Meadows Brown and Sere*

Do we love the week between Christmas and New Year’s?

It has always been a difficult one for me. Always, I say—but not truly always.

Not when I was a child. Not when I was in my late teens, going to glamorous parties where I was expected to meet the young man I would marry.

It began to be difficult when the parties stopped. Or maybe when they stopped seeming glamorous.

Or maybe when too many of the people I loved were absent on Christmas.

This latter is a circumstance of life that, while surely predictable, is rarely anticipated in full—and rightly so. No point in digging the garden where loss will grow.

I know I’m not alone in the thorns I find among forlorn wrappings and garlands at the end of December.

Widows, widowers, divorced persons, grandparents whose little ones live too far away for practical travel—we are a siblinghood of strategies for improving this empty week.

Many of us fly to visit far-flung families. I’ve given that up for the time being on account of a lowered tolerance for stress and crowds.

But I keep moving. I have spoken before, here, of “slow travel,” the evening ritual I perform with my giant dog, Bristol, along the backroads of Fayette and Washington Counties.

On a particular afternoon recently, rolling slowly along a gravel road, we flushed a red-shouldered hawk from a shaded fence post only a few feet away.

And I found myself thinking of Mary Oliver’s poems. Lately, I’ve been reading her “Little Alleluias,” a 2025 compilation.

Many of her images come from daily walks around the neighborhoods she lived in. Such vivid pictures in words: “The toad was always here, with his gold-rimmed eyes.” (Wasteland: An Elegy) No toads for me, right now, but deer. Deer like smoke, flashing white flags as they bound away. It’s still deer season, of course.

Deer are what Bristol hopes for, with her huge head poking out the back window. She knows where we are most likely to see them out of season. But now, pursued and vigilant, they always surprise.

One virtue of slow travel is that you have time to stop when one surprises you. I’ve seen a couple of near misses over the past weeks -- pickups traveling too fast out of familiarity, and a young doe crossing the dirt road a little later than she might have.

Did the driver of the truck know what almost happened? Was he looking?

There is so much to see in these pastures, despite winter and drouthy conditions. Little calves for one thing, many of them who have never touched green grass. Also, gleaning birds in flocks; the solitary Great Egret and Great Blue Heron who fish in close proximity on an ever smaller local stock tank.

I love those patient, lethal birds so much, and their shallow, shrinking pond shaded on two sides by willows.

The sere and elegant meadows cry out for rain. I know this in a practical sense, the way so many of us process nature’s whims and lessons.

But I feel it in my spirit. It’s this spirit that my slow travel can lift and buoy when commerce and construction pause for a holiday.

The directors of commerce and construction, however, don’t think of spirit in the same way I do.

I think they can’t allow themselves to feel the pain and heartbreak they cause the creatures they don’t know -- even when some of those creatures are people.

*From “Death of the Flowers,” by William Cullen Bryant Readers can contact Hale at bfhale2017@gmail.com