, breeze blown plume of meat smoke. The faded camouflaged hunting coat once again so ably keeps the late chill of December at bay.
Maybe tomorrow the coat will sit in some high tree and hope for the second rut to drag some buck by the ancient White Oak. There’s always a second rut. You convince yourself that there’s always a second rut as the year glides with the moon away.
The coat has to be kept safe from the grease of the pork. It’s, the lucky coat, in your mind. Some strange kind of a lucky piece of stitched thread maybe. A hunting covering that you’ve refrained from washing since you somehow decided it fostered the thing you believe is luck.
You’ve come to some errant conclusion that this particular piece of cloth is oddly impervious to stinking. Likely it was the one you were wearing earlier in the season when the grilling tenderloin was harvested. Maybe it’s seasons past that it was imbued with some kind of mysterious sort of charm. But somehow, you’ve decided it’s a lucky sort of a thing that magically provides some sort of an edge.
Odd how it is that a garment can be deemed to provide a much needed edge. Hats come to mind. Stained hats, dirty and sweat stained hats, hats that smell of forehead grease and toil, but still retain the strange gift you believe is luck. Don’t stink these pieces of magical cloth up with the sweet smell of hot bacon you tell yourself. They might bring more luck. A simple charm that is needed in the rapidly coming new year.
You watch the stars glide over the ancient mountain as the now strangely silver clouds drift through the twisted branches of the trees. The clouds are now silver instead of the stark puff ball white like they were in the hours earlier, before the stars illuminated the night sky. You’re waiting on the illumination of the full moon to rise as the star of the evening supper sizzles on the grill.
The moon is what the mystical solunar tables claim is waxing. Maybe 98 percent full, maybe 95 percent full, but the peak of the fullness is irrelevant and unimportant at this point. It’s the last, fading full moon of the year. You try to comprehend that fact, the last full moon of the year. Another year slips away as the moon slides slowly in view through the barren trees on the mountain. The waxing moon shines through the silver clouds of the star light and the smoldering smells of the cooking bacon.
Another year fades in the cooking meat smoke and the starlight. The old waxing moon amplifies the end.
You try to take stock of what the last year provided. It’s hard to take stock. It comes in fits, taking stock. You look back at other years, previous years, and the taking stock becomes more convoluted the more you try to take the look back at the good and the other. You don’t really know why this happens, this taking stock. It takes focus. This requires some brutally fierce amount of focus at times. But, it’s worth the effort. And, slowly, so slowly, the last year comes into some true but foggy focus. One recent year or two at a time, it comes into clarity of vision, when you finally manage to bare down on it.
To borrow a phrase from Anthony Doer’s “All the Light We Cannot See” - “Both ride spirals of memory.”
The last moon of the year, in the bare tree branches, does just that. You’re never sure why. But, the last moon of the year spirals the memories. A warm fire, high in the Rockies, spirals to mind. Trout sputtering in wood fired hot grease over a campfire, a buck unaware, a fox squirrel asleep at the foot of your tree stand, all flood the minds’ memories. Spiraling the memories in the waxing of the last moon of the rapidly fading year.
We hear John Prine, singing in the silver clouds of the evening stars;
“All the snow has turned to water
Christmas days have come and gone
Broken toys and faded colors
Are all that’s left to linger on.”
[Chorus]
“Memories they can’t be boughten
They can’t be won at carnivals for free
Well it took me years
To get those souvenirs
And I don’t know how they slipped away from me.”
Charles Darwin writes in “The Voyage of the ‘Beagle' — Delight itself is a weak term to express the feeling a naturalist has, for the first time, wondering by himself into a Brazilian rain forest.”
WOMR Notes: Here’s to your spiraling memories of 2023! May 2024 bring you many more! Thanks for your many kind words in 2023!
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