There must be some Druid pagan sun-worshipping Odin-screaming berserkers in the red-headed ancestral DNA of waepnedwomann and myself for all the excitement and discussion that the up-coming Winter Solstice generates every year. The Winter Solstice's relative importance to a person's life increases or decreases with changes in latitude. While waepnedwomann and myself dwell in a temperate clime, my brother lives north of Fairbanks. He buys batteries, which run his lights and radio, once a year on re-supply run into Fairbanks and divides the batteries, evenly, into two stashes: half the batteries are designated to be used only after the Winter Solstice, so sometimes he goes a week or two without radio and with only very limited light after he has used up the first stash of batteries. Some people say, "Don't mess with Texas." Go north. The people in Alaska need their Wookie-suits just to survive the winter. Going to the laundry-mat is a life-threatening under-taking when it is 45 below. Your morning hike to the outhouse is not as dreaded if you hang the toilet seat behind the wood stove when not in use (toilet seats carved out of styro-foam are now en vogue). When I was in Juneau, forty years ago, the city had a Battered Men's Shelter. Yeah! Winter Solstice!
And then the days start getting longer again as we look forward to summer.
ReplyDeleteThere must be some Druid pagan sun-worshipping Odin-screaming berserkers in the red-headed ancestral DNA of waepnedwomann and myself for all the excitement and discussion that the up-coming Winter Solstice generates every year.
ReplyDeleteThe Winter Solstice's relative importance to a person's life increases or decreases with changes in latitude.
While waepnedwomann and myself dwell in a temperate clime, my brother lives north of Fairbanks. He buys batteries, which run his lights and radio, once a year on re-supply run into Fairbanks and divides the batteries, evenly, into two stashes: half the batteries are designated to be used only after the Winter Solstice, so sometimes he goes a week or two without radio and with only very limited light after he has used up the first stash of batteries.
Some people say, "Don't mess with Texas." Go north. The people in Alaska need their Wookie-suits just to survive the winter. Going to the laundry-mat is a life-threatening under-taking when it is 45 below. Your morning hike to the outhouse is not as dreaded if you hang the toilet seat behind the wood stove when not in use (toilet seats carved out of styro-foam are now en vogue).
When I was in Juneau, forty years ago, the city had a Battered Men's Shelter.
Yeah! Winter Solstice!