No question, the nut didn’t fall far from the tree. The nut…that would be me. My old man once bought a huge WWII cork and canvas U.S. Navy raft on a whim and tied it to the roof of a truck. When he got to a railroad viaduct the raft wouldn’t fit under the arch. So, he somehow bounced the overhanging front end down, inched the truck forward a little, then bounced the trailing end down to see-saw under the viaduct. My mother wasn’t thrilled to have “fly island” in the backyard for years, and the raft was never used. Dad couldn’t resist an oddity or a challenge. Neither can I.

Case in point: big week-long heavy sleet storm 10 days before Christmas. Some of the arbor vitae around my yard tower three stories above the house (I extend a roof rake out the upper window to knock snow off) and others are wider than a country road. They are gorgeous with frosted branches of wet snow, but – alas – one of the latter split and caved. My chainsaw is busted, so the smart thing would be to hire out the removal, right? But if I did that here in the Paul Bunyan state, I’d lose my man card.

Much better to take a pruning saw out in the storm to amputate a gazillion branches, make 30 trips dragging them up the hill in my yard, and bring them in batches into the garage to complete the autopsy. No challenge too big. I have only recently finished spreading leftover paint from a dozen half-empty gallons on cardboard to dry so that I could get rid of the cans with the trash, so there’s a little room in the garage. Just gonna slowly reduce those lovely branches to something the trash haulers will accept without it being gift wrapped. Papa would be proud.

Takes no effort at all, though, to slip into the magic of night here in Minnesota. I’d take you on a photo tour to the velvet vaults of my nocturnal escapes, if I could; but even a lo-lux camera is denied passage there. You have to feel the emanations with your soul and expand them to your other senses, else it’s like swallowing a vitamin pill to taste food. I think the reason for magic coming at night is because subtracting daylight awakens something in the ether. Whatever that something is, it acts as a portal for passion and appetites. The hunters of the night cannot hide their lust for satiation; so it kinda makes sense that all animals, including humans, have evolved to sense that. And it discriminates between types of urgent needs. If it’s the passion of mating, it draws; if it’s the hunger for feasting, it warns. When you come to know the ether, the currents are nuanced and profound.

So, you’ll have to imagine what the camera cannot record in the first five photos below. This is my neighborhood just before Christmas. Behind my house, three wild turkeys are roosting high in a live oak, and nearby a screech owl with lo-lux eyes surveys all. Insert a coyote or a fox trotting briskly up the middle of the street in the middle of the night. They know that humans are bedded down, and even an occasional car does not deter them. One wonders what they read in the ether. Or as John Denver sang, “…you fill up my senses, like a night in a forest.”

Pictures #6-9 capture the beauty of my White Christmas by day. #10-11 – alas – are corpse photos of my arbor vitae that didn’t survive the weight of a storm. Half of it is in the garage; half left where it collapsed. And #12…that’s me wishing you health, wealth and happiness in 2023!

Thomas "Sully" Sullivan