All Saints: A Visit to the Graveyard

Mailboxes at the Cemetery
I like the looks of these . . .
maybe it's not too late to send that letter . . .
"No one gets a thousand years; but if you're lucky you get twenty thousand days and the chance to put down a 'million' things. . . . and one thing I've learned is that the private fingerings of ordinary experience can fill up notebooks as interestingly as musings on great events . . . Time is the strongest thing of all, and the diarist is always fleeing it. He knows he will eventually be run to earth, but his hope is that his book will let each day live beyond its midnight, let it continue somewhere outside its place in a finite row of falling dominoes."

American novelist & critic, Thomas Mallon (b. 1951)
from the introduction to his book
A Book of One's Own: People and Their Diaries


Appearing as the epilogue in Mallon's book
is this fitting thought for All Saints Day:

"Why do we wish to be remembered, even when none remain who looked upon our face? Surely, though it must retain an element of self- consideration, it is a last acknowledgment that we need to be loved; and, having gone from all touch, we trust that memory may, as it were, keep our unseen presence within the borders of day."

Scottish poet & diarist, William Soutar (1898 - 1943)

"It was suddenly a warm afternoon,
a lost summer day in late autumn."
from The Saffron Kitchen
by Yasmin Crowther1 November 2011

Blue Moon

"The start of a decade always seems ten times as auspicious as the beginning of a mere new year." -- Thomas Mallon

Although as children we all practically memorize "The Night Before Christmas" without even trying, this story contains some phrases that surely no child can fully understand. I was always puzzled by "The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow / Gave the luster of mid-day to objects below" and "As dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly, / When they meet with an obstacle mount to the sky." What could those words mean?

At last, after paying closer attention to twenty or thirty autumns, the imagery makes sense, and I am able to visualize the coursers (now that I know coursers = reindeer) rising swiftly like the dry leaves that cyclone up through a swirling fall gust.

And the moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow? The luster of mid-day to objects below? That's what I've seen the past few nights, looking down the street, or out of my window at the brilliant blue-white landscape and stark silhouettes back-lit by the luminous Blue Moon that appeared on New Year's Eve to welcome in 2010, a most auspicious decade . . . as foretold by prophecy!

[Rarely does the Blue Moon appear on New Year’s Eve, but it did this year, well make that last year, the year just passed -- on 31 December 2009. The last Blue Moon on a New Year's Eve was in 1990 -- Ben's first Christmas!]