Samain                                                                                       Closing Moon

It is a sweet sad thing, this leaving. Tonight before sheepshead Bill Schmidt and I ate supper at the St. Clair Broiler. the last such meal before our monthly card game. We’ve played cards 60 different times over a period of 8 years. That’s a long time. Bill and I have eaten together most card nights for the last couple of years.

We ate, talked of his daughter, his grandchildren. He gave me a gift, a CD, a Celtic Thunder Christmas. It has two songs on it with a distinctly Celtic (Irish) flavor and the rest is well-done versions of various Christmas standards. But it was not the music so much, he said, but the idea of holidays and Celtic and Christian together, all part of my way: holiseason, long years in the Christian ministry and a now long standing immersion in Celtic sensibilities about the land, the nature of time and joy, life and death.

At the game tonight, which did not go well from a score keeping vantage point for either Bill or me, we played with a sense of ending. Dick, Roy and Ed had not been caught up on our purchase in Conifer, nor, really, our reasons for leaving. We spoke of them.

At the end of the evening Judy made an apple crisp that was delightful, Roy had written a closing piece that would be a good eulogy and Dick Rice gave me a t-shirt with the Celtic triskelion and the sacred raven. I was told I would I would be missed and felt it.

As I said in my post from last night, I am a rich man. Yet, it is this richness that makes leaving sad, and, the leave takings themselves, also sweet. And, precious.