The Reindeer Keeper

Did you ever look at a photo and wish you could remember that moment; remember what lead up to it and what everyone was saying and who took the photo and what happened after the photo had been taken and life continued on? I had all those questions and more after receiving the attached photo from a cousin. That’s me sitting on a horse behind my Uncle Paddy-my cousin’s father. My older brother is sitting on the other horse. I have no recol lection of that day. But I do know if my Uncle Paddy was involved, it would have been a fun day. Most in the community knew him as owner of a shoe store. I knew him as an uncle who was a kid at heart. Uncle Paddy was the one who built us kids rafts out of telephone poles so we could go off on adventures on a creek that ran along behind our homes. Uncle Paddy was the one who helped my cousin and I set up a tent behind his house so we could camp out on occasion over summer vacations. Of course he was also the one who loved to scare us later on

This past December when going to the woods for a Christmas tree, I came back home with two trees. One was for the living room. The other was for the room where Brian and I spend most of our time. We call it the Groove room. It used to be a back porch. Now it’s where it all happens; everything from singing and dancing to TV viewing and CD listening and writing and watching the leaves turn and the snow fall and the garden grow and the deer pass by. It overlooks the back yard and the fields; a rock wall where rabbits live and the old barn with a light in the upstairs window. I’d thought about putting a small Christmas tree in the Groove room before but I never followed through. Something was telling me to do it this past Christmas. So I did. Once Christmas was over, it didn’t bother me to take down the tree in the front room but that little tree on the old back porch was a different story. Brian and I weren’t ready to say goodbye to what had become our favorite little tree. So we

With the snow and the wind and below zero temperatures, I sometimes fix something simple for myself when suppertime comes around. This doesn’t happen every night but when it does happen; whatever I fix not only warms me up but fills me with an even deeper appreciation of winter. I’d never think of having hot cereal for supper in the summertime. But I do during the winter. And I enjoy every spoonful as much as I would enjoy a full-course meal. After the hot dogs and potato salads and the boiled dinners and turkeys, winter offers a time of slowing down and occasionally treating yourself to simple, warm and relaxing suppers. Besides a bowl of hot cereal, which could be Oatmeal, Corn Meal, or Wheatena with an added treat of dipping a piece of toast into any one of those cereals, my simple winter supper might be buttermilk pancakes with either blueberries or bananas on top. When the kids were little I had a Hello Kitty-shaped pancake skillet. Those pancake suppers were quite popular