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Next week is Thanksgiving and the only Thursday that “Angelkeep Journals” is guaranteed to have a “day off.” The News-Banner does not print on major holidays, and thanks to Abe Lincoln, Thanksgiving is always on the day this column runs. That was a coincidence—not President Lincoln’s forethought cognition. (Have you saved your 2009 “Lincoln on a log” penny which memorializes Abe’s years growing up in Indiana? “Formative Years” is what the numismatic people are calling it.”
With a week to go till Thanksgiving, the turkey in the freezer, the first diet, crust-less, pumpkin pie already eaten, and Angelkeep’s Formative Years Lincoln cent safely preserved, thoughts at Angelkeep turn to the approaching long and busy holiday season of seasons. Before the holiday dust settles, after New Years confetti has flown, even fall will be history. Fall passes during the turbulence of approaching Christmas. Fall’s dust is often settling under another blanket of snow.
Thanksgiving snow is less likely at Angelkeep than the frequent paper-thin glazing of ice on Angelpond, resultant of a frosty late-November morning. The frost design of the floating transparent layer is a crystal pattern that is size determined, it seems, by how quickly the temperature changes. An individual crystal of the connected beauties can vary from thumb-joint size to a full arm length.
A two-foot pond ice crystal is something similar to a winter fairy tale book illustration. A wing from Tinkerbelle. As translucent and mystical a masterpiece of God’s creation as the wings of a dragonfly. Both sparkle in the sun, proving (to some of us) that God is the inventor of fairy-dust. Not leprechauns after all.
The ice softens in the sun and becomes elastic. Ripples move under the thin ice sheet that is melted away from the warmer earthen banks. The pond coating acts much like its glacier cousin of the Polar Regions. The Angelpond ice undulates, appearing to take on life, seeming to breathe, caught between another melt-down and a chilled strengthening.
Will today’s ice skiff become the base for skate-able ice that deer will soon walk upon while visiting Angelkeep for their daily corn kernel snack?
Most of the oak and willow leaf matt that covered the pond over the past few days has become waterlogged and sunk. It will add to the pond’s bottom muck.
Yellow corkscrew willow leaves that had ends curled upward are yet locked into the frozen surface. They look like golden Spanish galleons or the sailing ships of the Norsemen which lost the needed winds to keep them ahead of the cold air that has now frozen their boats into motionlessness.
Just a week ago (or was it a day?) a surviving dragonfly was resting on the stern of one of the leaf ships as the curl in the leaf’s bow caught the breeze that gave the dragonfly an effortless voyage across Angelpond.
The November change from green to yellow on a corkscrew willow is a sign of winter’s desire to make an early, if temporary, appearance. A leafless corkscrew willow is surely a sign—as accurate as an angora-length-hair caterpillar—that winter weather has decided to overlap into November autumn.
If it is Mr. Winter breathing down turtleneck sweaters today, what is there to be thankful for next Thursday? There is much!
It was a delightful 2009 summer and fall. A bumper-crop year for green bean growers. And at Angelkeep, the core-flesh and seeds of a store-bought butternut squash, pushed into a patio pot last spring, produced 7 huge winter squash larger than their parent.
That’s enough to last Angelkeep all winter.
Perhaps a tithe-portion of the butternuts can be put into a squash pie for Thanksgiving. I’ll check with Gwen about the recipe potential. I’ll search “The Book” for Biblical accountability. I’ll rub my lucky penny and again thank Lincoln for the Thanksgiving holiday.
by ALAN DAUGHERTY
Mr. Daugherty is a Wells County resident who, along with his wife Gwen, enjoy their back yard and have named it “Angelkeep.”
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