Celebrating the Winter Solstice

If you check on Wikipedia, Winter Solstice is about the axial tilt of the earth or some such gyroscopic horseshit.

Maybe.

I like to think of it as that special day when the Farm Manager gets up an hour and a half before the crack of dawn to fix us a pitcher of vodka smoothies!

She's the Queen of Smoothies, the Farm Manager is. Under normal circumstances she's doing weird shit with hemp seeds and strange grains from parts of the world that are generally starving, but for Winter Solstice, she lets it all hang out, and I get something out of the smoothie-making technology that makes me forget how much I resent it the rest of the year.

And I have to admit, it works to put the Farm Manager herself into an amenable frame of mind. We were just discussing her placement of a license plate as decor item in the kitchen here at Falling Downs. Now, you would naturally assume, if you're any kind of regular reader, that decorating with license plates would be my department, and not hers, and you'd be right.

I immediately offered to refinish the dining room ceiling with the stack of old license plates I have stashed in the garage. I'm a bit of a collector that way. Old plates. Every time I nail a 1950s era plate on the barn wall I ponder about what vehicle that plate may once have graced, and who was driving the vehicle, and who bought it new, and how and where the plates eventually came off that car and found their way into my collection.

There's a hundred stories in every old license plate. Keep reading The View From Falling Downs and I promise I'll eventually bore you with every one of them.

That offer was rather hastily declined. There will be one and only one plate on display, because it came from the only vehicle she ever bought in her life, on her own account, for herself. A brand new 2003 Montana.

So the reason ARET 192 is on view here in the kitchen at Falling Downs, is because it's a reminder of a long journey...

And that's a fitting way to salute the Winter Solstice...