In the Bleak Midwinter

(There's a Christmas song for you, Lisa!)

I looked out the kitchen window into my neighbor's yard yesterday morning and  saw a flash of brilliant red in the midst of the hard brown ground under the drizzly gray sky.  I realized how quickly I have succumbed to the stress and bleakness of a midwestern December and much I have missed in the past few weeks by not getting out for my walks.

It's difficult to maintain any kind of routine as the winter begins to press in, with its demands on health and family relationships, its end-of-semester pressures, and the tensions created by the ever-changing needs and momentum of three young adults (or, as one prefer preferably identify them, three individuals in the throes of advanced adolescence).  It's even harder when the already gray and damp days shorten into pre-solstice darkness and misery.  No wonder people are suddenly frantic to get their holiday lights out.

But there, bravely resisting the inevitable, a red-bellied woodpecker optimistically scavenged my neighbor's dead grass for a meal.  As far as I could tell, she was not concerned about her Christmas shopping, her final paper, the crashed computer system at work, the students who suddenly want help with college essays, her children coming and going at lightning speed, her ill stepmother or her disoriented grandmother.  She was out there in the moment, a flash of brilliant presence in an otherwise darkened morning.