December 11 - December 15 Murder

2010-I prepare to leave on a seven week trip- to Florida for a month including a week long cruise in the Western Caribbean, then onto New Jersey for three weeks to watch Judi’s cats while they go away.  I hate to leave the bird feeder though I feel I have prepared them by always letting it really run down between refills so that they have found alternate sources. While warm weather and longer days will be fine, something in me is loathe to leave this particular matrix of time and space and climate that has come, through particular observation, to feel part of my own self.
2011- A long explanation on the radio about why the sunrises stay the same or continue to get later while the sunsets stay the same at this point and then begin to get later. December 8 was called a crossing day and had something to do with the angle of the Earth and the gradual change in the Earth’s orbit(?) over millennia. Then there is something called the analemma, the apparent movement of the sun in the sky if you marked its position every day at the same time. I wish I could visualize this better, but it reminds me of a pendulum's movement as well.
2012-I am so looking forward to staying north this winter. It seems every year just as I begin to get into the quiet winter mind space of close attention, I whisk myself away.
The other morning, a very plump mouse stuck her head out from under the oven and then scampered under the fridge. She poked her head out from under there and watched me for a moment and then kind of ran/waddled under the sofa and disappeared. She was very fat or, more likely, pregnant. She was very adorable. The next day, as I removed the body of a mouse from the trap, I wondered if it was her. When later that afternoon however, she poked her head out from under the stove and pretty much repeated the performance of the day before. I found myself feeling really happy that she wasn’t the mouse in the trap. This situation, and I’ve written about it before, is driving me crazy. I am lover and murderer battling each other in the same body. I don’t want mice in here, I don’t want droppings on the counter and insulation chewed out of the oven to line nests, etc. I could use live traps, but that doesn’t solve the problem of removing a mother from a nest of babies, the gruesome result of which I’ve also written about before. I am not against hunting for food, which can be done with reverence.  But killing because I don’t like or want a creature around is not sitting right with me. But I continue to set the traps and even get more ingenious about it so the escape rate is lower. Diabolical.