New Year, New Writing

coming soon...

Winter is lean time. Days are short. As soon as the sun hits its peak, the light goes a little bit dimmer, like I can feel it getting a bit darker, colder sometimes, than a few minutes before. Our house faces the path the sun takes each day. In January, it carves a broad horseshoe pattern across the sky. If you happen to be standing on our front porch, it starts over to the left around seven in the morning, and then it swings upwards and then over to the right, where it falls below the horizon around five o’clock. This time of year, it never gets close to passing directly over the house. By summer, though, its path will straighten again to a direct line, east to west, one hundred-and-eighty degrees. I’ll be complaining about the heat.

Even the land goes taut in the cold. Animals are searching a little bit harder for food. Songbirds flock to the places in the yard where I haven’t managed to mow down seed heads of perennials; barn cats harass them. Colors bleed, soften, desaturate. You look up and you see the shapes of trees for what they really are: rangy, antic, probing creatures, limbs forever searching for pockets of sunlight.

Farm work has shrunk to a minimum. There are of course the daily herd checks, the flinging out of hay, water, and shelter in poor weather. I still need to do some clean up in the garden and the field. For the last three years, though, I’ve let the day’s abbreviation invite me to do less on the farm, not more. Spring will come soon enough.

Life and writing have been busy. I’m juggling four different writing deadlines at the moment. Please bear with me: a longer Substack post is coming shortly.

As always, thanks for your support of my work here. It means more than you probably know. More soon.

Jack