Samain Closing Moon
With our closing Black Mountain Drive on Samain, October 31st and the Celtic New Year, it has meant that the final phases of the move, the last packing, the loading and transport of our household will all happen during Holiseason. Though we made no effort to have things work out this way, from a Great Wheel perspective and on my personal liturgical calendar, it couldn’t have happened better.
By closing on Samain and wrapping up the move in this 6 week season which began on Summer’s End (Samain), it means we will start our new, mountain life in this time of beginnings. It also means that the move will mark a harvest of our Minnesota lives and then a long fallow season, stretching into the next spring. Over that time we will nourish roots tentatively planted in new soil.
Furniture will get positioned. Clothes sorted into closest and drawers. The kitchen will fill up with our dishes, pans and utensils. Rugs will go down. Kate’s Bernina and her long arm quilter and her stash and her ironing board and her work tables will find their positions. Her new sewing room will take shape. The reading chairs will go in front of the fireplace, a new kitchen table, made of wood from pine beetle killed trees, will come into being. My treadmill and weights, computer and work tables, and books will occupy the loft area over the garage.
The dogs will have their places, not yet fully determined, either by them or by us. The Rav4 will have its own bay and the new snow blower will inhabit space in the garage, too.
We will arrive in Colorado during Advent and in the middle of Hanukkah. Winter solstice 2014 will find us on Shadow Mountain with a non-light polluted view of the longest night’s sky.
Our movers project December 21st to December 24 for delivery. Christmas day we will be opening boxes filled with materials we use to live our life. What better presents? Over those final, often dismal days at the end of the year, we will be moving in. And on New Years we can have a party of our own, as we always do, a quiet evening to mark the coming of 2015.
Over these Holiseason days, which come to an end on Epiphany, January 6th, the grandkids and Jon and Jen and Barb will come over. We will eat meals together and begin to adjust to this new, closer to each other, reality. Actually, as I write this, it occurs to me that Holiseason will extend well into January with the coming of the National Western Stock Show. This event has been an annual trip to Colorado since Ruth was 3 and is a celebration of things Western and ranch.
There will also be new people to meet. Perhaps through the sheepshead meet-up group, quilting retreats, the Rocky Mountain Chapter of the Sierra Club, the Colorado Beekeepers Association. At restaurants and service locations like the Colorado Toyota Service center. In ways we do not yet know.
All this over the dark, cold, snowy time so that in the spring or early summer perhaps, we can emerge with our new life ready to bloom, to sink roots deeper and to enjoy the mountain summer.
