Three for three, makes nine, which a library patron recently told me means completion. I like that. I like numbers. Nine is a good number- it was my brother’s favorite. A favorite as well of John Lennon and Vladimir Nabokov, whom he admired.

If you think of 12/21/2013 you come up with more threes and another nine. And I was thinking that the edge of ice and open water was a rather nice metaphoric image of that line between dark/solid (ice) and light/ethereal (water) that the solstice represents in equal measure. I think of it as a holy day and Christmas should more rightly fall on it as the mass of Christ or the return of light in all its pagan archetypal sanctity.

Now before I get too carried away, back to realities- we have only three geese- when before we had four. Their injured companion has not been with them for two (or three) weeks now and so we have come to accept that she will not be returning with them anymore. Nature has taken its course elsewhere. They carry on because that is what one does, well enough…