December Stillness

 Here we are in the Holiday Season with surging COVID cases and deaths, the presidential election still contested by the current White House occupant, and COVID vaccines being distributed. To paraphrase my daughter, the distribution is "sketchy."  Dr. Fauci  says to continue wearing your mask, like this snowperson.

This is the first holiday in about fifty years without our dear friend, Don. Acute COVID pneumonia contributed to his death. I met Don in the Fall of 1969, when we began teaching at West Bend High School. Don taught math and I taught social studies. On countless occasions over the years, Ann and I enjoyed the love and joy of Don along with his wife, Kay.  For years Don and Kay, along with other of our good friends, celebrated New Year's Eve. COVID means we will not be gathering in person and yet Don will be missed. 

On the celestial plane shortly after sunset on December 21st and on solstice, Jupiter and Saturn will appear to pass each other in the southwest sky creating the illusion of a brilliant star. This heavenly show happens every 800 years and may explain the Star of Bethlehem in the story of Christ's birth. 

In the meantime back on earth Monroe Street establishments continue to adapt. Here are holiday shoppers lining up and patiently waiting to enter Orange Tree Imports, a popular gift and gourmet shop that has  been on Monroe Street for 45 years. I ordered Ann's presents online with pickup on the back porch.

One of her gifts, a special brand of cocoa, was already out of stock. Hopefully this indicates that Orange Tree is surviving. 

Taste of India, a restaurant across the street from our apartment, seems to be doing okay.  Once the red "open" sign lights up, I can see from my office windows a steady stream of customers leaving their cars to pick their orders.   

So much is happening during our epic times. Yet there is stillness in December as underscored by that popular carol, Silent Night and the following poem. I offer this poem for your reflection about the benefits of stillness and especially the kind that penetrates December. 

December Stillness 

December stillness, teach me through your trees

That loom along the west, one with the land,

The veiled evangel of your mysteries.

While nightfall, sad and spacious, on the down

Deepens, and dusk imbues me where I stand,

With grave diminishings of green and brown,

Speak roofless Nature, your instinctive words;

And let me learn your secret from the sky,

Following a flock of steadfast journeying birds

In lone remote migration beating by.

December stillness, crossed by twilight roads,

Teach me to travel far and bear my loads.

By Siegfried Sassoon

Stillness as a teacher strikes me as being very appropriate for this atypical year.  Which brings me to what I relearned from our atypical Christmas tree. This year no Frasier Fir covered with sparkling white lights and the many ornaments collected over the years. We would typically spend hours decorating our tree after buying it from UW Forestry Club's lot within the Stock Pavilion.  

Stillness and giving up the Frasier Fir has reminded me of the importance of gratitude. Here's our "gratitude tree" with ornaments from the 1950s, several bird ornaments mostly purchased over the years from Orange Imports on Monroe Street, and small cards cut from wrapping paper. On each card Ann and I wrote our own statements of gratitude. We anticipate that our daughter, Emily, will send some which we will add. 

The vase is from Ann's beloved Mom. The plastic 1940s snowman is from Ann's Uncle Johnnie and Aunt Gertie.  We found it when we cleaned our their Milwaukee apartment after Uncle Johnnie died in 1985. Johnnie was always included in a Christmas Day gathering at Ethel's, my beloved mother-in-law's Brookfield home. 

Ethel loved the holidays and always prepared a great feast. The main dish was kolbas, a Hungarian sausage. Dessert was kalacs (Hungarian stollen) and her 15 different kinds of cookies made well in advance. She shared tins of cookies with relatives and friends. I liked all of Ethel's cookies with Pecan Fingers and Thumb Prints being my favorites. 

Sometime during the morning of  Christmas, Ann and I would pick up Uncle Johnnie at his Milwaukee flat. Shortly after we arrived, Uncle Johnnie always served us Brandy Manhattans mixed in a purple glass pitcher and poured in matching glasses sitting on a silver tray. My days of enjoying alcoholic beverages are long gone.  Yet the joy of those past Christmas celebrations sustains me while reminding me of how far I have traveled since those Christmas days on our family farm. 

Living in our neighborhood also sustains me.  Here are a two scenes from my daily walks through the neighborhood. 

Monroe Street Framing offers a nostalgic winter scene on the front window. The brick building in the background is the reflection of the building across the street. The ice skaters remind me of the joy of ice skating with Emily on the Vilas Park lagoon. Another favorite winter activity with young Emily was sledding down the hill that was once on the Edgewood campus where the science building and parking lot are now located. I would pull Emily from our house on Keyes Av to the hill on her red plastic sled.

A few blocks from our apartment now are these colorful ornaments hanging in a front yard tree along with others. You can see how much snow (about five inches) we received last weekend.  The picture was taken the day after the storm moved on. 

Our neighbors love to decorate while being somewhat restrained and modest. You wouldn't fine extravagant displays spanning the entire lot or covering the entire front of a home.  Garlands with small lights attached to white picket fences, a few lighted figures, and tree ornaments are more the norm. 

I belong to a small group of fellow Unitarians who meet twice a month. A statement of gratitude for this group, referred to as a "Chalice Group," hangs on our gratitude tree. Before COVID, Barb V. and I carpooled to meetings. During this time of the year we would sometimes rate the Christmas displays as we passed by. Those that were on the skimpy side were rated "why bother" whereas those that were considered too lavish received "over the top/too much." Ones we considered just right were designated as "tasteful."   Most of my neighbors' outdoor display would fall in the "tasteful" group. 

Stillness and having a "tasteful" appearance now characterizes Prospect Gardens. The December stillness of Prospect Gardens evokes a sense of peace while underscoring the value of patience. I patiently wait for spring to learn what will emerge and unfold. Here's the snow covered hosta gardens.

This picture caused me to wonder about the winters that my maternal great-grandparents Frank and Josephine Lepak experienced after they moved to the wilderness of Wisconsin. At that time we did not have standardized time zones. In November 18, 1883, railroads began using a standard time system involving today's four time zones which resulted in all clocks within a time zone to be synchronized. 

The couple arrived in Milwaukee on June 11, 1872 shortly after being married in January from what is now Brusy, Poland. They were visiting Frank’s brother, Michael, and decided to stay.  During the fall of 1877, Frank and Michael, along with two other Milwaukee Polish families, sold their homes and moved to uncleared land they purchased near Hoffa Park, about ten miles northeast of Pulaski.  The men during the summer had built temporary shelters before the women and children arrived.  

According to Wisconsin 1879 census records, Frank owned 80 acres with 20 being cleared. The family produced food to survive as they cleared the land using oxen. The same records show that the family made 100 pounds of butter from the milk of one cow and chickens laid 40 dozens of eggs. Frank harvested 3 acres of wheat yielding 38 bushels. The garden produced Indian Corn, Canada Peas, and beans. One-half acre of potatoes yielded 50 bushels. 

So what was in like during those winters without standardized time? Life must have slowed yet survival required vigilance. Frank died in 1929, a prosperous farmer owning 120 acres. The couple had fifteen children.  Here they are in their old age.

Both Frank and Josephine certainly experienced more stillness during winter compared to our noisy 21st century globalization era in which  standardized time is broken into nanoseconds. 

Prospect Gardens, especially after a heavy snow storm, provides some stillness. Here's a few winter scenes from the Gardens along with quotations about what stillness can teach us.

“Wisdom comes with the ability to be still. Just look and just listen. No more is needed. Being still, looking, and listening activates the non-conceptual intelligence within you. Let stillness direct your words and actions.”  Eckhart Tolle

"True silence is the rest of the mind, and is to the spirit what sleep is to the body, nourishment and refreshment." William Penn

“The answers you seek never come when the mind is busy, they come when the mind is still.” Leon Brown




“Seek out a tree and let it teach you stillness.” Eckhart Tolle

“Within yourself is a stillness and a sanctuary to which you can retreat at any time and be yourself” Herman Hesse

"In the stillness of the quiet, if we listen, we can hear the whisper of the heart giving strength to weakness, courage to fear, hope to despair." Howard Thurman

"Stillness is our most intense mode of action. It is in our moments of deep quiet that is born every idea, emotion, and drive which we eventually honor with the name of action. We reach highest in meditation, and farthest in prayer. In stillness every human being is great." Leonard Bernstein

I recall the stillness of winter days growing up on the family farm. The deep snow crunched as we silently walked to the barn to do chores or when we carried the cans of milk from the barn across the yard to the milk house. The night sky sparkled with stars as the yard light buzzed and cast shadows. Many nights the Northern Lights flashed upward from the distant horizon and spread across the sky.  When the moon was out you could see for miles across the white countryside. Silence even became deeper as the animals quieted and settled in for the night. 

Days after severe snow storms were especially infused with silence. Here's my older sister, Angie on top of a snowbank of a particularly heavy 1959 March snowstorm. She conquered the huge snowdrift and is celebrating her victory. 

As the picture indicates this 1959 storm had fierce winds. Blinding winds howled for at least a day and sometimes between gusts you could hear an eerie silence. The world seemed to groan and sigh as the winds swept the snow into huge banks. This snowbank reached the top of the machine shed. Notice the tree tops in the background.

The contrast between the ferocity of the storm and the post storm silence made the days of recovery quite pleasant, as Angie is demonstrating. During these storms I never felt like destruction was imminent. Instead the feeling was more like the acceptance of nature's power and that another day was at hand. 

By no means were we careless or flippant about storms. My mother was well prepared to wait out snowstorms. She had a well stocked pantry off the kitchen, with hundreds of canned fruits and vegetables, along with a pile of potatoes and crocks of sauerkraut in the basement. Just off to the left of the basement stairs was a huge stack of wood that Ma burned in the wood stoves. At bedtime my brothers and I, in our long underwear, crawled in our respective beds and snuggled under the thick goose feather comforters (piszyna in Polish). My sisters in cotton or flannel nightgowns would also retire to their respective beds. On below freezing nights, the square framed house would make a cracking sound as the wood contracted. I was never startled by this unusual sound.

What we really dreaded during winter and especially during storms was a visit to the outdoor privy across from the house and next to the machine shed. I will leave this experience to your imagination while just saying one did not linger for long in the cold December silence.

I offer this Mary Oliver poem for your reflection as we near the end of these meanderings and musings. Its messages are similar as those in the first poem, "December Stillness."  

First Snow 

The snow 

began here 

this morning and all day 

continued, its white 

rhetoric everywhere 

calling us back to why, how; 

whence such beauty and what 

the meaning; such 

an oracular fever! flowing 

past windows, an energy it seemed 

would never ebb, never settle 

less than lovely! and only now, 

deep into night, 

it has finally ended. 

The silence 

is immense, 

and the heavens still hold 

a million candles; nowhere 

the familiar things: 

stars, the moon, 

the darkness we expect 

and nightly turn from. Trees 

glitter like castles 

of ribbons, the broad fields 

smolder with light, a passing 

creekbed lies 

heaped with shining hills; 

and though the questions 

assailed us all day 

remain---not a single 

answer has been found---- 

walking out now 

into the silence and the light 

under the trees, 

and through the fields, 

feels like one. 

Mary Oliver. (1992, p. 150-51). New and Selected Poems. Beacon Press: Boston, MA. 

 

May you experience the blessings of silence during this month of holidays and may these blessings increase and multiply as 2021 unfolds. Peace and good health to you and your loved ones.