The Solstice: Still a Miracle
Borland, Hal
The Solstice: Still a Miracle HAL BORLAND I would like to think of December as a beautiful woman with starlight in her frosted hair, a snowflake on her cheek, and a sprig of holly on her...
...This will p a s s . " It did, of course...
...Thanksgiving was just another holiday with a Sunday dinner somewhat glorified with cranberry sauce and mincemeat pie...
...And t h e next day was Christmas...
...Or the winter solstice, which is the milepost of the year...
...For skiers, yes...
...Mashed turnip, as I was saying...
...t h e reality and not t h e hoop-la, is returning...
...And from the blight that now and then attacks oak t r e e s . One of our oaks began to shed bark, like dead skin sloughing from a wound, and there was nothing to do but take it down...
...The figures don't seem to have taken much account of the young drop-outs who pair off and build a shanty in the woods for an "experience...
...We had to wait until frost had somewhat loosened its fibers to wedge it apart...
...We remember the hush of Christmas Eve, the visit to the village church for the program...
...Life somehow made mysteriously meaningful...
...Rutabagas...
...The solstice is a time when the sun makes its apparent turn and cuts a wider arc across t h e sky again, toward the equinox and spring...
...A turkey stuffed and roasted to perfection...
...Federal officials commenting on the movement give major credit to retirement and recreation but admit that they are merely speculating...
...Some were simply people who had had enough city life and wanted to get back to the reality of the land...
...The star-shot silence of a December night, the barking of a farm dog down t h e road at dusk, the insistent questioning call of a barred owl in the hillside pines...
...The fact that after the solstice the days began to lengthen was a part of the whole picture, expected but still miraculous...
...I exclaimed.'4 Where I come from, only cows eat them...
...And those who go back to the land are discovering autumn and winter again...
...With small gifts and with an almost ceremonial dinner, a feast...
...Where is the miracle in hearing Jingle Bells every time you turn on the radio...
...Much farther back than that, of course...
...It was t h r e e feet through at the butt and tough as rawhide to split...
...The winter solstice occurs on December 22, at about a quarter to eight in the morning here...
...The light in her eyes is as young as this morning and as old as time...
...The horse knows the way To carry the sleigh Through the white and drifted snow...
...Let's see...
...I heard about it, of course, in small boyhood...
...So we shall pass Thanksgiving, a late Thanksgiving this year, and watch the days shrink toward the year's minimum...
...In either the second or third grade at school we sang, in our barnyard-hen voices, a song called Thanksgiving Day: Over the river and through the wood To Grandfather's house we go...
...Green peas...
...It may even be one of the unspoken reasons for the migration from the cities...
...Before radio, and then television, screamed that you must buy Christmas in November...
...There still are almost three times as many people in the cities as in the country, a fact that is obvious in much of the legislative action taken in Washington...
...What is miraculous about meeting a tired old man in false white beard and cheap red suit on every other street corner...
...Oysters to start, an oyster cocktail...
...I suspect that Christmas is one ofthose events that can't b e diluted satisfactorily...
...Ly dia Maria Child wrote that song, and she was born in 1802.1 didn't think about who wrote it or when at that time, but I did wonder how come and where there was enough white and drifted snow on Thanksgiving for a sleigh ride...
...But all this winter we shall be warming our house with sunlight stored in that tree for close to one hundred years, the simplest answer I know to the basic question of what to do about the energy shortage: Encourage and trees and cherish the woodlands...
...I have yet to meet a person who has retired to move to upper Michigan or Wisconsin and live comfortably and carefree...
...In t h e West, wherelgrewup, Christmas was t h e year's major event, with everything from a special program at the church on Christmas Eve to gifts in the morning, a feast sometime around midday, and a family gathering...
...Then the Census Bureau looked into the matter and announced that for the past five years the cities have been losing population and the rural areas have been gaining...
...Now even I admit that it isn't Thanksgiving without cow turnips, boiled, mashed, buttered, seasoned Barbara's New England way...
...We never had enough snow on Thanksgiving in our part of Colorado for a good snowball fight...
...Copyright© 1975 by Hal Borland...
...A turning year...
...A wise old woman I used to know said to me, at a painful time in my life, " I t ' s my experience you have to know the low to appreciate the high...
...A winter month...
...Perhaps that is one factor in what I spoke of as the dimming of the glow of December...
...Snow didn't come until December...
...We aren't about to become a rural nation again...
...It was Thomas Jefferson, as I recall, who first advocated a rural nation and distrusted the cities for leadership...
...And the mountain country of New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana—the heart of the Rocky Mountain area being populated by the newcomers— is not exactly a health resort for people of retirement age...
...So we turn off all the electronic gadgets of communication, all t h e technological miracles, and go back to our own remembering, which is itself miraculous...
...Few people go to the upper Great Lakes area for any recreation except canoeing and fishing, both seasonal sports...
...It is 30 below in Medicine Hat...
...She put a generous helping on my plate...
...This was a real move-out...
...It is a stiff-tailed young squirrel scrambling up an oak tree, and a maskfaced coon in the moonlit cornfield listening for the hounds...
...It is a blizzard in Wyoming, a gale on t h e Great Lakes, and t h e Berkshires frosted like a plate of cupcakes...
...Wait a minute...
...We shall b e grateful for firewood cut in August and now slowly burning in the fireplace, not a betrayal of the trees but salvage from the windstorm...
...It is ground pine, older than the hills where it grows, and it is a seedling maple from two years ago still clinging to one last scarlet leaf...
...Yellow t u r n i p , " she said, flushing...
...She is a kind of summation not only of one year but of all years' ending...
...So how is it heralded...
...It reaches all t h e way back to the Plymouth colony and the 1620s...
...But we obviously can go back to the land when the cities become unbearable...
...The Solstice: Still a Miracle HAL BORLAND I would like to think of December as a beautiful woman with starlight in her frosted hair, a snowflake on her cheek, and a sprig of holly on her stormcoat...
...I find my small-boy yearning for Christmas...
...Since the pagans, alomost without exception, worshipped the sun as the visible manifestation of their deity, the solstice was a religious event of great importance, a kind of holy resurrection...
...Maybe some of us want Thanksgiving still to b e an occasion in its own right, not merely a send-off for the year's biggest spending spree...
...But t h e whole thing was reversed in New England, or at least in that part of New England to which I was introduced as a Yankee-in-law when Barbara and I were married...
...Snow belonged to Christmas, and neither of t h em encroached on Thanksgiving or November...
...I was trying to say something about the year's short days and the winter solstice...
...One is in the southern Appalachians, another is in t h e Ozark country of lower Missouri, a third is the upper Great Lakes country, and the fourth is the Rocky Mountain upland from Montana and Idaho all the way to New Mexico...
...But that was before life became so complicated, or so populous...
...The miracle of sunrise, of a fresh snowdrift in a meadow, of clear ice at the edge of a brook—the miraculous in everyday life...
...Before we passed the 200 million population mark...
...For the most part, the migrants from the cities seem to have moved to four essentially rural areas...
...Won't you even try them...
...And nuts, mints, and coffee in front of the fire...
...I tried them...
...Turnip...
...I don't know why, but the old shimmer that began a week or so after Thanksgiving and spread slowly to a great glow and glitter, emotional as well as electrical, the last few days before Christmas—that glow has dimmed...
...Hal Borland, the distinguished nature writer, grew up in Colorado andnow lives in the foothills of the Berkshires in western Connecticut He is the author of fourteen books and contributes a chapter, "AFreeMarginfor Birds, "in the forthcoming Audubon book, ''The Pleasure of Birds (Lippincott...
...The evening was hushed, an evening of great events...
...We can't go back to Jefferson and his day, despite the costumes and the oratory of the bicentennial charades...
...The arrival of Santa Claus and the distribution of the little bags of candy, the oranges, the inconsequential little gifts...
...Some of those who moved out were retired people looking for open country, clean air and, undoubtedly, lower living costs...
...That was Thanksgiving in the New England way of Barbara's childhood and growing-up...
...But t h e December I know and live with is bare maples and warm green pines and hemlocks, weed stems rustling in a ruthless wind, and partridgeberry gleaming on the wooded hillside...
...Most of them were and planned to continue to be members of our society...
...It wasn't the candy or the oranges...
...Boiled onions, creamed and buttered...
...And every year I have known has brought the fifteen-hour June days after we have lived through the nine-hour days of deep December...
...The sense of the miraculous has been cheapened if not destroyed in so many places...
...A good many answers to complex problems simplify themselves, once you examine them in a rural context...
...By a demand that you buy your Christmas turkey at t h e Downtown Market, by a last-minute pitch for 4 ' a diamond for Christmas," by a welcome to skiers at the High-Hoe Ski Lodge for the whole holiday weekend...
...I wonder now if that change, that insistence on a hopped-up tempo of life and time, isn't one reason for t h e population shift that has been going on the past ten years or so...
...Many of them, as vacationers, knew spring or summer in the open...
...Then the walk home in t h e crisp night, stars bright as they were over the hills near Bethlehem, snow brittle underfoot, the Christmas songs still echoing in your head...
...But not Thanksgiving and Christmas...
...It is ice on t he pond and lichen on t he rock and a flock of chickadees in t he pine thicket...
...Anyway, they were moving out in noticeable numbers, and quite a few were coming to New England...
...I wonder if it didn't start to lose its warmth when high-pressure business began pushing the Christmas theme in mid-November...
...But even the skiing isn't much to brag about in July and August...
...The songs by the children, and the big tree, and the sense of wonders...
...The day came and the feast was spread...
...They didn't want to b e mugged or raped or shot at or stabbed in pig-sty streets where $17,000-ayear trash collectors were on strike...
...My guess is that they are wrong...
...She has known youth and love and age and heart-hurt, and she can still smile, knowing that life is not all one or the other...
...Or could it be that t h e wrinkles in my face have begun to show in my biases...
...And it wasn't merely the drift from the inner cities to the suburbs...
...Mincemeat pie, which didn't belong on that menu but was special for me...
...But that is a rural solution and not much use in the cities...
...I knew that quite a few city folk were restless and that a good many of them were moving out to rural areas some time before the roof began to cave in in New York City, of those who moved out didn't know much about the finances of the cities...
...Turnip...
...Not those cow-turnips you were looking at in the market day before yesterday...
...Somehow it created the miracle, the belief in the reality of a miracle we called Christmas...
...Christmas celebration was frowned upon, in this corner of the world, until the Nineteenth Century, but Thanksgiving was an institution here long before it became a national holiday...
...A cup of clear soup...
...As Thanksgiving approached she kept talking about it as though it were—well, Christmas...
...But you have to look it up in t h e almanac to know, though it is the turn of the year and the start of the cycle that leads to spring, one of the great and enduring miracles of this world...
...Some were younger people willing to work for less and live close to recreational areas...
...It was the whole evening, even if you were a teen-ager or an adult...
...I fixed them special...
...I finished my helping...
...They weren't half bad...
...And it ended with the exultant shout, "Hurray for Thanksgiving Day...
...They just didn't like living conditions there...
...And turkey gravy, cranberry sauce, plum pudding...
Vol. 39 • December 1975 • No. 12
