Relative Something

We wait all year long for Christmas to get here and just like that, it’s over. Happy December 26th. Today is my half-birthday. To keep me humble, the skin by my thumbnail has split so that it constantly stings. One of the ways I deal with painful cracks in the skin on the edge of my fingernails is to apply germ-killing New-Skin. It occurred to me that, as I was wincing at the stinging pain of that antiseptic feature, it wasn’t much different from the constant sting of the cracked skin.

Cyndie and I made two trips to Bloomington, MN for Christmas gatherings of her family over the weekend. Driving was entirely nerve-wracking on Saturday and a little less-so yesterday. It’s really unsettling to be rolling along on what looks to be dry pavement, traveling at posted speeds, and constantly coming upon vehicles that have recently spun into the ditches.

I have no idea what they were doing to end up in their predicaments, but not knowing made it a guessing game about what I could do differently to avoid a similar fate. (Can you say, “black ice?”) Luckily, we completed all our driving without incidents.

Yesterday, to join the family at her mom’s place, we decided to skip giving the horses the noon feeding they have become accustomed to receiving. As we pulled up the driveway when getting home around the time for the evening feeding, the horses gave a little show of their opinion on the matter. One might describe them as looking a little “hangry.” (Irritable or angry because of hunger.)

Upon making my way down to the barn, I was happy to find their gesticulation had been more dramatic than necessary. They were much less rambunctious than I expected them to be and barely fussed over my choice to do some housekeeping before serving pans of feed. Conditions in the paddocks and under the overhang are stabilizing now that wind and snowfall have abated for a couple of days.

It isn’t much, but having the temperature climb to single digits above zero is at least a psychological improvement over the brutal conditions we’ve been dealing with over the last… I’ve lost track of how many days. Feels like it’s been a month or two.

I always enjoy seeing evidence of the horses’ meanderings out into the fresh snow on the fields. You can almost visualize the four mares heading out in a parallel formation before making some loops. These tracks appear in the mornings which tells me they go on these adventures in the dark of night.

My nighttime adventures are all in the dream world but feel a lot like the way those meandering pathways look.

The Monday after Christmas on Sunday feels like we have to wait 364 more days to find out if we were naughty or nice enough to get our wishes wrapped up and delivered under the tree.

Now that’s a long meandering path.

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