Sense, Nonsense, and Not-Sense

[It's December Days time! There's no overarching theme this year, so if you have ideas of things to write about, I'm more than happy to hear them.]

bethany_lauren wants to know what my favorite season is. Previous entities in December Days suggests "baseball season" is the appropriate answer, and based on a later-to-come entry, "Duck season! (Rabbit season!)" would also be a strong contender for favorite season.

I suspect, however, this has more to do when the weather than the great humor opportunities that come on board with this.

As a child of school-age, summer is always the best season, because summer offers the possibility of entire days without the requirements of the school schedule. For me, that means attempting as much video gaming time as possible, in addition to having a significant number of books from the library to read, both for the program and for getting through the sections I was interested in and moving on to the library loaning from other branches. Parents have other plans, including frequent demands to run around outside and situations where a parent wants to impart wisdom through shared time together. Often with tools or physical labor. Which have turned out to be surprisingly useful.

Casual sport is also in summer, so evenings at the diamond, swinging away and occasionally getting to participate in the action, whether by actually making contact or by having a ball hit to you. (Later on, it would be as the umpire, trying to keep the game moving according to the rules and the skills of the players.) The thrill of the idle and of being in more control of your day is a thing that children crave, just so they can burn that day in pursuit of their passions without interference. Places like public libraries become incredibly important, as points where the newly freed can be, without having to spend money. Ideally, they would also not have to deal with glares and others in the space that believe teenagers and children do not deserve to be visible or audible in public. (And especially not staff people with these beliefs.)

Now that I'm in a working world, summer no longer holds as much mystique. Mostly because there's no summer break from work for idleness. Which has somewhat promoted the second favorite season of childhood to the prime position, because the things I love about this season don't change just because I'm a working adult now.

Winter is a great season because of snow. My provincial upbringing was in a space that would receive regular snowfall. Enough to cover the streets, and then to accumulate into drifts and hills. Enough to cover the grass of the backyard so that flimsy sleds and toboggans could carve paths and then ice over into slick running tracks for greater fun later. The kind that bring on the fear of black ice, but also the joys of ice skating. And ice hockey.

One of the things that was an annual tradition in the Boy Scout troop of my school town was to take a winter lock-in weekend at a walking archery range. The walking and the archery were nice enough, balanced out by the general malicious prankishness of the other members of the troop, since I and my friends were the geeks and nerds.

The best of that trip, though, was the hill. The cabin was at the top of a properly steep hill, and the snow was usually well enough on the ground that after the first few trips to break in the paths, one could traverse the entire hill at high velocity. Many a cheap toboggan was sacrificed on the hill and the inevitable jumps and ramps constructed to make a trip have both flight and speed involved. That's the best hill I've sledded on. I'll bet there are better ones where I am now, but the problem is that we don't get enough snow for long enough to test those hills on most years.

Even so, even in the new places that are more rain than snow, winter still holds a happy place in my life. The idea of renewal, of discarding the things that weigh us down and hurt us and bringing forth the new, the potential, the suggestion that perhaps things will not always be this way - it's providing a lot of optimism to those who could use it.

On every world, wherever people are, in the deepest part of the winter, at the exact mid-point, everybody stops and turns and hugs, as if to say, well done. Well done, everyone. We're halfway out of the dark. Back on Earth, we called this Christmas, or the Winter Solstice.

Well done, everyone. We're just about halfway out of the dark.