Thursday, December 29, 2011

At 5:45 p.m., I was a grownup walking quickly through the supermarket parking lot, about to head home to make dinner.
The child in me saw something tiny and white in the air and stopped: Was that … a snowflake?
It was!
Giddiness ensued.
The flakes were few in number, nothing for the grownup in me to fret about (visions of shoveling did not plod through my head).
I watched them fly in the wind. Against the backdrop of headlights, they zipped like shooting stars. 
When I got home I announced the snow's arrival to my son and his girlfriend. She reacted like I did, and the two of us went out on the back porch to see the last few flakes.
Snow is magical.
I may need a reminder of that in the bleak mid-winter.

Wednesday, December 28, 2011

Sweet Christmas Eve memories ...

"Decking" dough is a group effort.

Friday, December 23, 2011

One of our favorite sunset spots: over the bay in Strathmere.
As I opened the refrigerator the other night, I knocked one of the magnets on the door, and the photo it was holding -- beautiful fall leaves -- floated to the floor.
  What timing, I thought. A symbol of fall falls just as the winter solstice approaches.
For the record, that solstice slipped in at 12:30 a.m. yesterday, the shortest day of the year.
It's officially winter, and the good news is that from here on in, the sun sets a little bit later each day.
Let there be light.

Monday, December 5, 2011

My brain is ever-open to word play.

One of my current obsessions is listening to murder mysteries. 
I listen in the car, or while cooking dinner, and even some nights before I fall asleep. (I think of it as a grownup version of a bedtime story.)
What the ear hears and what the eye would see on the page don't always match, which means the image that comes across by listening may not be quite what the writer had in mind.
Case in point: a line from "The Murder Room," by P.D. James.
In the book, Adam Dalgliesh, a commander at New Scotland Yard (and one of my favorite tragic hero detectives), is about to interview two women connected to a recent murder. This is what I heard:
"Moving toward the front of the house, he saw with surprise that the door was now a jar."
Can't blame him there. I'd be surprised if I saw that, too.
Of course, Ms. James was simply saying that the door was slightly open, but my brain, always on the lookout for an excuse to laugh, offered up a completely different image.
A bit of crime and pun-ishment?
(Couldn't resist that one.)