“Naked and cold,” the tree tells me when I ask how it’s been lately.  I tell him he should move down south.  He says he can’t; still has saplings to feed and get through college and his wife just took a job as a table.

Soon enough we’ll be knee deep in snow wondering where the afternoon light ran off to.  Toil through the daylight only to be greeted by the night.  We wait for the prophecy of the Solstice and the day when the sun vanquishes the darkness.

A false sense of nostalgia engulfs me as I stroll through the mounds of discarded memories.  It calls me, pleading me to find something to latch onto, to keep, to cherish.  It’s all second hand – even the nostalgia.  For certain it’s no high-brow antique store.  It’s the home of the heirlooms sold by desperate families to pay for food.  It’s the remains of a recluse’s life no family member bothered to claim.  It’s where our unwanted go in hopes of finding love and affection from another.

Thanksgiving.  Too many things to reflect upon and give thanks for.  Of all the things I am thankful for – a wonderful and loving wife, a career that pays the bills and doesn’t leave me a shell of a human after a long day of work, all of my friends and family, etc, etc – I am most thankful for the realization that we are all one in the same.  Every living being is connected in ways unimaginable.  We are all animated star dust with minor variations on the arrangements of atoms which comprise us.  The bonds which connect us and intertwine our destinies far exceed the forces categorically employed to separate and disconnect us from the greater realm of life.  Love one another and be thankful.  Happy belated Thanksgiving.

The Thanksgiving week brought many adventures our way.  Despite the long travel, traffic, and tryptophanic turkey torpor we were fully immersed in the atmosphere of familial love and fellowship with my entire immediate family.  One of the memories I’ll take with me for years to come will be our foray into indoor rock climbing.  My brother Matt and myself accompanied our nephew, Phil, to his indoor rock climbing haunt in Raleigh, NC.  Despite being in descent physical condition, both Matt and I couldn’t hold a candle to Phil’s dexterity on all things vertical.  Thanks Phil for showing up your uncle and teaching us the best humility comes from minors upstaging self-assured adults.

I’m not sure if photographic artistic ability runs in the family, but I handed over control of my camera to Phil with basic instructions while I hit the walls and this is what he captured.  Very cool work from a very cool nephew.

Off doing society’s dirty work.

Reduced to its simplest elements, it cannot survive.  On an individual basis the species faces extinction.  However, when banded together in groups of three, six, and five nothing imperils their destiny.

Rather than shelling out the ungodly amount of money needed to purchase an authentic Freddy Krueger sweater for his Halloween costume, my ever creative brother Sam decided to spray-paint a sweat shirt with the infamous red and green stripes.  Now my dad’s garden preparation area looks like a crime scene for old Hollywood horror has-beens.

Banish the fallow and steady yourselves for what’s to come.

Two weeks ago in the past has put me two weeks behind in the present.  Grab the DeLorean Marty.