Keeping The Solstice/Grey Havens

I.

Always, in the days before Christmas, I walk over to the house of a certain woman with a small parcel of Christmas cheer - usually fruit from my citrus trees and a bit of candy or cookies.  This woman (and I used to make the same pilgrimage to another such woman's home as well, but she moved to Austin) was my boss at one time and my elder colleague for longer still and just a very good mentor in my life.  I rarely see her anymore.  She lives in a neighborhood close enough to mine, but not close enough for making carrying a bag of citrus easy.   I always forget just where her house is each year, underestimating the number of blocks from the one in the neighborhood sort of next door to my neighborhood to the block where she lives.  Walking there, I pass a house I lived in as a child for about two years, when my mother married and my sister was born, past the cat lady next door to it who gave me my late Pussywillow when I was just six.  I pass the sea glass wind chimes of a friend who now lives next door to the house a childhood friend lived in when I lived on that street - the friend whose father kept bees in their backyard.  I never knock or call this woman who I walk my gift to - I just leave the bag on her doorstep, when I finally find the blue shutters of her house. It is a Solstice offering to the Mother Goddess as much as to this mentor, this annual pilgrimage, I think. A thankfulness.

II.

I looked for the lunar eclipse tonight.  The clouds obscured it and I wasn't sure I'd see enough to wake the girls, but finally I did, and I woke them and they saw it, too.  All up and down my block, it was only me out seeking, me and then mine, but no other neighbors gathering to drive the dark away with fires or gaze on the red moon in between the clouds.  Where were they?  It was only me.