A loon needs a hundred feet of open water to take off. The lake is frozen over except for a patch of water maybe 10 feet by 30 feet and about a hundred yards out from our shore. In that patch there is a loon who didn't get the memo about migrating. He dives, fishes, splashes, calls out, but cannot escape. The Avian Haven rescue folks have come out a few times, but we can't think of a way to get him out of the water. The ice is probably not thick enough to walk on yet and if we get near him he will probably dive and hide which is how is is avoiding the eagles. Maybe a hovercraft or an ice-breaker or a drone. Or this: Andrew the warden comes down with a PA system and plays the wail call and that gets him to walk to shore. Another possibility is that a good wind comes up in a direction parallel to his slot in the ice and he catches enough lift from it to help him escape. After a week we think that may have happened.

Winter travel is a total crapshoot. The Bourgs and Soleaus are stuck in Philadelphia for a day while we have some freezing rain. But Christmas Day should be good and snowy. It feels odd for the coffee shop to be closed for a week. In the new year we'll add Belgian waffles and live music and maybe a ukulele class.

Cats and christmas trees. Actually it's all about the village and other little realities we construct. 'And yet what good were yesterday's devotions? I affirm and then at midnight the great cat Leaps quickly from the fireside and is gone."

Someone posted this shot of Matthew's horse and buggy parked out front. The filter makes it look like an old postcard.

Snow is a good look for the coffee shop. The awning and railing add more horizontals for the white stuff to gather on. The tree is a live one in a pot and it will get re-flocked with every storm. Inside it's cosy and decorated with Vinny's kindling baskets. This is finals week at Unity College and I anticipate that we'll be serving up a lot of caffeine.

Tomorrow's elections (senate race in Alabama, mayoral race in Lewiston) are the latest test to see if we have hit bottom and began to climb out of the pit or if there is no bottom and we will keep descending. Every election is now a pointer to a recovery of democracy and decency or a further descent into theocratic fascism.

Book Group met at our house last night. Here's what we're reading.

Today was the day to reclaim the blog. Added some photos for the neglected months and here we are in the first week of December and writing actual words in the dark time. Bloody damn Firefox puts out a new version and all my add-ons and development tools go away. It's ok. I'm bonding with Filezilla and Chrome.

I grew up understanding that a certain attitude of Southern Christianity was my parents’ emotional vocabulary before they understood the world and their place within it. I was invited to adopt that as my own point-of-view as well, but I decided even at a very young age that that’s not how it works for me—that what they got from Christianity was what I got from music, which was understanding my relationship to something bigger than I was and something sacred. And sacred, not meaning something precious or limiting, but sacred as things that we honor and devote ourselves to. So, yes, that imagery is part of the vocabulary is what I was taught when I learned to speak in the most fundamental ways as a young person. And I use that imagery to paint whoever I might the same way as using imagery of the natural world. Just by its nature it doesn’t insist that you have this point-of-view versus that one. You use that imagery to speak however you want to. And I use that imagery to say whatever I need to not out of fidelity to any kind of institutional religion of any sort. That’s the lens that I was given to look through. I can still decide where to point my lens. Religious imagery is just like American imagery, just like nature imagery. I come by it honestly; it’s what I grew out of. But it doesn’t contain my thinking, if that makes sense.

Slice of my pm time: put together new rolling prep table which goes where the coat rack was, to Farwells for 3 more coat peg things, helped Diana fork mulch into wet area of her parking lot. She got the mulch because the tree cutter guys turned off her electricity while trimming. Saw Timber Frame farm truck in front of Zooey's shop, stopped in to get an egg supplier price from Arlene, bitched about town government. A natural flow of one thing into another.