Solstice Happenings.

It's dark and cold, the steeple's lit up through the kitchen windows, there's ice in the yards and snow on the roofs. Solstice. Quiet. Took the third wall off the outbuilding, the bad wall, the below-grade wall, and found the sill plate improbably, impossibly, sound. I had expected disaster, rot, fiasco, and instead found only minor infestation and incidental damage. Nothing rising to plague status. New sheathing back up, and now there's just the french-drained front wall to go. Doors and windows in on Wednesday. What surprises could be left? Surely nothing as surprising as the moment I ran the screw gun through—through, friends and fans of puncture wounds—my thumb late this afternoon. In one side and out the other. Had the presence of mind to take myself off the ladder, walk to the back door, knock on the glass, ask AMR to untie my shoes and implement our Emergency Action Plan, which was: run impaled thumb under cold water; try not to faint or die. Apply gauze. Check in the mirror for level of greenness in face. Oh, I was green.

Tomorrow: the home improvement big box, and a tetanus shot at the walk-in clinic near the big box. I am wounded, but lo, I am not slain. Left thumb. I'm right-handed. Could be worse. As through and through puncture wounds go, in fact, this has got to be about the best-case scenario.

My little building out back is meant to be some kind of something I stand up against the rest of the world, a little place to try and make sense of what there is. What must those pre-anything folks have thought when they figured out that today was the bottom of the year, that every day after brought them closer to planting, to harvest, to living in the mouth of the cave instead of back by the fire?

The dog comes in the kitchen, wagging, wants out so she can come back in. This is about all we ever want, isn't it?

Owls out there in the trees. Close.

That low sun today, lowest of the year—there was warmth in it still.