December is the color of blue

Every month has a color that suits it.   

Now here’s where I may be showing I’m behind times. Perhaps this color thing is in place already.

Maybe some Pantone-like color choice for each month has long been in existence. If so this is the cue for me to say Oh excuse me, and whistle my way offscreen.

If a color scheme for each month hasn’t been devised, however, let’s get going. 

Just as a month has a birthstone and zodiac sign it might as well also have a color assigned it as part of the package deal.

With this in mind it seems to me that December, of all its confreres, has dibs on the color blue.

Deep blue, midnight blue, cobalt blue, all shades of blue fit with December. 

December is frosty blue skies, blue fingertips and mountainsides of blue spruce mantled with snow.

Its color of blue is also the aquamarine of tropical seas. 

There are no coastal shores here but they're our December getaways. They're right up there with hot toddies for easing seasonal aches.

It's sufficient evidence to second the motion that December and blue go hand in (blue suede) glove. 

For those who need more convincing consider blue in other December formats.

Indigo blue dusk blooms in the withdrawal of each short winter day. The indigo hue, which spreads and intensifies with dark, is a tint of blue I propose be given a name, December Sunset.

December dusk quiets the day. Vast blue shadows of snowy ground merge into chilled inky blue silence.

Night's metallic blue glitter is equally a December color. 

Through frosted windows, or stamping numb toes in lined boots in the crunchy snow, we gaze up in wonder at stars piercing with light the cerulean field above our heads.

The color blue is the festive color of the December holidays. It’s a primary color we choose for gift wrap, ribbon and bows. 

It’s the blue bulbs in sets of colored Christmas tree lights. They merrily twinkle or glow as if under a lampshade under a coating of new snow.

It's pale blue candles which rest in greenery on our fireplace mantels. It's designer blue, in all its range of shades, which is a current color trend in party wear. 

It’s the rich royal blue of cashmere pashimas we fling fashionably around our shoulders as we step into our round of December events.  

This time of year, for a multitude of reasons, can bring a person down. “I feel blue,” we say.

The holidays can trigger flashbacks to a time when we were little and life was secure, as it can appear without a doubt as we look back.  

Comparisons between then and now can lead to a blue outbreak. It may be a fleeting thing. It can sometimes persist through the holidays.

At this time we remember loved ones no longer with us. Each grieves in a personal way. Loss can make celebrations going around us ring not with glad peals but dimly as from afar.

For others the season's downcast mood is a response to lack of sun. Daylight is at its lowest in December.

Those who get blue often can pinpoint what makes them react to the season as they do.

Understanding the seasonal effect is good information to have. It doesn’t automatically lift the heaviness some recognize as a constituent of this month.

 We can take steps, by many different aids, to gain peace over regrets or loneliness at this time of connections and community. 

One approach is to shift the word blue away from a symbol for feelings that have gone south (but  not with the vacationers chasing the sun).

We adopt the tactic of using the color blue to our benefit. We utilize blue as our token of joy.  

We can begin using blue to advantage by regarding it like vivid December sky. On it the clouds of care sail away. The sun beams down to warm us through and through.

Ro Giencke

December 20, 2013

 

 

 

Christmas letters

Oh so cold here! Twelve below zero this morning and perfectly bright and sunny in aspect as it gets to be when air pressure is high and all of the Arctic is visiting us.

It’s wonderful reason to be warm inside getting at Christmas letters. The seasonal wishes will be traveling over new laid snow. Upwards of eight inches fell earlier this week, blanketing everything in white.

As the addresses go on the envelopes, the sheet of stamps beside the festive cards marking our mail for postal delivery, the thought that comes is of the friends with whom we mark another year.

Christmas correspondence affirms gratitude for relationships that can make every day feel like a holiday.

It expresses the hope within us for peace, health and happiness. These hopes are universal – they don’t need passports or have certain boundaries imposed on them. This is the time, this end season of the year, to reboot good wishes for our belabored and imperfect but marvelously amazing world.

As I mentally sum up the year to make a Christmas letter not too lengthy and not too lacking I count back through the months. The year 2013 has had ups and downs accompanied by the personal growth that perhaps we were intended for through the hard stuff and the fun events.

The challenges that a year doles out require all of us to dig deep to find reservoirs of courage or perseverance. Successes when they come lift us. They’re the easy things we pick out from the sequence of days. But the ordinary moments give a balance and identity that may be the most important part of us that we share.

One year is life stretching us. It’s like a coach or personal trainer. Its aim, as it appears to me, is to keep us flexed, poised and ready for more.

The Christmas cards being readied for mailing tell me that friends and family are vital ties of human connection. These ones companion us through a year and sometimes through a lifetime. They hear our stories. They share in our joys. With understanding wisdom they place us in our hearts when situations are tough.  

Every day has its routines and often its surprises. Time has deviations of pattern sometimes planned and occasionally coming out of nowhere.

We’re grateful for the rhythm of our days together at this time in our lives. There’s a natural desire to share something of this with others.

Christmas cards help in this. Writing our letters, signing our names to the holly-decorated cards, and stamping the envelopes with the special holiday stamps give us a ritual to make the most of.

If we let it, we can pause and refresh ourselves in the midst of seasonal busyness. By these cards and greetings we invite in and reiterate our allegiance to those in our lives in meaningful ways.

Words can and do make a difference. The amount of mail generated at this season speaks volumes to the value of the personal touch as only each of us can deliver it.

Ro Giencke

December 6, 2013

Gratitude Given and Received

A sense of heightening holiday time prevails as we fill our pantries with the good food to make ready for the Thanksgiving Day table.

The venerable November event inaugurates the season of parties, gatherings and homecomings. It flips the switch on the light that shines cheerfully through the dark period of the year.

A recent email from a friend catches the anticipation and planning in our homes this busy week. 

With mention that she’s hosting her family’s Thanksgiving dinner she concluded by saying she’d concentrate on the food and it will all work out.

It was the last line in her note that widened my smile. She said she best get back to work to get it done. Succinctly she identified the process for successful hosting – food and thoughtful preparation. 

My thoughts will be with her as she and her husband seat their large group at table.

This Thanksgiving, for most of us, we’re in a different place than a year ago. 

This relocation generally doesn’t have to do with another setting. We may very well be tucking our legs under the holiday tablecloth at the same house as before. The surroundings in many cases aren’t changed – but we are.

Life circumstances are good at putting us in a different place. For each of us the preceding twelve months have brought a mix of experiences.

Most of us have known something of joy and gain and loss and pain. We've secured employment and been downsized in careers.

We’ve acquired homes or other possessions. We’ve suffered foreclosures or lost ground in other ways as through diminished health.

Relationships for some have wonderfully begun. Don’t count on fairy tale endings when people are involved. Cessation of romance, trust or any other involvement of the heart is the wound many carry this year.

Great numbers had dreams realized. Never liking to be left out of the equation, disappointment  has a universal tendency to pop up. It introduces discouragement by taking down a hope or raising an obstacle.  

Ah yes, we sit in a different place than at this time last year.

Thanksgiving Day, wisely set aside by our government, should wisely be used by us in return. 

More than the surfeit of food, more than the gorge of Christmas shopping which begins immediately, the day is well used to give thanks for the gift of life we share with others.

Giving thanks for what is in our lives includes time enjoyed and which utilizes the best in us. It takes in good moments of every kind that make more of our days. 

It can be gratitude for someone who has touched some aspect of us. Some of those remembered are with us, some no longer so.

 A year can deal harshly. In these hard situations support generously supplied, or wisdom or patience that gets one through, is the thanksgiving to give concentration to.

Life, as I’ve come to grasp it, isn’t to be understood but to be lived. Giving thanks in all conditions is wired to the entire spectrum of who we are – no matter who we are, where we are or at whose Thanksgiving table we gather.

Thanksgiving Day, by its very reason of creation, calls to the importance of taking time for purposeful consideration.

The day was established as a day of thanksgiving and prayer by our first president George Washington, made a national holiday by 16th president Abraham Lincoln, and the date later set by Congress as the fourth Thursday of November. 

It upholds an important tenet that precedes the founding of our country. It can be traced to the Pilgrims more than a century earlier.

These English colonizers, driven by zeal for God, and perhaps impractical in their idea of how they were to survive on remote rocky shores, hung on. 

With the help of American native neighbors they made a home where they could in faith and future abide. This is what was celebrated at that first Thanksgiving. 

Faith in the present, which in part draws from the past, hope in the future and gratitude given and received continues to be our Thanksgiving today.

Ro Giencke

November 26, 2013

Too Hot to Sleep

November has put a heavy gray lid over us. Days are short and brisk. 

It can get dreary as the routine of gray cloud cover goes on. Short days robbed of daylight by the prevailing gloom begin to be felt.

In Minnesota November is often not a lovely month. 

Thanksgiving helps to redeem it. Pumpkin pie, turkey and dressing, and family and friends gathered, are a great antidote to days edging in. 

For lots of us, as well, anticipation and preparations for the holidays pulsate with stronger energy the darker the days get.

It’s this seasonal mix – dreariness of weather and the homecoming thoughts many of us hold to – that makes November a time to think about dear ones gone, absent from us on earth.

It’s well-spent time to occasionally bring to mind those who’ve left their mark on us, often in lasting ways. 

Perhaps it was this that made my sister think of an old neighbor. She wondered if I knew the year this dear friend of ours passed away.

I did some checking to see if I could find the answer for her. It wakened my curiosity. I wanted to know too. 

This sweet farm woman passed away so long ago. But some folks, while you don’t always have them in mind, you never forget.

The year of her passing was found and the question  solved. But the search kicked off for me vivid memories of pleasant visits with this elderly neighbor when I was a girl.

I liked to walk up her steep hill to sit and chat awhile. They're remembered entirely as forenoon visits.

She often was making bread, or waiting while it set to raise, or was at some stage in baking (cookies and desserts were a given in a farm kitchen in those days) when I called on her.

We sat in her living room. The room had a door which entered from the outside. This was the door used by me.

The door was open to the outdoors in the summer. It made the visiting both informal (green nature and birdsong on the other side of the door screen) and cozy.

I had a seat by the door. She took the easy chair. I don't recall she took her apron off but she may have. Like the flowers outside she lovingly tended, her apron was such a part of her.

Sometimes her husband, every bit as liked by my sister and me as the friend I came to see, joined us from work he was doing outside. 

My visit gave them a chance to "sit a spell." It was a break from tasks which began at early rising. Their work day (as farmers with a dairy herd) revolved around their cows. Milking time took precedence over everything.

We were a companionable trio. Possibly in some way - as I look at it now - the couple were surrogate grandparents for me. Mine lived far away.

Even then, probably, I was something of a historian. The stories my friend told of earlier times were interesting to me.

Her early life which she touched on, perhaps in response to questions from me, have all been forgotten. All but this one about to be shared. 

Why it remains, while the others have faded, is one of the mysteries of memory.

Perhaps it's because it was a story of another summertime – the summertime when she was a girl like me. 

She lived in Iowa then. It was hot Iowa in the summer. Humid nights when temperatures stayed up were common. 

It was before rural electrification. Electric fans to cool a closed-in room weren't an option.You put up with your misery as best you could.

She said on those unbearable nights she slept below the opened window. It was cooler on the floor than in bed. 

On the floor there came across her an occasional stir of air. It was moving air which can be such relief on a beastly hot Midwest night.

Mattresses may have been moved off the beds for more comfortable sleeping. The details elude me now. 

All I remember is how wide eyed I listened picturing my elderly friend brought to the necessity of catching a breath of air below the window sill.

That story illuminated her background as stories of a personal nature can do. 

It’s my connecting point with her and always will be. At ten or so I could image it vividly. It made her past so real.

Ro Giencke

November 17, 2013

 

Beneath the Cottonwood Trees at the River

How good it is to have a line of light at the horizon again as we get up. 

It's like shaking off hibernation to have the earlier sunrise. Hugely appreciated is the setback of our clocks to central standard time.

In time it will be back to dark at 8 AM as days shorten. In the surfeit of the holiday season the late arrival of sunrise doesn't seem as big a deal as now in the industry and energy of fall. So for our newly returned light I am grateful.

Snow comes in later today with totals of 1-4." Weekend temperatures being mild, and foliage remaining surprisingly vivid, we took a drive down the Mississippi River where color is hanging on even better than here. 

The orange, red and brown patchwork  of the wooded bluffs, and the bright yellow leaves of the birch trees in Frontenac State Park above Lake Pepin, made us glad we fit in the color tour which otherwise eluded us as we got busy with October things.

The river road was a coincidental but appropriate prelude to the next thing enjoyed. We had a chance to hear Garrison Keillor. It was at a book signing. 

His new book O, What a Luxury: Verses Lyrical, Vulgar, Pathetic & Profound brought out an appreciative fan base which included us.

Keillor is famously known for A Prairie Home Companion and his Lake Wobegon monologues but it's geographical connection in particular that draws me to his works.

He grew up near the Mississippi River not so far from where our kids were raised. Their play was, in many ways, not very different from his time of youth. 

Although his fields had given way to rows of suburban homes, in which we came as young families to have our piece of land as part of the American dream, the river which marks the eastern boundaries was unchanging. 

The river put something of its timeless quality into the neighborhoods - and I like to think, into the children who grew up there.

Keillor sometimes in those years wrote articles for our big city paper. His pieces may have been on the Opinion page. This I recall less than the interest with which I seized upon any column with his byline.

My favorite articles were his writings about his boyhood in Brooklyn Park. It was essentially country then. 

He biked past cornfields, whiled away hours roaming and exploring and spent extensive time in thought under the big cottonwoods on the banks of the river. 

At the book signing we learned more of his early days. It was a time when a boy could go up in the Foshay Tower, the tallest building in the Twin Cities, and from the top see the countryside that lay about. 

From Hopkins to the west, to the truck farms and potato farms of his area to the north, the city had not yet engulfed the rural.

As a young person (perhaps to earn money for college - he didn't specify) he worked on those farms. He came to know the ache in the small of the back that comes with labor on a potato farm.

Keillor is funny. That's no surprise. It's how clever spills from him that gives him his genius. Clearly it's as natural to him to be quietly humorous as it is to breathe. 

He talks of walks to the school bus in those far off days when the winter elements conditioned you. 

He refers to blizzards in which you couldn't see your hands in front of you. He held up his hands commenting their distance to his face was even closer when he was small.

He tells of school never being canceled. He says this is why Minnesotans are good spellers. 

With school never closing due to weather (his school was Anoka), every lesson plan was carried out, including the emphasis on making excellent spellers out of us.

It was a most enjoyed presentation. Even got my picture with him!

Ro Giencke
November 5, 2013

O is for pumpkins

Writing a letter recently I stopped the pen at October. It was the first word down and at the top of the sheet. 

The O which grandly started out the date caused me to pause a moment.

O is ideal as the starting letter of the month of October it occurred to me. 

October is the month of pumpkins. "O is for pumpkins" may not be alliterative but it's to the point. 

O is the shape of the pumpkins which dominate fall decorations and fill our thoughts with the good tastes of the season.

October in our area has become one big pumpkin patch. Pumpkins sell in stores, at stands in city parking lots (where venders bring their produce) and they glow like big orange bulbs in the growing fields outside town.

Field pumpkins were unknown to me as a girl. I don't recall seeing pumpkins in gardens or planted as a crop. The first October I saw pumpkins in their natural state at the side of the road it took my breath away. It was beautiful to me.

We were small town kids who lived in the country in the summer and went back with the start of school in September. The essence of the season of bringing in the abundance of the land was known to us only in a generic way. 

Country neighbors had the satisfaction of watching pumpkins grow large for bringing in for making pumpkin pies and carving jack o'lanterns. We weren't part of this richness of completion and expectation.

With the return to the classroom summer and the largesse that fulfilled itself in the harvest dropped from our minds. Halloween with bags of candy on the horizon was the harvest we pretty much concentrated on.

Nowadays buying pumpkins in October is like visiting apple orchards. We gravitate to the rituals which, more than the calendar, let us feel the change in the days. 

This year's pumpkin is purchased, carved and rests on our doorstep. It awaits the costumed parade that makes Halloween night go quickly as the treats are handed out.

October is festive with decorations. It holds its own with Christmas soon to come. Pumpkins on doorsteps, tubs of golden chrysanthemums in front yards, cornstalks tied to mailboxes, bright fall foliage and the very red rosehips and other berries which are winter's fruit make it a pretty month.

Pumpkins are also to be seen as canned pumpkin on the grocery aisles. As customers we're being reminded to buy ahead for Thanksgiving Day. It's probably a smart thing to do. 

O is for pumpkins. Perhaps no other month is paired with its motif so perfectly.

Ro Giencke

October 28, 2013