It began innocuously enough. I came home from work, kicked out of my shoes, caught up a little on Facebook, then headed to the kitchen to make dinner. Grilled cheese sandwiches and soup. Mmmmmmm. I took the griddle out of the lower cupboard and placed it on the stove top. Then I turned and got four slices of bread, and placed them on the cutting board. Then I went to the refrigerator to fetch the cheese, the butter (I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter, actually), and a slice of ham for Mickey’s sandwich. He still refuses to give up meat. He and the dogs will apparently cling to the death to their decomposing pieces of flesh hacked from the corpses of tortured livestock animals. Not that I harp about it. Much.

Anyway, I emptied two cans of soup into a larger bowl and placed it in the microwave before preparing the sandwiches. Then I opened the lower cupboard to get the griddle. It wasn’t there.

“Honey,” I said, “I can’t find the griddle.”

“It’s in the cupboard,” Honey responded.

I dug deeper. “Sweetheart, I can’t find it.” That’s what I thought I said, but if we had a security camera with sound in the kitchen it might have come out more along the lines of, “The fucking thing isn’t down here.”

“I know I put it down there,” Mickey said.

I don’t know about the rest of you tall folks – anyone over, say, 5’2″ – but I despise lower cupboards. They’re useless and awkward. The only reason for their existence is to hold up the sink and the countertop. They shouldn’t even have doors on them, that’s how useless lower cupboards are. But I digress. I started pulling pans out of the cupboard. Two cookie sheets, a large skillet, a muffin tin that I didn’t even know we owned, a couple of glass lids, a second surprise muffin tin. Still no griddle.

“It’s not down here,” I snapped.

“It has to be.”

By that time I was on my knees on the dog-hairy, cold kitchen linoleum. “Don’t fucking tell me that, I’m not blind. It’s not fucking here.” I’m sure my tone sounded accusatory. How could it escape sounding so? In my mind, I was accusatory. In my mind I was castigating Mickey for his careless misplacement of our one and only griddle. He works from home, he’s here all day, and he can’t keep track of a fucking griddle? These are the things that were going through my mind.

Mickey came into the kitchen at that point. “Oh, you’re right,” he said. “It’s not down there.”

“Ah ha!” I exclaimed. I jumped to my feet, basking in the self-righteous glow of my angry triumph.

“It’s not down there,” he continued, “because you already put it on the stove.”

Oh. Oops.

Mickey Mills, writer extraordinaire, software god, technical genius, and all-around long-suffering partner of mine with, thankfully, the best sense of humor ever, I am so sorry. I’m so sorry that even the dogs are sorry vicariously, although they have no clue why.

Mea culpa, darling.

By the time Mickey whipped the minivan around a corner on two wheels past the pond shop and onto the dead-end street, I already knew that Slevin was unhappy. He was stuck in the middle of the van with Shooter and had apparently given up all hope of seeing Christmas lights. Slevin likes Christmas lights. He especially likes the dark gray ones. But the poor guy was missing everything. He was laying on the floor of the van, emitting the occasional despairing sigh. Well, we can’t have that, can we? So I asked Mickey to pull over and stop.

Mickey is nothing if not agreeable.

Once I picked up the items from the back of the van that had been thrown forward onto the dashboard by Mickey’s spirited deceleration (my purse, the smaller of the two dogs, a large bottle of liquid detergent, a floor jack, the spare tire and an old Taco Bell cup), I exchanged seats with Slevin. I strapped myself into the middle seat next to Shooter and Slevin took the front passenger seat. What could possibly go wrong?

Mickey drove down one of the nicest streets in town, Broadway, determined to find Christmas lights for our ooohhhhing and aaaahhhhing pleasure. The faint glowing blur of red, white and green that streaked past the tinted windows of the middle seat assured me that he was giving us the grand tour, but by that time I was unable to fully enjoy the ride. I was feeling slightly carsick. I can only assume that Shooter was also because he began to give olfactory evidence of severe gastrointestinal distress.

In the front seat, Mickey’s eyes began to water. “Did that dog crap in the van?”

Needless to say, we had to cut the Grand Christmas Lights Cruise of 2011 short. I breathed a sigh of relief with what little oxygen left in my lungs that hadn’t been burnt away by Shooter’s methane as we pulled into the driveway. We were home. What could go wrong?

Mickey leaped nimbly out of the driver’s side. Slevin leaped even more gracefully out after him. That left Shooter and I. There’s no way I can explain how a 60 pound dog prevented me from getting out of my own damned vehicle. You’ll just have to trust me when I say that he did prevent me. Mickey reached in to try and pull Shooter away so that I could unfasten my seat belt. Shooter slipped out of his collar. Mickey slipped him back into it. Shooter slipped out of it again. Mickey slipped him back into it. Shooter head-butted me in the nose and anointed me with one last mind-bending fart as tears streamed down my face.

God as my witness, there will be no Grand Christmas Lights Cruise of 2012.

Back and forth, these Kings take turns ruling the Earth, one cloaked in darkness and the other in light, one incomplete without the other. Symbolic “enemies”, they are really brothers, or rather two halves of the Earth God himself.

For those who plan to celebrate the Winter Solstice with a ritual of their own, here’s a quick primer on what supplies you might need:

Incense: Pine, cedar, cinnamon and bayberry are favored for honoring the return of the Oak King and for sending the Holly King on his way with thanks and praise. Personally, I burn Nag Champa year round for all of my rituals, but I’ll burn cinnamon also as a sort of under-scent.

Herbs: Oak, evergreen, frankincense, holly, laurel, mistletoe, pine and sage. Luckily, most of us keep sage on hand year round.

Stones/Crystals: Ruby, garnet, bloodstone, emerald and diamond. I don’t personally have any emeralds, diamonds or rubies just laying around for ritual use, lol. But lucky me! Bloodstone is MY stone. I have a large (fist-sized) piece of it that I keep on my altar and I wear a bloodstone ring 24/7.

Spells: Auspicious spells for Sabbat include spells for peace, harmony, love and happiness. Good will toward men. (Sounds familiar?) It’s always a wonderful time of year to ask for enjoyment and prosperity during the reign of the Oak King.

As a child of Southern California, I never knew anything about winter until one year when the boy I loved at that time drove us up Mt. Palomar and into the heart of winter.  Cars were stalled and stuck all along the highway, and the chains my boyfriend had in the back of his Ford Pinto Wagon were too large for the vehicle’s small wheels.  Still, we stopped and helped push several stranded travelers out of the drifts, then descended the mountain to have hot chocolate at a tiny local cafe.  I’ll never forget that evening.  People stared at me.  People always stare at me because, frankly, six foot women aren’t all that common even in Southern California.  But I knew they were staring at me that night for a reason that had nothing to do with my height.  They felt – as I did – my oneness with the season.  Surround me with snow and ice, and I’m in my element.  My inner fire glows.

There’s a blizzard warning on part of the Southern Plains tonight and, oh, how I wish it was headed my way.

Come Winter!  Come snow and ice and chilling winds!  I embrace thee, as you embrace me.

This is MY time.

Most of our era’s religions and their resulting cultures discount women once we’re past the age of bearing children.  Youth is everything.  Youth is sexy and desirable, and women over 40 submit themselves to surgery, poisonous injections, cancer-causing tanning rays, and a hundred other devices in order to maintain the appearance of youth.  Why?  Seriously…WHY?

In Paganism, women reach their full potential and power when they step into the role of Crone.  Childbearing is behind us.  We no longer have small children wandering into our private times at night when we’re engaged in personal acts of sexuality or ceremony.  Our rituals – sexual or otherwise – have the richness of experience and the serenity of confidence attached to them.  We stand bold and full of our wisdom as women.

Winter celebrates this time for us.  It is the Fallow Time.  It is the time when our strength is at its apex, when we stand in our robes of silver, touched by frost and embracing the stillness of the season with perfect beauty, perfect wisdom.  We know the Spring will come again.  We still the restless hearts of the young and assure them that their time will come again.  Buds will burst forth.  Foals and calves will take their first stumbling steps upon new grass.  Eggs will hatch and the sun will break forth in what is now a sky of solid gray. 

But before that happens, before Spring comes to place us in the role of grandmother, midwife and healer, let the Crone enjoy her reign.  We have the wisdom the world aches for.  We embody serenity and patience.  We have passion under our hand and can unleash it at will.  We are the goddesses of old.

I embrace the streaks of silver in my hair.  My son is a warrior on the field of life, no longer wanting or needing my worried fussing.  The young come to me for advice and I’m confident in giving it.  The man beside me has winter hair and the settled, puckered scars of a youth well-spent.  I’ve never loved life more.

I have arrived.  I am the best of Woman.

When I was young I thought there was nothing worse than my own personal afflictions.  Now that I’m a middle-aged (if I live to be, say, 120 or so) woman, I know better.  As a mother, an aunt, a great-aunt, a lover, a woman who put in the years necessary to nurture friendships throughout a long adulthood, I realize how wrong I was.  The worst affliction is that which our loved ones suffer.  Lay it on me, I scream to the gods.  Send it my way, I have the knowledge, I have the experience, I can handle it!  If I could take all the pain away from those I love by bringing it on myself, I would.  But it doesn’t work that way, does it?

My son, my thirty year old “baby”, posted on Facebook this week that he was standing in fires of his own making.  I wrestled my mom-self into submission and responded as the crone I am, the aging woman with the cauldron and intimate knowledge of the Old Ways.  I told him that those fires are sacred.  They burn away our illusions.  They leave us standing here naked with nothing – nothing – except the realization that we surround ourselves with illusion every chance we get.  We cloak ourselves in illusion as if it was cloth of gold instead of the mind-numbing crap it really is.  Illusion is comfortable.  It keeps us from examination of reality.

In the midst of psychic and emotional fire we burn away everything superficial and stand naked before ourselves.  Pain is dreadful, pain is awful, but it strips us of everything except the knowledge of what’s really important in our lives.  It gives us the chance to step out of the illusions and into the reality of life.  It gives us a rare and sacred chance to see what’s worthy dieing for, what’s worth living for.  And in passing along this ancient wisdom to my son, I think I might find a lesson for myself.

The fire doesn’t hurt any less just because the flame belongs to someone else.  I’m standing in the fire also – the fire that is the pain of my loved ones.  In this vicarious fire I find my own illusions stripped away and I find myself face-to-face with my own naked self, and I wonder:  Is this my rite of passage also?

I couldn’t imagine why anyone would give back a puppy as marvelous as my Shooter.  Welll…one year later, I sort of understand.  The little booger has eaten his way through several sets of sheets (600 thread count, mind you!), the remains of a love seat that our lab got tired of gnawing, a dozen shoes and several pairs of jeans. 

He is the spawn of Satan.  And I wouldn’t give him up for the world. 

Why are we never prepared to bury those who are younger than ourselves?  Yet, in retrospect, this is obviously part of outliving our own youth.  Recently I’ve heard of or seen babies buried while their 20-something parents struggle to understand the depth of their own loss.  I’ve seen teens die by gunfire.  It’s horrible, really.  In what way does life prepare us for this?  I wasn’t prepared, that’s for sure, and I never knew how unprepared I was until today when I learned of the death of a young cousin by marriage.

Tall, blonde, scarred.  Heavily tattooed and pierced, Chris was a rebel.  He’s gone now, leaving behind three little daughters, a wife, and a family torn by grief.  He also leaves behind one tired middle-aged witch who wonders, did he ever know how much I admired him?  Did he ever know that every time I saw him I thought “Viking”?

Well, he’s in Valhalla now, and I’m left without any words of comfort for his family other than telling them that he made a difference while he was here.  He was fierce and gentle and strong all at the same time.  I noticed. I saw.  How could anyone not see?  He carried himself like the warrior that he was.

The world is short one warrior tonight and just at the time when we needed him the most.  But the fires in the Great Hall are brighter for his presence.

Continue to burn brightly, Chris.  We’ll see your glow from here, I promise.

Can anyone tell me when jumping POV became an offense?  When did maintaining one POV become “The Law”?  When did jumping POV fall out of favor, leaving readers to slog their way through too many novels that had the potential to be brilliant if only their authors hadn’t been so timid?  Seriously, when did we stop taking a chance with our art and fall victim to the mundane rule of one POV?

One of the world’s best loved books is Pride and Prejudice and Austen is considered one of the finest authors of all time.  Yet, in P&P, which many consider her master work, we spend time not only in Eliza Bennett’s head, but also Mr. and Mrs. Bennett, Charlotte Lucas, and to a lesser extend Aunt Gardiner.  We even get to view the world from Mr. Darcy’s eyes from time to time.

Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina is another example.  The book is purposely divided into segments of Anna’s POV and Lenin’s POV, yet within these segments we jump heads into Vronsky’s arrogant, narrow little mind, and also into Kitty Levin’s and Stephan Oblonsky’s.

Stephen King is another great author who doesn’t tell a story from one POV.  He head jumps and also offers the omniscient POV from time to time for good measure.  I’d hate for one of the POV Nazis that I see on many online fiction sites take a blue pencil to ‘Salem’s Lot.

I will continue to write from whatever POV I choose, and if I decide to jump, I respect my readers enough to believe they’ll be able to follow me.  And to my fellow authors who might be reading this, feel free to jump POV all you’d like.  I’m pretty sure I can keep up.

Thank you, Barb!