December Morning

A beautiful morning, quite cold for our area. There was a thin layer of ice on the decking in the back yard. Inside the house, the new heating system still mystifies me with its quirks. A room that was warm last year with the old system is now chilly. And the reverse. Why? Part of our small house is old, mid-nineteenth century when they thought air space between layers of imperfect siding was plenty insulation. It isn’t, of course, so the old rooms are much colder than the newer ones.

I don’t particularly mind the cold, though. Up here in my attic office, it’s much warmer. The narrow, steep staircase acts like a chimney drawing the heat up. We have vents up here, but generally I keep them closed in winter. The stairs provide more than enough warmth.

The main reason I don’t mind the cold, however, is that out here in the country, there is a picture to look at through every window, and that more than compensates for physical discomforts. I am talking about the simplest things—light on a fence post, morning light falling across an old chair, a rose bush. The day is still, and cardinals fly tandem raids upon the sunflower seeds that LH sets every morning atop the fence posts.

One might almost say on such a day that one is happy.

December View for the day is an abandoned barn on the old Muske farm. Mr. and Mrs. Muske lived on this small acreage into their nineties. Every summer he planted a wonderful vegetable garden, and I'd see Mrs. Muske tending her flowers in one of the old sunbonnets people used to wear.