Large Fierce Mammal

Yes I know we’re missing a few marbles, but you get the drift.

Welcome back thou Goode and Weary Traveller, and well met at our Homely Hearth as we’ve only just thrown on another fine log just for you!

Here in Nova Scotia, the Winter Solstice of 2020 stole in on rain sodden moccasins at 06:02 Atlantic Standard Time this morning, marking the official “first day of winter” with the season’s longest period of darkness at the celestial end of a dark year indeed.

On this day three years ago I wrote:

“Winter in Nova Scotia will arrive at twenty-eight minutes past noon Atlantic Standard Time today when the Solstice heralds the start of the long, slow plod to Spring. For those of us of whatever species who haven’t already migrated or gone into hibernation, this is a time of uncertainty tempered with incipient joy.

“The Black Bear sow impregnated in June will give birth in her den in January, and nurse her offspring in her warmth as the very dead of Winter holds sway outside.

“The pregnant White-Tailed Deer doe who survives the Winter will carry her fawn through the snows to late May or early June.

“As to Human kind, Winter will bring challenges at the end of which the result will lie on a spectrum ranging from the greatest of joys to the gravest of sorrows, and in this it stands as no different from any other aspect of life but for bearing a greater degree of urgency and inexorable deadliness in the face of any vulnerability.

“And so it goes.” ~ A Long Winter’s Night — 2017 Edition: Day 1

Looking back on my comments at the start of previous seasons in the history of this series discloses an interesting yet unsurprising pattern, that being the sky seems to be perpetually falling on someone, somewhere, for some reason. So now, what might appear to distinguish this Long Winter’s Night from all the rest is that this time it’s falling on everyone, everywhere, for the same reason.

“And so it goes,” as stated above, but in this I wasn’t speaking to any transient state of travail, but rather to the beautifully perennial and terrible reality whose onset we commemorate today, and that for those who neither hibernate nor migrate from these northern climes will Truly fall on everyone, everywhere, for the same reason — Winter.

This new pestilence is upon us, to be sure, but the hand of Death is not, so until it is, be not stayed from joining our Lusty Company as we ride forth to the Hunt on this Long Winter’s Night!

Now here’s Blackmore’s Night to sing us out.