Sometimes you’re not going to make some journey that you thought you would. That’s the reality.

It might be a big vacation you planned. Or, it might be something small, like going swimming in some lake that you’ve driven by for 23 years and it looks so placid and beautiful that you want to stop the car and jump in for a dip. But, because you don’t happen to drive by that lake at exactly the right time, your plans won’t come to fruition. It’s the way life is.
 
We miss out on some opportunities. Other times, the vagaries of where you are and when, combined with an odd impulse makes you stop and climb a forest trail where a rainbow reveals itself at the summit. You never expected it, you didn’t plan it, but there it was, and your life was enriched.
 
I keep a host of news clippings regarding places to see, trips to take. This past year, I narrowed down the pile. Sifting through each review or ad, I looked and considered how much I really wanted to visit the location, what the probability honestly was that I would ever go there, and how much I still cared after the information had been sitting in the folder for years.
 
My wife and I take regular dates to eat at local restaurants. I keep a list for this, too. It’s another reminder to make the effort to go to places that you have an interest in, while also forcing you to make choices on one restaurant or another. If you head to this one tonight, you won’t be going to that one.
 
You’re not going to make it to certain restaurants. You aren’t going to make it to certain vacation locations.
 
There’s a sadness – a “letting go” feeling – that occurs as you make considerations about the places you want to visit, but come to understand shouldn’t remain on your bucket list of things to do in the years ahead. Based on your stage of life, letting go could be a decision based on the reality of costs vs. how much money you earn. It could be you let go because you had an interest in some activity that no longer engages you.

Or, as you go through a new stage of life, you realize there’s something different that is more important to you. Years ago, for example, I enjoyed body surfing in the ocean. That urge has not gone away. But, 1) we don’t live near an ocean, and 2) not wanting to sit on a beach for extended periods absorbing solar radiation are both reasons that urge is not as strong as it used to be. The rush of riding a wave to shore is outweighed by logistics.
If the ocean came to me, I’d be there. If, remarkably, we drove near the Atlantic or Pacific during the right of time year, I’d pull the car over and take a dip, swim out, time the wave, paddle forcibly towards the shore to capture a burst of adrenaline. The rush and joy would be there.
 
It’s good to keep spontaneity open.  Don’t throw all those news clips away. Cull the list, add to it, keep it up to date, and leave room for the sudden urge. The impulse joy usually stays in your memory banks.

​Working my way through invasive buckthorn recently, I came across trash history. Our property heads down a hill to the Bark River, where the buckthorn multiplies. The low-lying earth where the river overflows is where I was cutting down the brush and came across living history.
 
The term “trash history” is literal, not figurative. As I slashed, yanked, pulled and piled the various bushes and small trees, history was unearthed as well.
 
An overturned stump held a broken glass bottle nestled in its root system. Underneath a pile of leaves, the front bumper of a car emerged. Stuck in the dirt was the top of an old, rusted paint can, which slowly emerged with digging, and partially crumbled in my hands during the process.
 
A small local dump on our property. Oh, joy. How long had these artifacts slept there? The answer to that question slowly emerged with each new discovery.
 
First to test my personal knowledge based on my lifespan was a pop-top beer can. The style told me everything. It was from the 1960s.
 
Next was a beer bottle. The style gave it away. Again, from the 1960s. Probably was a Schlitz, but the label had disappeared.
 
The level of decomposition was another telling factor. I’m no archeologist. At the same time, when you see the rusted remnants of a cooking pot and look at the other refuse, you put two and two together to come up with your prediction on how long ago someone decided to let their crap fly.
 
How long does it take glass to decompose? How about an aluminum can or a cooking skillet? Plastic jar? Barbed wire? A discarded tire? Clearly, none of them in 50+ years, which is pretty scary. All of these items were intact in the scattered rubbish.
 
Carbon dating is a scientific method that can accurately determine the age of organic materials as old as approximately 60,000 years. I didn’t need that to help recognize the leftovers from my own personal life.
 
Do people think about decomposition when they toss their refuse in the woods? Highly unlikely. In the 1960s, as is often still the case today in 2023, too many people don’t care what they throw in the woods or out the car window. Sadly, the world is their dump.
We grew up on a dead-end street in northern New Jersey. There was a dump at the end of our street. Random cars and trucks would stop and throw old television sets, toilets, tree limbs, leaves, lumber, shingles, and who the heck knows what else into the ever-burgeoning pile. I wonder now if those materials are buried, have been removed or still sit on the surface providing a certain historical perspective of those years.
 
We played in that dump, never thinking twice about smashing things, throwing something over the ledge. The trash depositors created a new world for us kids.
 
Future generations might unearth artifacts from that dump in the years ahead. What will they find? If it’s similar to the junk I’ve found during my buckthorn destruction, the throw-aways will tell a story, like most things left behind.

Making accommodations for cold weather (and increasingly colder weather in the months ahead) seems to engage more decision-making than years past. Hard to say if this is something you over-think or over-complicate. Whatever the reason, I find that clearing the summer clothes out of the closet and depositing the winter ones in their place causes me to pause more so the past couple of years than it did 5-10 years ago.
 
Last week, we got some temperatures into the 20’s at night. That’s a signal. Time to air out the winter jacket. Check and see where the stocking caps are. Find those lost winter gloves. See if anything needs to be washed because they remain stale or dirty from the previous winter.
 
The past two years, rather than making a massive transition in one day, emptying my closet of short-sleeve shirts and filling the area with long-sleeved ones, I’ve incrementally made these changes. One week, I shift over three shirts, particularly ones I know I’ll wear in the colder weather. A week later, I find a flannel shirt that looks good and I bring it over to the closet in our bedroom and remove a golf shirt. And so on.
 
This goes on for several weeks. Rather than one massive evacuation, I tier the decision-making. Partly, this is tied to weather. There is no clear break when you absolutely know for sure that the next two weeks are going to stay below freezing. Instead, we get some cold nights down in the high 20’s or low 30’s and day-time temps may still hit 42 or 46. You aren’t going to sprint outside in shorts, but you also don’t need long johns.
 
This time of year, you can’t count on consistency. After hitting the types of days noted above, you may get three days in the high 50’s. Golf beckons. You go to the supermarket in pants and a t-shirt. You whistle while you work in the yard, the blindingly blue sky filling your heart with thanks and joy. But not a winter jacket.
 
As you shift your personal mindset from summer to fall to possibly winter, you undergo this ever-so-slight transition, like other mammals. You may find yourself starting to consume more foods, appreciating starches, preparing yourself to hibernate for three months. Sleep becomes a closer friend, one more Making accommodations for cold weather (and increasingly colder weather in the months ahead) seems to engage more decision-making than years past. Hard to say if this is something you over-think or over-complicate. Whatever the reason, I find that clearing the summer clothes out of the closet and depositing the winter ones in their place causes me to pause more so the past couple of years than it did 5-10 years ago.
 
Last week, we got some temperatures into the 20’s at night. That’s a signal. Time to air out the winter jacket. Check and see where the stocking caps are. Find those lost winter gloves. See if anything needs to be washed because they remain stale or dirty from the previous winter.

You can’t give in completely though, so rather than wearing winter gloves, I pull out the fingertip-less hand gloves to demonstrate how tough I am in the face of 37-degree temperatures while raking leaves. When my fingertips go numb in 23 minutes, I realize I’m not so tough anymore.
 
Another gradual change involves the head gear. Warmer months, you decide which ballcap is best suited for the day. When your ears start to get cold, you know it’s time to decide on a stocking cap or one with ear flaps.
 
Sadly, declining hair population accelerates this decision with each year. The cool breeze becomes colder on a scalp increasingly bare. As your natural protection decelerates, the artificial one must increase.

And, I guess that’s what it’s all about. You figure this out and adjust in stages, bit by bit, learning, going outside and realizing, “hmmmm, better get a jacket.” There’s no nirvana moment of change; instead, you keep living and learning day-to-day. 

 

​Halleluiah!!!!!!!!!!  There’s a new national holiday!
 
We are going to term it, “The Day the Weather Forecasters were Right.” That’s the headline in the newspaper, so it only makes sense to set aside this national day of recognition for the one day of the year that the prognosticators accurately foresaw snow, wind and clouds.
 
This event occurred two weeks ago. It didn’t immediately become apparent that we should turn it into a national holiday, but upon consideration of the epic success made by the television weather guessers, a groundswell occurred from the masses. Letters were written to their Congress members urging recognition and a day to be set aside for their one-in-a-hundred accurate assessment of what the weather was going to do 12 hours in advance.
 
You ask, “What happened?” This:
 
Sunday night, if you checked the hourly forecast online or listened to the local newscaster, snow was expected to start at 7 a.m. the following morning. If this had been typical, the forecast would change and the snow would be changed to rain, and moved to later in the morning, then into early afternoon, then finally evaporate from the forecast altogether, as if it had never been predicted.
 
On this day though, they were not about to be wrong. Instead, they forecast snow through the early morning hours, followed by a brief respite before noon, then some light snow sprinkles in the 1 p.m. range, then steadier snow from 4-6 p.m. YAWN.
 
You know they’ll be wrong, so why pay attention.
 
Instead, no, that was not to be the case. Instead, the forecasters were 100 PERCENT ACCURATE! They didn’t just generically come close with their predictions – they got it exactly right.

Neighbors called out in the streets, “OMG, they predicted the snow. THEY WERE RIGHT. PRAISE THE LORD! They said we’d get one to three inches, and we did! Go buy a lottery ticket!”
 
There’s a lot to be said for accuracy and getting it right in your daily job. You get respected. People believe you. Trust is established. Good things.  All good reasons to make this a national holiday as it works to improve the national psyche.
 
Their timing was exemplary. They got the snow accumulation totals perfect. Amazing, incredible, astounding, unbelievable (really). How’d they do it?
 
You really have to wonder. What was so different on this day? Was there something fundamentally easy to predict that day? Did the forecasters have a good breakfast and that made them more content and on top of the upcoming weather patterns? Was the direction of the wind, the moisture in the air, the size of the cloud cover all so simply connected that there was no way they could miss? Like a fat pitch coming your way in baseball that you couldn’t help but slam out of the park?
 
Who the heck knows? Let’s just forget about the cause and marvel at the prediction coming true. Time to celebrate. Set off the fireworks. Shoot some streamers into the air.
 
When the weather forecasters so frequently miss, when they do get it right it’s time for a national holiday.