For a while, I had trouble sleeping late in the summer. I thought it was because the sun would peep over the horizon and call to me, a morning person. I couldn't bear to miss any daylight and would awaken and rise, no matter how early. But these days, I certainly can't blame the sun for waking me, as we cross the dark passage of winter solstice. It just seems like I don't need all that sleep that I used to. My brain awakes before I do, solving databases puzzles and memorizing new song lyrics. As my eyes open and I turn over, I find all sorts of mental processes dancing in front of me on the bedspread. I might as well get up and join them.

This morning, I woke at 4:15 and lay in bed for a while to sort it all out. When the creative thoughts started to turn into worries, I got up and went into the office, where I had some fun making decorations for our christmas stockings. This is a tradition that I have carried on.. each year, there is something on the sock that represents an event of the year past. Cutting images out in felt turns out to be sort of clumsy work that my mother was much more adept at than I. However, felt comes in more colors than it used to, and that helps.

Now I've moved on to coffee and blogging. The garbage collectors have come and gone, and the sun is still hiding below the edge of the world.

At the holidays, we like to spend a lot of time playing games. Our favorites are charades, catch phrase, pictionary, and scattergories. This year we bought Perquacky and expect to play that a lot. At a holiday luncheon last Friday, we pulled out the dominoes and I started building a tower. The set was plastic and slippery, but still the tower got quite high before the inevitable happened:

Upon reviewing my diaries that I wrote at the time, my memories of my teenaged trip to Switzerland were a bit compressed and simplified. I'm sure that's what memories do, when they get faded and folded away like a once favorite shirt that one can't bear to throw out.

I found an entry for one particular day - parts of which I clearly remember. The other parts were folded into the memory of my first day in Italy. Now I see that the experience of getting lost and found by the river happened on the very same day that I jumped into the Rhine River on a whim.

------------
We had to get up really early and walk to the station from the train to Lausanne, then on to Bern. The five hours in Bern were well spent - Cathy and I were together all day. At first in Bern we got lost, and saw only the huge ugly buildings of the business/factory section near the station. Descending to the river Aare, we saw a totally different side of the city - the beautiful color of blue/gray/green water and its texture, next to green banks of trees and a nice bridge, too. We sat and waded and watched patterns of leaves against the sky. Lunch was a picnic at a pool. We went to the huge cathedral's park and ate oranges. Then we climbed the steeple and saw huge bells.

Riding to Zurich, on the train, I thought of how much water in that river is like me, with its unformed consistency and its changes - forming over things, smoothly moving but the whole of it is churning, whirling. It's just such a beautiful thought - to be water - and I can't decide if its good or bad that my movement is too fast for a definite form, or if a shaped personality would freeze me.

We're at a youth hostel in Stein am Rhein, it's not terribly nice but I think I had a myth in mind when I think of a hostel. Tonight Cathy, Jean and I walked to the small bridge in town and saw people diving from it. So we gave our shoes and contacts and purse to Jean and jumped in, too. It's the most fantastic river - swimming in the Rhine - it doesn't seem possible to swim in what has always been a squiggle you've had to label on a map. We went a long ways and when we got out it was a fenced in swimming area. We finally escaped through a private home's yard. I touched some sort of plant that made my skin feel on fire.

For the past four years, I have sung at the Harley Davidson Toy Run at San Francisco General Hospital. This year was L'Attitude's first time. It was wonderful! A sunny day, over 150 bikes loaded with gifts for the kids that otherwise would not have a christmas. We sang some holiday songs and then led the group in carols.

There have been a couple of days this week where it was so cold outside that we postponed our usual morning dog walk. We just couldn't face the nose-numbing frost. But I've found that I get stir crazy by 11am if I don't have my walk, forget about how antsy the dog gets.

So this morning, we bundled up and braved the outdoors. The sky was crystal clear, and the thermometer hovered at 31 degrees. For some reason, Lola wanted to go "the long way" (probably because she remembered that her walk yesterday was later than usual, and shorter!), so we circled the whole neighborhood and ended up in the park. It is always surprising to me how quiet our area can be in the morning. Do most people get up later than we do? There was only one sign of life, an idling car in a driveway. Otherwise, all the homes were tightly sealed and certainly no one else was out walking. Even the birds were too cold to get up this morning. The only ones I saw were four crows in flight.

The crows have pretty much taken over our neighborhood. They used to be limited to a family that lived in one tall tree next door. Then that tree got cut down, and the crows formed an alliance with some other crow families, and in retribution for removing their habitat, have started a crow gang that has intimidated all the other birds in the block. They like to pick the walnuts from the trees and then drop them onto the street to crack them. They swoop down and eat cat food from the porch. They caw and caw and scare the other birds from the feeder.

The grass in the park was completely white with frost. I played catch with Lola (reluctantly, because she will only retrieve if the thrower has a treat as a reward for her, and I didn't want to take my glove off to pull the treat out of my pocket). Her paws made silver tracks across the white grass. The silence of the neighborhood continued. The dogs that live on the perimeter of the park did not even bark from inside the house. We quickly walked home, to try to restore blood to our limbs. The crows flew by once more.