The Dark Nights

I looked at the calendar today and thought about Jacque and Becky.  Almost every year I call them and wish them a happy birthday.  Both are former students and good friends who have remained here in the community througout their adult lives.

In fact, Jacque lives over there on Hickey Road, and I ride my bike past her house quite often.  Becky graduated with my sister Barbara, and she was in our 4-H horse group.  With both ladies come wonderful memories and a bagful of laughs. 

They're older today, and I can see from Facebook a few other friends and relatives are celebrating their birthdays today, like my cousin Rich.

Rich, a Chicago-area dentist,  was the first contact of the Aspell clan whom I met face to face after we had rediscovered the family.  

In fact, he was the first person in the clan I ever talked to on the telephone.  That conversation took place when I called him out of the blue and asked if he'd ever heard of a Bud Aspell.

Bud is my mother's cousin whom she happened to mention out of the blue one day when I handed over her mother's death certificate, which had just arrived from the State of Idaho Bureau of Vital Statistics.  Mother didn't know a whole lot about her mother because she died when my mother was 3. 

The death certificate gave her a little more information about why Lily Short Halter had died at a young age---a stomach disorder.  Once she looked at the death certificate, Mother said, "Now, if I could only find Bud Aspell." 

Well, this sleuth wasted no time making a few telephone calls, and within hours on that day back in the early 1990s, Mother was talking to Bud on the telephone---first time since 1945.  They've talked and seen each other a few times since.

Bill and I met Bud, his sister Rae and his son Rich  at O'Hare Airport on a quick stopover to Washington, D.C. back in 1992.  That was before 9-11 when friends and family could visit with travelers in an airport.

In that six-minute meeting, they handed over a letter written to the folks back in Chicago from Lily Halter just two weeks before her death in Wallace, Idaho.  To say the letter and its impact on all of us were poignant is an understatement.

Anyway, we've enjoyed the great good fortune of seeing Aspells fairly regularly since that time, and Rich remains sort of a cousin soulmate of mine because of that very first association.

And, what does that have to do with Dark Nights, readers may be asking.  Nothing.

It's just the digressive gene working overtime today.  Besides thinking about birthdays, including Rich's, today, I looked at the calendar and counted.

Only seven more days of extending darkness and then we'll start seeing the light more and more each day.  The figurative dark clouds will lift and we'll be looking forward again to spending more time outside each day.  

I love Dec. 21 for that reason.  Yes, it's the first day of dreaded winter, but it also signals a finality for six months.  No more going down down down into the abyss of darkness.  

With each day afterward, we claw our way toward spring and summer and fall, and that is a good feeling because of a sense of making positive progress.

Ironically, with all the strange weather we've had this year, the 2010 period of darkness seems to have raced by.   I have not yet fallen into my usual state of winter apathy.  Whine time has kept to a minimum, and that is good.  

Today is a celebration of special birthdays and a day to rejoice that the winter solstice will soon arrive, clearing the way for brighter, longer days ahead.