If you like night, we’ve got a deal for you. Longest nights of the year. Hardly any day.

When we’re in a good mood, we call it the Winter Solstice. But lately I’ve taken to calling it the Big Darkhole. Long, dark nights during a pandemic are not a recipe for good cheer.

Unless you are a night creature. They seem to be doing well. We have two night squirrels coming in to the bird feeder at different times of the night. We can hear them coming and going. As they spring onto or off the feeder, it swings with a small thump against the outside wall of the house by the kitchen window. If we’re feeling curious, we can turn on the outside light, open the blind, and get a look at them—chinchilla-soft fur and big, dark eyes. (Their formal name is northern flying squirrel, but night squirrel suits them better, at least here and now. The day squirrels—red squirrels—are far less evident these days.)

One night I was sleeping happily at midnight when I heard the feeder bang against the wall three times. That’s not a night squirrel. That’s a hairy stick eater (moose), into the moose candy. Ugh. First time this year. A few minutes later I was out on the deck in bathrobe and slippers at -15 F chasing the moose away from the feeder. She moved off slowly. This is a new one, not Gertrude. She’s a little smaller and a more shy. But I didn’t want to have to come back to drive her away again, so I took the feeder down and brought it in with me until morning.

Due to COVID, we haven’t traveled much this year. Usually we try to get out and take a short vacation to sunnier places. In retrospect, the Darkhole seems bigger without that break. Both Rose and I have been very busy, so the darkness sort of snuck up on us. But it’s been particularly noticeable during recent cloudy days, and we’re ready for the light to start returning. On the bright side (figuratively), I’ve been getting out snowshoeing quite a bit, and we’re reading tons of great stuff by the fire every evening.

So I feel that we’re mastering the darkness, not just the lack of daylight but also the constant pressure of the pandemic. One day I decided that would be a good name for some of my Zoom meetings. Master of Darkness. It did provide a diversion. It’s particularly effective when your camera and microphone are off and only the name shows.

I don’t have a great image to post with this, because it’s too damned dark all the time to get a good one. So I’ll ask you to close your eyes and see what it is that we see too much of these days.

And, well, it looks a lot like this in the middle of the day…

High noon.

Snowshoe trailhead. Into the Boombah. Gateway to fun.