A Good Week

This may be my favorite week of the year.

In the three days before Thanksgiving things are quiet. Here, I don’t mean the news. There’s news every day coming out of the once and future President. I’m trying to ignore that as best I can.

I mean there’s a quiet in our souls.

Okay, let me stop right here and apologize for a sentence like that. Here at YSDA, the editors cringe at Hallmark worthy statements of that sort. But the editors are not their usual cranky selves this week. There’s a certain quiet in their souls.

I got home from deer camp yesterday around lunchtime. No, I did not “catch” a deer as my neighbors referred to the act of killing the animal. We do not catch them, rehabilitate them and send them back out into the wild. We kill them. Sometimes, I like to use the gentler word, “dispatch.” But they are never captured dead or alive. It’s only the former.

In any event, I haven’t dispatched a deer in six years running now. And, while I would like to try some new venison recipes, that’s fine. On the list of things I love about deer camp, killing deer ranks about number 15.

Higher on the list would be Saturday. All day, Saturday. On opening day of the season I, as is my wont, spent the entire day from a half hour before sunrise until a bit after sunset alone in the woods. I didn’t look at my email, I didn’t read a book, I didn’t even nap. Much. I listened and looked. I saw 10 deer, but all of them before 7:30AM. For all of my remaining time in the woods on Saturday and Sunday I saw not a thing.

Deer hunting is a test. Can you spend a whole day with just yourself? This is not a video game with constant action. This is long hours of nothing much happening. So, how good are you at spending 11 hours in the quiet, by yourself, with no distractions?

Me, I love it. I’ve always enjoyed my own company. I am the classic introvert. I find that being with people — even people I like — a drain. I recharge the batteries by being alone.

Which brings me back to my main point. I love this week because to me it has the feel of spending time at a retreat house — no matter where you are. The landscape has shut down for the season. Growing season is over. Things are brown and gray and tucked in, waiting for the real cold and the snow. It’s a good time to reflect on where you’ve been and where you’re going. It is not a time for action. It’s a time for thinking.

If life were a big house, this week would be a dim nook in the library. Again here we wait for our editors to hit the ceiling with that sentence. No? Still caught up in their quiet souls, I guess.