16 days til Christmas--reflections

Reflections--5 by 7 watercolor

16 days til Christmas--a time for reflections, on what happened before.
Little things that stick in your mind over the years, a First Grade teacher's name, a postman, a saying, a special gift...the memories of certain journeys, of those who have gone on before us, but are still part of who we are.
The reflections are brilliant, and brighten the short days and long nights.

17 days til Christmas--traveling a long way off

A long way off, 5 by 7 watercolor

17 days til Christmas--a season of traveling a long way off, as it was that first Christmas long ago.
We're used to traveling long distances these days, usually at high speed, either in the air or by car, to get "home" or to relatives for brief reunions, and then scurrying back to work or other obligations.
The holidays have become almost anything but holidays, with complicated plans, scheduling and the actual travel--lots of stress, all for a few hours of days of getting together to supposedly rest.
Of course it's worth it, and we're fortunate to be able to cover those distances.
But there was a time when it was not so. Anyone who has lived on the Great Plains knows that.
There's a reference in the Bible, in the parable of the prodigal son, that speaks of those times.
Remember when Jesus says the father saw him, while he was still "a long way off"?
That doesn't happen these days. In spite of the distances, we arrive almost instantly.
I remember as a little boy in Fort Worth watching for a bus to drop my Dad off from work several blocks away. I would see him when he was a long way off, walking toward the house.
Years later, I remember when my first born was coming home for Christmas from college that first year, watching out the window for his car to turn the corner several blocks away.
The anticipation and joy has to come close to what the prodigal's father felt...he too had been hoping, watching, praying for safety.
Yes, in this season, there is anticipation of loved ones arriving, or going to visit from a long way off, people we've not seen in a while as families grow and spread out. 
But what a pleasure to see someone at a distance, like people in a car, or on horseback, or on foot, coming up a country lane.

A profound stillness and whispering

Approaching the Arizona Memorial

December 7, 1941...75 years ago.
Today, at the U.S.S. Arizona Memorial, daily tours bring hundreds to stand over the sunken, rusting hulk of that battleship off Ford Island in Pearl Harbor, Hawai'i.

You take a ferry, operated by U.S. Navy sailors,  out to what was battleship row, where she and her kin were destroyed in a surprise attack from the Empire of Japan, plunging us into WWII.

A bomb struck her ammunition magazine and exploded, sending 1,177 men to instant death. 

Their remains are still there, beneath the water, their ship still oozing oil after all these years, from translucent slicks on the clear water, where you can look down and see the rusting remains of that ship.

I knew all this, but was reminded even more last week when visiting a bookstore, and noticed many new books displayed about that day.
It's more than a Memorial, it's a cemetery. I was privileged to visit there a few years ago when my son M/Sgt. Vance Clark, and family, USAF, were stationed.

When you get your ticket to the ferry from the visitor center at the World War II Valor in the Pacific National Monument on the island of Oahu, it carries the name and biography of every sailor killed that day. I can't find mine now, though it crops up when cleaning out a closet every few years. Mine was from a young sailor from Hominy, Oklahoma.
As you board the ferry from the visitor center, it's striking that the directions on the wall are in both English and Japanese. I'd guess from my visit that half the visitors are young Japanese. 
There's chatter in the visitor center, but when you board the ferry and head across Pearl Harbor, approaching the Memorial, it gets hushed.

When you pull up to the quay, and head down the ramp onto the Memorial that spans the ship, there is a profound silence, a whispering as people read the names of the victims on the walls, view the rusty circular mount of a forward turret rising above the gently lapping, oil stained waves, look at the rusting steel below, or gaze astern stern to the battleship U.S.S.  Missouri, moored as another museum. It was on her decks that Japan surrendered almost four long bloody years later.

Pearl Harbor is still a major Navy, Army and Air Force bastion in the Pacific.
Our servicemen do not forget. There are still machine gun bullet gouges in buildings at Hickham Field, in the seaplane ramps and other reminders of that day when the Pacific was not pacific.

USS Abe Lincoln passing the USS Arizona and USS Missouri

But most impressive to me is that on every U.S. Navy ship that enters, or departs, Pearl Harbor, sailors "man the rails" in their dress uniforms, and salute, in profound silence, as they pass the Arizona Memorial, and their dead "shipmates."
Salute.

 
**

I've blogged about this before. Click these links if you're interested. 
Pearl Harbor Thoughts
Here's to the Navy

I can't find my photos from my trip, and my son can't locate his either, after multiple moves, but my daughter-in-law Kerin sent the top three photos above from a friend of theirs, Airman Jonelle Snyder. Others are from the National Monument.

USS Abraham Lincoln arriving at Pearl

18 days til Christmas--welcoming warmth

Door to warmth, 5 by 7 watercolor card

18 days til Christmas.
Cold front, north wind.
A world of worry
Frozen emotions
A welcoming door
Warmth interior.
Why we need
Christmas

19 days til Christmas--adobe, earth to stardust

Adobe essence, 5 by 7 watercolor

Just 19 days til Christmas--warm earth adobe withstands the chill of winter.
Adobe is so simple, so natural, so much a part of us.
Made of earth like mankind from the dust of the earth, it will return, as we will to stardust.
In between, it is a sanctuary, a haven for mortality--like Christmas.