She called it "fish-eye pudding," my mother did: a name which not only aptly described the look of the stuff, but made it all the more fun for a little kid like me to eat. Clear and gelatinous, the "fish-eyes" suspended in the cream-coloured sea were the size of a fat pea, the surrounding custard sweet and fluffy with whipped egg whites.

I suppose in actuality, the "fish-eyes" had little taste in themselves. A starchy product processed from the root of the cassava and ground, they are better known as a thickener which carries other flavours excellently. Yet as they sat in my bowl, they were as much for entertainment as for edibility as I tried to isolate each one with my spoon and rank them in a line atop the pudding according to the size of each individual pearl. They refused to sink when pressed into the matrix, bobbing back to the surface like glass floats on a frothy ocean.

Did I believe they were really fish eyes? Yes, for a long time, I looked for any sign of ocular structure within their translucent orbs, eventually concluding that the spheres were simply lenses. My erroneous deduction did not hamper my willingness to lift my spoon repeatedly to mouth, however! Not the child who had once eaten thirteen angleworms!

Not for many years have I prepared this delightful dessert for myself because at best, the modern cook must make do with the eyes of minnows. Perhaps global warming or over-harvesting has destroyed the fishery. Today, true pearl tapioca is hard to find.

The air smelled of snow, a slightly metallic pinch in the nostrils, brazenly flying in the face of forecast rain. True to its promise, four inches of soft, white fluff covered both yard and highway when I woke, and the plows had not gone down. The tires of one passing car made no more than a murmur as they parted the virgin field, muffled in the deep, leaving no echo to drift above the padded asphalt. The stalking snow soon filled in the abandoned imprints, still falling in hushed, thick draperies when first light paled the grey horizon.

The path my feet cut as I walked in darkness through the scattering flakes is no longer visible beside either filbert or dogwood, and my route to the bird feeder has faded from the silent earth's map. The corner fencepost stands lonely, my visit to the wild lilac now forgotten by the moss-shrouded cedar rails. Not a trace of my pre-dawn meanderings is in evidence; no scuff, no divot, no hollow shows a reminder of my booted and bundled patrol.

The snowflakes count their seemingly infinite census as far as the eye can see, a cloth of diverse miracle thrown over forest and field in beautifully haphazard artfulness. Too often dismissed in a hasty world as nuisance, there is something hidden here, a gentle secret. Its meditation emerges from a quiet sky, as fragile as the whisper it speaks into the tin-scented air.

What is the true measure of a gift? Its monetary value? Hardly! The quality of its materials or craftsmanship? A child's drawing may be more cherished than an exquisite artwork in the proper eyes. The value of a gift is in the love of the giver, the heart behind the object, only to be recognized by the recipient.

As I held one wrapped package in my hands, my tears fell for fear it was not what I expected it to be, that I would tear off the paper to discover something not so much a part of the person as what I hoped for, that thing which would help me learn to share a part of his life foreign to me. The box lay in my fingers for long minutes as I tried to summon the strength not to be disappointed in whatever it contained because regardless, it would have been chosen with love. My hands shook as I carefully slit the tape with a thumbnail, wanting to preserve the precious paper which concealed my last, most special present, and I laid the green paper back with great care not to wrinkle or to do any damage.

A teardrop fell on the bedsheet as I saw only the back of a box which still hid its secret. I wiped another away, not wanting the spate of my emotion to leave a stain. Now I was convinced I knew in essence what the package contained. I turned it over. Clouds formed in my eyes and the rain came down, yet I still did not open the box as I tried to read between the rainbows in my tears. When at last I lifted the lid and saw what lay within, I could no longer keep grip on the last of my composure and broke into long, wrenching sobs over that for which I had longed, the core of my beloved's soul. God willing, some day I will fully comprehend the whole worth of this one so very special gift.

Today, I remember my mother. I walked away from her bedside on this date, almost to the hour, certain that morning would find nothing but her shell cast aside to be returned to the earth. How could I leave her?

Her spirit was weary of the world, had been so for years. Embittered, jaded, she lived a solitary and friendless life by choice, seldom setting foot beyond her door except as necessity demanded. She dwelt in books covering provocative political issues, in vituperative radio broadcasts, in a fantasy of conspiracy theories and government treacheries, and I often wondered how she could enjoy the anger and hate with which she surrounded herself from morning until late at night. She seemed to thrive on it and the way her obsession with it alienated those around her.

But at one time in her life, my mother had been another person. As I cared for her in her final weeks, stories came out, both good and bad, which helped me to understand how she had come to her present state. It was often difficult to sort embellishments from her stories, but a careful ear could hear the current which ran beneath them, a flow of truth and revelation which she may not have meant to release. I met the mother I had never known in those last two weeks. She too was acquainting herself with her daughter, and from this, a healing came. The rift which had erupted between us at my birth was bridged as we discovered each other to be human.

In my mid-twenties, I had promised my mother that I would never put her in an old folks' home or send her off to hospital until it became absolutely necessary, so when her health failed, I brought her to live with me. She remained here all but her final three days. I had kept my vow to her, and as I left her bedside, I knew that she was grateful and wished to leave the earth in privacy, in solitude as was her way.

Winter's firstborn daylight lifted from behind the mountains and opened onto an unexpected snow, its glint and sparkle mirroring the last of fading stars. It had come under silent stealth with its solstice gift of untold beauty, on tiptoe in the night and with a hush of reverence for the Earth, and where it crept into pasture and pathway, only the trees watched and the creek muttered in its lazy sleep. Quiet flakes nestled in flocks; white caricatures of wrens huddled within arbors of barren branches, voiceless against moss and bark. The silvery stillness read a profound philosophy to its tardy witnesses: peace, the snow speaks peace in wordless wisdom.

The year now turns, and daylight gains against darkness. Unless on a subliminal level, I will not notice the first few minutes won until January begins to enter its second week when I will find myself recognizing evening's retreat as it skulks off with its tail between its legs. It is an Aboriginal awareness which comes upon me then, an epiphany of sunlight's minimal expansion, a sense of changing tide in the sea of hours, and I will find myself watching for the pussywillows' bud and the 'mouse-ears' on the Indian plum as surely as if I were dependent on them for sustenance.

Light. It was the first word of my vocabulary; light, the moon. Light, the secret of vision; light, the universal euphemism of theologies. It is light which brings us revelations, light which shows us the path. Light in all its mysteries nurtures us, protects us, heals us. We follow it, covet it, rejoice in it for the benefits it bestows. Light grows from this day forward, rooted in the solstice's dark earth.

Stories which were old when I was young, captured in pages yellowed with the years even then, take me down a sweet path of memories as I transcribe them to share with the heart of my soul. Childish though they may be in their fancies and quaintly illustrated in the manner of the times, they have a romance all their own which has been all but lost, picturesque and poetic and filled with the bright ideals of family and goodness.

In the ear of my mind, I can hear my mother's recitations of the poems echoing the previous generation as her voice read them aloud to me, my grandmother's inflections rising and falling in her intonation of phrase and meter as she herself had heard them. There is no hesitancy; the words flow of their own accord in the writer's stream as it bathes the imagination in its placid current, a navigation not beyond the skill of even the most clumsy oarsman. These are lullabies, a delicately turned cradle of poesy rocking in the gentle breeze of a caring mother's breath.

In the simpler times of eighty years ago, evening's firesides saw parents and children gathered 'round with such volumes as these which I have picked from my shelves, the coloured images vivid and the pages crisp, and no doubt the flickering light made its dance in eyes which delighted in the whimsical depictions. But their charm had not faded with the inks in the time of my own childhood, nor fallen into tatters along their edges as the chipped pages have done. Beneath the tape and threadbare bindings, their magic yet abides, waiting only for a voice to speak their spirit into a dear heart.

For the first time since the storm, I drove beyond the immediate neighbourhood and saw some of the havoc the winds had wreaked. In the space of five miles, I counted no fewer than eight or nine Douglas fir which had fallen across the highway, trees of twelve inches in girth or more and at least forty feet tall. Deeper in the forests lining the road, groups of trees had come down en masse and lay tangled like jackstraws, or had caught among sturdier branches and were leaning, precariously held aloft above a mat of broken limbs. The highway verges were thick with branches and twigs, the grass barely visible beneath their debris.

Another system is slated to bring even more wind and rain to the area tomorrow to add more to the state's growing list of weather woes. Although neither sustained winds nor gusts are forecast to be as intense as the last storm, there is still hidden potential for severe damage to property from hazards created when it swept through the area. Many residential locations in the Seattle area are still without power and roadways have not been cleared of fallen trees, nor have crews had time to remove those hung up on wires or in neighbouring limbs, increasing the likelihood of further electrical outages. Likewise, another bout of heavy rain may well choke rivers with logjams and take them more quickly to flood stage, particularly where levees were weakened by the previous spates.

This old chestnut may prove wrong before this winter has run its course in Washington state:

Whether the weather be cold
Or whether the weather be hot,
We'll weather the weather
Whatever the weather,
Whether we like it or not.

As my power continues to flicker on and off, I have yet to hear from two friends in Flatland. One lives on urban property with several large, old trees standing quite near the house, the other in a more open suburban setting and both in the infamous Puget Sound Convergence Zone. Stories trickle in through other acquaintances, representing Flatland as something akin to a war zone and I begin to think we folk here in this narrow, sheltered valley came off lucky.

It sometimes works that way. Several years ago, 88 MPH gusts raked through a home weather station on a lake not far from home, yet not a breeze over 10 MPH disturbed my trees. The wind came directly from the south and sheared across the river's mouth where it dumps into the reservoir, but where the river's channel lies, a range of hills afforded us full protection. A southwesterly wind might have torn off shingles and uprooted trees as this last storm did, or the rare easterly which is infamous for its destructive capabilities, yet gusts from due south are rare and more kindly.

The bulk of our weather comes in from the coast of Oregon near Astoria, sweeping across the flat relief of central southwest Washington where several major rivers begin to spread out in anticipation of the sea. There is not much to blunt the force of a storm until it comes spang up against the Cascade Range or the Mountain itself, which means it races across some of the most densely populated areas of the state. It is not surprising that over a million people lost power in this last storm. The wonder is that the number was no higher and the damage no greater, given the intensity of the winds which I am told peaked at 135 MPH. This valley certainly saw nothing so severe.

Washington is having more than its share of extreme weather this winter, balancing out a mild and dry summer with torrential rains and ravaging winds. Totted up at the end of the year, I think you'll find our seasonal averages and means fairly close to normal, surprisingly enough, when half the year's end's glass is poured into the empty one which began it.

Forty hours without power, twenty-four without a landline phone, and I got off easy. Never mind that the longest I'd been without lights previously was a mere 18 hours, as opposed to those in that same storm who lost theirs for up to two weeks. It's one of the benefits of living in an area where a small number of customers is served by a small, well-prepared company as opposed to the consortiums and their huge clientele. Although our lines run miles through timber country, the repair crews have fewer feet of wire in which to pinpoint a problem.

As I walked around the neighbourhood yesterday morning, I saw everywhere evidence of what I had heard in the night. Dozens of trees, both alder and Doug fir, had snapped twenty feet up their trunks and lay in splinters and tangled boughs. One ancient snag had gone down roots and all, the massive foot upturned and the body sprawled across a disused road. Twigs, boughs and branches littered yards and verges like confetti. I was thoroughly amused at the highway department's solution to remove the debris when their fleet of sweepers was deployed to more critical areas: they sent the snowplows down!

With propane at a premium and no idea how long I might be sitting in the dark with no heat, I kept the house near 60° during the daytime, lowering the flame when I turned in for bed on a mattress beside the hearth. By morning, the room was chilly at a temperature at least ten degrees less, but my only regret was not dragging out my expedition-weight sleeping bag. Instead, I bundled up in wool longjohns and curled up in a catlike ball beneath half a dozen layers of fleece blanket. Lack of light was not really an issue. Whenever I was on the cell phone, I kept candles or a propane Coleman burning, and when I wanted to see to work on needlework, I simply put on a backpacker's halogen headlamp and stitched merrily away.

Getting through an unpleasant situation like this is largely a matter of the mind. You might as well enjoy the adventure, pretend you're camping out or on a climb because cussing about it isn't going to make it any better. Now if only I could have instilled that philosophy into the cat!

So many times, the forecast of blustery winds and snow peters out in a fizzle of rain, but under the threat of a Winter Storm Warning, the skies have gone coal-black and the breeze is stiffening its resolve as it makes a practice run through the wind chimes. I've battened all my hatches for this latest of Pacific Northwest weather systems, tucked away in the safety of the garage all blowable objects save the metal awning of the kitchen porch. The water jugs are filled, an extra pot of coffee made, Coleman and kerosene lanterns stand at the ready, and the propane tank is nearly full. Foodstuffs are provisioned (although I may tire of a fish diet if we're in for the long haul), so what have I forgotten? Oh! A five-gallon bucket for the convenience! And now even that is drawn from the well. The house is prepared.

As much as I love a good windstorm, the trees to the west of me pose a menace to the house. My huge Doug fir was topped of its schoolmarms years ago, but even so, the new growth now towers twenty feet above the parent trunk and one ancient branch projects out toward the carport, thick as my waist at its junction with the tree. Yet the firs on the undeveloped neighbouring property are those which most greatly concern me, since several are of a height greater than the distance to my bedroom roof. I fret under the punishing winds when they come from the east to bow those evergreens westward, because it is as the gusts die suddenly that backlash snaps trunks and sends the giants of the forest to the ground.

The house has its share of wind-inflicted scars. The biggest storm windows failed to live up to their reputation some years ago and were removed by gusts and shattered on the sidewalk, never to be replaced in the warped frame which had turned them loose. So too, the unsupported kitchen awning once took wing and sent me scampering after its parts as they gambolled across the highway. In a stop-gap measure which held for the duration of the season's rampant weather, I tied the bent and twisted aluminum slats back together with wire, then later put up a more sturdy type of roof and anchored it to the ground.

The wind is gaining confidence as it plays the chimes now, readying for a concert. The cold rain hints that snow is following, and perhaps at blizzard force. I am snug for the moment with heat, water, food and light provisioned, and all would seem secure, except perhaps my jangling nerves. This one is going to be a doozy.

I'd swear they're in cahoots, those two with their "no fondling, peeking, poking, shaking, rattling or hefting" prohibitions regarding Christmas presents, and "they" know exactly who I mean, don't they? I smell teamwork in this scheme to tantalize and tease me. Consciously or unconsciously, I suspect you two have had your heads together, working out a plot. Now were I of a mind to, I'm sure I could find a loophole in those injunctions. Let me consider this a minute. There surely must be some way to adhere strictly to the letter of the law...

The truth is that I relish the anticipation, and the few times I've accidentally 'busted' someone's surprise by guessing correctly when thin wrappings or weight or sound gave a gift away have been disappointing, so I try to be careful; I really, truly do. Equally as much as your presents make me glad of heart, so do I enjoy your pleasure at witnessing my honest delight in finding something unexpected in my hands when the bows and paper have been cast aside. I would not detract from that for all the world by chancing an inadvertent revelation.

Yet I must wonder: No hefting? No shaking? None at all? Hmph! My reputation must precede me, that you lay down such stringent edicts and cruel embargos. Numbered boxes? One-each-day restrictions? Could you please submit a printed copy of the rules? Ha! Well, you missed a lick when you didn't mention going through a third party, and my agent is even now considering how best to apply her teeth to tissue and patting those enticing strands of curling ribbon with her paws.

But no...I will discourage the cat's curious advances, for I see your games for what they truly are: your extraordinary and original way of making this Christmas one which I will cherish as a gift in itself.

A Noel of Small Birds

All the birds of winter gather in to find a shelter,
Begging for a bit of food and warmth in the cold weather.
From their homes in barren trees, sparrows go, and chickadees,
Finches search for bright berries, flying back with treasure.
From a journey returning laden, they sing merrily.
Song fills the sky and the snow is so white, and red's the rowan tree.
Gifts of Man shall help in need, crumbs of bread and scattered seed:
Thankful small birds all, indeed! Merry to a feather!
Singing, soaring over the forest, freely they shall fly.
Dance on the wind over moorland and glen in the sparkling winter sky.
All the birds of winter gather in to find a shelter,
Begging for a bit of food and warmth in the cold weather.
All along the hedgerow gay, birdsong beckons in the day,
From the holly and the bay, and the hoary heather.
Tiny birds take wing to go wassailing. Questing they shall go.
Thicket and bush for the moment are hushed by the silence of the snow.
Masters of their frosty hall, they announce the minstrel's call,
Pleasure to accord to all, singing all together.
Thus their carol rises unbounded, joyful hearts in flight.
Echoing trills lie like mist on the hills on a starry winter night.

Friends would gleefully have my guts for garters if they didn't benefit from the fact that unlike them, I start assembling my next-year's Christmas presents before this one has passed its mark on the calendar. No last-minute rushes for this kid! No scrabbling through the shelves or elbowing through crowds to find that special gift for Aunt Matilda or Uncle Walter, only to come upon the perfect solution broken in a picked-over pile of goods.

Call me old-fashioned if you will, but I believe the Christmas season is much better spent in love of friends and family instead of traffic hassles or check-out lines. What better way than to begin with handcrafting a unique item seated by the fire in the soft glow of the lighted tree as my mother often did with a needle in her fingers, picking fine stitches in doll clothes for her child? Likewise, in the dim light of his shop, my father bent his back at the workbench through holiday vacation, painstakingly dovetailing corners or mounting the tiny brass fittings which embodied the worth of his labour in the wooden boxes he built with such meticulous pride. Both parents used their skills to make care-filled gifts which, if not of the same quality mass-production might have supplied were obviously produced with the recipient in mind and heart. It was the ethic and the effort which was bestowed on neighbours and relatives with a value far greater than any pricetag could show, the priceless gift of hours of being in the mind of the artisan.

The threat of a lump of coal in the stocking of a bad little girl could only have set me on the Road to Ruin, my budding interest in geology having already manifested itself in the stone-filled pockets of my jacket or my school skirts. Unlike most kids on the playground, I was not content to hunt for 'wishing rocks' (those with a complete band of quartz encircling their diameter) but preferred to spend class recess labouriously picking tiny garnets out of a schist boulder with a pin. Although the largest of my finds could not have been a quarter inch across, I proudly added it to my collection right beside a one-inch beauty which had been a gift from an adult friend. Yet it was that lump of coal I longed for, and for more than one reason.

It didn't help that a few miles from our home was a lapidarist's shop which my mother occasionally visited in connection with her own unrelated business. I would tag along and stand goggle-eyed, staring at the museum-quality specimens lining the walls and shelves, dreaming of explorations with pick and hammer in exotic locations like Brazil. There was nothing on my maple dresser to match the deep bowls of amethyst crystals which came from that country, nothing in the bookcase headboard of my bed to parallel the staurolite crosses or the glittering pyrites, no rainbow-banded agates, no synthetic boules nor rough star sapphires, and certainly no coal.

From this delightful shop, I obtained my first copy of "Rocks and Minerals: A Golden Nature Guide" at the expense of several months' allowance. I learned from its pages what specific gravity meant, how to rank a specimen on the Mohs scale of hardness with only a few rudimentary tools, read with fascination about blowpipe tests and bead tests (both beyond my amateur abilities). I pored over the little volume for hours, committing crystal shapes to memory, hoping some day to find them in the field. Seeing my keen fascination with the subject, the proprietor always made time to talk to me, and sometimes (but not often) he would offer some small but fine specimen at a substantial markdown to my mother or an exchange of goods at the asking price.

Yet as Tennessee Ernie Ford was singing "Sixteen Tons" on the radio, the store's shelves held no lumps of coal, much to my dismay. It was not until my mother accidentally discovered a coal yard that we were able to obtain samples of sub-B bituminous, picked up free along the roadside where one of the massive trucks had spilled part of its load as it turned into the driveway. One small chunk went into my collection, and the other larger one was used to grow a Depression Plant, an experience/experiment every child should be allowed to enjoy at least once.

You will not actually need a lump of coal for this project. The plant (a fragile, coral-like growth) may also be grown on a brick, a chunk of landscaping pumice or any similar porous material.

Materials:
A lump of coal approximately 3 inches square
A dish at least 2" tall and 6" in diameter
4 Tbsp. non-iodized salt
4 Tbsp. laundry bluing
4 Tbsp. water
1 Tbsp. non-sudsing ammonia (I have used sudsy and it still works)

Combine liquid ingredients and salt and pour over coal in the dish. Add a little salt each day to continue the growth. A few drops of mercurochrome may be added to give colour.

The bubble tree was my favourite of all the family's Christmas decorations because it was such a wondrous thing. Nine lights illuminated the white paper needles of the little artificial tree, nine two-coloured globes capped with tall, liquid-filled spires which seethed like a chuckling hotspring. A line of bright bubbles would spout upward in rapid succession once the bulbs had been lit and allowed to warm, percolating within the pencil-thin tubes of glass in a spangle of fascinating effervescence, although occasionally, one would wax temperamental, and a hard flick of the finger against the tube's bottom might be required to jar loose the small plug of clear material which kept the boil from rising. You see, not only was the little artificial evergreen lovely, it held a scientific principle which intrigued my youthful mind.

Brought out of storage on St. Nicholas' Day with the manger scene, the tree stood a bit over a foot and a half from tabletop to spire tip and always took a place of honour in the room, sometimes surrounded by a batt of cotton snow. It was never decorated other than with its own lights where it sat on top of the old Muntz television or on the maple hutch, never tinselled or garlanded for it needed no adornment to make it more beautiful than it already was. Each night until Christmas, it would be lit and allowed to burn until my bedtime, and I would often sit beside the cabinet radio listening to carols, simply watching the rising bubbles play in their coloured glow.

When my father passed away and my mother was forced to move, the tree was packed away in a box and forgotten for many years as were many things, and when it emerged again, the white paper was yellowed by exposure to moisture and only a few spare lights remained unbroken. In a last-ditch effort to give the tree a new lease on life, we sprayed it with flocking which deteriorated after a single season, but because it had earned a special place in my heart, I would not allow my mother to throw it out. The poor, pitiful thing was tucked away in a steamer trunk and the next time I saw it, I was an adult. At that point, I claimed it for my own over my mother's protests and carted my childhood treasure around the countryside as I moved from place to place until at last, I hit on a means to restore it, if not quite in its original form.

It is green now, wrapped in the twigs of a new artificial swag. Its lights are a modern, larger version of the ones I loved so well, and still occasionally need that same hard flick of the fingernail to set the bubbles in motion, yet at its core is the old metal armature and it stands on the same heavy ceramic base it once did, but newly painted. As I sit with old carols on the CD player, I watch the bubbles' merry progress upward, seeing much more than the superficial beauty of its lights against the branches. In the depths of this precious keepsake's history, I see the spirit of my little tree shining from within.

Now that the reservoir is being let down following the November flooding, the new channels the river has cut are becoming more apparent. This is an annual occurrence which we who fish the lake watch with a careful eye, already planning the distance of our casts or the dropping of the anchor, mentally mapping out the bends and meanders cut by the current deep beneath the surface.

It is sometimes a conscious action, sometimes not. The slick (as we call it) gives the river away. Darker because it is deeper, less disturbed because its current expends its roiling energy navigating the tight confines of the main channel's bottom, it leaves a track like a contrail and as plain to read to those with experience. The eye wanders across lightly wind-chopped water to a faint streak which looks almost greasy, smooth and undisturbed, registers the curve in relation to a familiar stump on shore. Knowledge of a hidden snag springs to mind and the mental cast is revised and adjusted. Ah, yes! Just there! That's where the big trout will lie.

The river will mislead us several times before spring sees it settled in its permanent bed, changing with each new spate. It may travel today on the near shore, on the farther two weeks hence. One never knows which chapter of its tale to memorize, nor where the story ends, only that the characters within its pages are the living water, the fish and we who angle for them in our dreams.

Like many little boys who have reached their 30's, nothing would do but what my dad had to have an electric train. He'd caught the bug from a co-worker who had a Rube Goldberg contraption in his basement, mounted on plywood, rigged on cords and pulleys. My father's friend could lower a finely detailed countryside from the ceiling and walls until the whole of his small basement was filled but for a narrow walkway along one side for observers and a hole in the center of the tableau where the operator stood.

Snow-covered trees and village shops with frosted windowpanes filled out a magical winter panorama where figures of children skated on the pond and adults with Christmas packages under their arms made their way, while after climbing papier maché switchbacks or disappearing into tunnelled mountains, lines of tracks ran along the flats and over bridges, or diverged at any of several junctions to skirt the farthest edge of town. Two or three engines and their freight sped along the silver rails at any given time, passing through crossings with a hair's breadth between one locomotive and another's caboose, or sometimes pulled off on a siding to wait the passage of the streamliner. The only thing brighter than the gleaming headlamp was the sparkle in my father's eyes as he watched the trains' endless circling in a scene which must have reminded him of his Wisconsin childhood.

After several visits to the friend's, the family began exploring the surprisingly numerous shops in the Seattle area which specialized in train sets, and my father finally settled his dreams on a Lionel in HO gauge. It was purchased in due course without his tacit knowledge and remained hidden in a closet, secure until Christmas Eve when, to his delight, it was brought out in many separate boxes, one housing the starter set and the others, many accessories. He laid out a basic figure-8 that night on the living room floor, much to the enjoyment of his little daughter and the Siamese cat who seemed to think the train needed pouncing.

The shiny black engine resembled the old pufferbellies, with a smokestack which huffed clouds of genuine 'smoke,' supplied in a small lozenge which looked exactly like a one-inch red rubber hot water bottle. My father would add a few drops of this uniquely fragrant liquid and set the train to chugging 'round the room, a trail of grey puffs following it as freight cars bearing names like "Rock Island Line" and "Great Northern" coupled or uncoupled with the flick of a switch, waiting on a siding to be picked up on the next circuit. A red caboose always tagged along behind, its lantern lit with a warm yellow glow. A second engine (a sleek silver streamliner) was eventually added, giving rise to several spectacular train wrecks as they coincided at the figure-8, deliberately engineered by my dad.

In truth, the train became a family toy and stayed set up right where it stood on Christmas morning for at least a month, although with alterations made to the route it plied beneath chairs. How well I remember the sound and feel of the two-rail tracks as we assembled them in wider variations! The sharp plastic edges of the ties clicked brightly against one another and the solid snap with which the delicate pins fit from one thin metal component into another struck a note unlike any other. To my ultimate delight, I was allowed to assemble them, once given a caution about their fragility.

Inevitably, the set had to be dismantled so that my mother could vacuum, but it was not simply boxed away and forgotten. Especially at Christmas, it would be brought out, again to take over the living room floor for several weeks, and likely with some new accessory hidden beneath the tree. It became part of our tradition, and although my father never achieved his own personal 'train room,' I am certain he found his pleasure in the hours of enjoyment we all shared watching the train as it circled 'round about and home again, home again to the station in our hearts.

Boxes of memories are trundled from the closet and set about the room with lids thrown open, and from their tissue-wrapped contents an aura of poignancy arises, joyous yet bittersweet. Here there are feathers from the child of my heart, gone now five years, and there the jewel-like snowflakes my father once held in his farmworn hands. They are few, these ornaments of retrospect, yet each takes a place of prominence amid the branches. One cannot see the touch of time in their colours, though it flows through them in a spate of reminiscence as I handle them with reverence, calling up recollections of scent and sensation as if yesterday were no more than an hour past.

There are days hung on the Christmas tree, seasons of togetherness and closeness, and though a tear falls sometimes on the soft paper wrappings of a keepsake, the sentiment wrought is not one of melancholy but of a wistful happiness. Love and an angel ornament its boughs, and birds: cardinals, jays and cockatoos uplifting my spirit on their myriad wings. The tree is lit, its tiny blue lights dancing in reflections not of their luminescence, but of the mind.

In the Catholic household of my younger years, the Christmas season opened not with Advent, but with a visit from St. Nicholas as was the tradition in the Old Country from whence my father's people came. Some say that the observation of the saint's day begins with the eve before the 6th of December as Christmas Eve precedes Christmas, but our tradition held with the evening of the date, a schedule (as my father explained) which allowed the saint to pay first call on all the children of Europe where he was better known. Whether the clock bore out my father's logic, I never checked against the Dateline. It would have detracted from the mystery which surrounded this special day.

I would arrive home from school, filled with anticipation for the bag of sweets I knew the saint was bringing to the well-behaved child who had perhaps told a few white lies or sassed her mother, but no greater sins. He had never let me down, St. Nicholas; never punished me by delivering chunks of coal or potatoes instead of candies to let me know of his disfavour, even though I was sure he knew I sometimes longed for a lump of coal to add to my mineral collection. No, within St. Nicholas' sack of treats would be things I had not seen since his last visit: paper-thin ribbon candy which looked like folded rainbows, jelly-filled fruit drops in the shapes of bunches of grapes or lemons or berries, swirly red or green mints, chewy toffees with centers of nougat, but never peppermint candy canes. The shepherd's-crook delights were reserved for hanging on the tree when it was put up on the Saturday preceding Christmas, and woe betide the person who plucked one off before the turkey dinner!

St. Nicholas' visit was to me a miracle, unlike Santa Claus in whom my belief was always shaky. Santa came surreptitiously at midnight, long after I was asleep, whereas although I never saw Nicholas himself, I had heard audible evidence of his existence. Never too long after the evening meal, there would come a sudden thump at the front door (always when it was least expected) and I would race to the entry to find a plain brown bag folded like a lunch sack laying on the floor, heavy with a fine selection of beautiful candy. I would try to catch a glimpse of the saint through the window as he sped away, yet not a trace of him could I find; only my father's familiar footprints in the snow.

Two years ago, I didn't know a football from a field goal, but while visiting my fishing buddy over New Year's, I allowed myself to be talked into watching the Rose Bowl for no other reason than to share quality time with a friend. My chum carefully explained the game to me, drawing diagrams and labelling the players with their positions, answering my sometimes stupid questions with a smile and patience until I had a rudimentary knowledge sufficient to follow the action and to derive some enjoyment from the play. I had no particular loyalties; the teams involved were simply names to me and nothing more.

The year passed without football entering my mind until we again sat down before the television on New Year's Day of 2006. Although my friend had to refresh my memory of terms like "first and ten," "conversion" and their significance, I was surprised that the words came quickly back into my vocabulary once the game had started. I found myself being able to talk somewhat intelligibly on the subject (at least while it was fresh in my mind) and with several other female family members present, I didn't feel like such an idiot when I was forced to confess ignorance on some point or other.

Although you might not call me a football 'fan' yet today, a notable step in that direction occurred with the Seahawk's involvement in the subsequent Super Bowl. It was the first time I had seen the home team play. The whole family turned out to watch the event, ten of us packed into one daughter's cramped living room, perched on couches, lawn chairs, camp stools. Those who were left standing applied themselves to meal preparation, and before long, the buffet was lined with dishes ranging from chips and salsa to pizza, a variety of sandwich makings, grilled burgers (vegetarian or not) and a raft of sweet desserts and beverages too great to number. It was a party, a Super Bowl party, and its unique atmosphere of folk united by a common interest began to draw me into the fold of fandom, never mind that the Seahawks lost in what I thought to be a shameless exercise in favouritism on the part of the referee.

I dismissed football from mind until Thanksgiving when once again, the family invited me to holiday dinner as their "other daughter." Sande and I watched both games that day, excused from kitchen duties to take our time in friendship and even rivalry as we rooted for opposing teams during the latter of the two. I astonished myself by cheering for the Cowboys, specifically saying that I wanted to see them play against the Seahawks.

Caught up in the camaraderie of the previous season's Super Bowl party, I hope to see 'my' team vindicated this year and I wonder: is this how fandom begins? Perhaps. I know I was jubilant to learn this morning of the Seahawk's narrow victory over the Denver Broncos, inflicting my shriek of "Yippee!" on the ear of a man who has no desire to know a football from a field goal, except to pass the score along to me. Baseball, Bob? I suppose if I've come this far with football, there might be hope.

Anybody have a Geiger counter? It's time to put up the Christmas decorations!

Oh yes, those two sentences are certainly related, for deep within the boxed ornaments in the closet is a set of glow-in-the-dark icicles dating back some fifty years to an era when little was known about the effects of radiation. The plant at Hanford was regularly releasing its wastes into the air above the farmlands of eastern Washington then, and clock dials and watch faces told the time in the greenish glow of radium isotopes while constellations of radioactive stars glowed eerily through the night on children's ceilings or the headboards of their beds as they did on mine. The Nuclear Age was upon us, a godsend and unlimited supply of energy (or so it seemed), and we embraced it and naïvely welcomed it into our homes in many forms.

I had never given any particular thought to the pencil-sized plastic icicles which I had so loved as a child when they were hung on the Christmas tree year after year, and when the lights were shut out at night, I'd stand admiring their subtle color and the luminescence they imparted to the adjacent branches. It was a faint glow, to be sure, a mere cast of light paler than a sliver of moon throws, and coldly greenish in its hue.

We also had a set of six snowflakes made of plastic which did not glow, not until they had been packed in close proximity to the icicles one year. When I darkened the room to admire the ornaments one night before bedtime, I noticed a suggestion of phosphorescence coming from within the tree's boughs in a six-sided shape. I passed it off to a trick of light, a ray reflected from some other source, until I noticed yet another and another, and finally when I had counted six unmistakably glowing snowflakes, I began to guess what had happened. I removed one flake, took it into absolute darkness, and there I saw it shining all by its little self. Yes, it had become contaminated by the radiation being emitted by my precious childhood icicles.

I no longer hang the radioactive icicles on the tree, preferring to have all 24 of them on a string across a doorway. I pass beneath their tips several times a day, never without looking up and wondering how rapidly they'd make a Geiger counter tick.

Where have all the cardinals gone? Although this beautiful bird does not occur in my state, they are to me a symbol of Christmas, and as far back as I can recall, only once has it happened that my holiday cards have not borne their image. That notable exception occurred when a Clark's nutcracker (a species which holds deep personal significance for me) made an appearance in WalMart's card display, as if calling to me for acknowledgement from the shelf.

It is my custom to shop a year ahead for cards, laying in next year's supply soon into this year's marketing campaign, and so it was that I began looking for cardinals just prior to Thanksgiving. Had I been checking off species on my life list, I might have added chickadees, various sparrows and finches, ducks or geese, robins, the inevitable patriotic bald eagle, doves (of course) or even a woodpecker, but no cardinals were to be found. I was almost fooled by poorly illustrated cedar waxwings which passed for a female "redbird" at first glance, but the mask and bill shape gave them away as impostors, whatever the artist might have intended.

Yesterday, I searched through dozens of aisles and end caps, hoping to see a trace of red which was not Santa Claus' suit, the scarf on a snowman or a kitten sporting a Christmas bow. Trees held bright red apples in their boughs, a moose wore a scarlet harness, but the closest creature I could find to my beloved "redbirds" was sketched amid a falling snow of glitter: a faded, pale linnet (house finch), its streaked and spotted breast more obvious than its dull pinkish hue.

Will the cardinals come again? I feel as if I am waiting vainly for a legend to arrive: the ivory-billed woodpecker of the season.

Tai-chi: It has been a long time since I went through the slow, graceful moves of the exercise, but although I have forgotten the sequence and must now re-learn the pattern, my body remembers the poise and balance it demands. One would hardly expect physical fitness to result from such a seemingly relaxed and effortless posturing, yet the truth is that the form is an excellent conditioner, requiring constant control over the muscles as the slow motion is kept regular and flowing. The full 'set' as I perform it, done twice in succession takes approximately fifteen minutes to complete, and done twice a day, leaves both my mind and body feeling simultaneously invigorated and relaxed.

Done in conjunction with yoga and the occasional warm-day bike ride or walk, a daily practice of Tai-chi has been sufficient to maintain my muscle tone during the idle months of winter, despite the fact that I often grow bored with its repetition by the time February rolls around. I've used other means to stay in shape, from a stationary bicycle or a HealthRider machine to resistance cords and dumbbells and have found none as satisfying or as salutary. Although a far cry from aerobics, the meditational nature of the routine is in its own way beneficial to the heart as a stress reliever as well.

Mind and body are inextricably linked, and at the core of the matter, stress is ultimately responsible for more illnesses than germs. Western physicians tend toward using pharmaceuticals to treat the mental and physical aspects separately, whereas Eastern medical practitioners takes the opposite approach, prescribing exercise and meditation to find health from within. "Treat the mind, treat the body," is a tenet often repeated in the so-called 'alternative' medicine texts, a sound philosophy, and even if it is not a cure-all, what harm could fifteen minutes of gentle exercise do? Surely far less than some chemical which will leave unavoidable residues in the organs! Given my choice, I will choose to follow those clever Chinese, and carry my personal tigers to the Mountain with Tai-chi rather than swallow a pill.