The equinox slid past without my even noticing.  I’m still waiting for summer to arrive.  Oh, we had a few days here and there where it got up into the 80s midday, but on my morning walks I almost always wore a jacket and boots.  Not that they were strictly necessary — in years past I’ve gone in shorts and T-shirt at the same temperatures or even colder, but somehow last winter the chill got right into my bones and never left.  Now here it is, raining again, with the days already getting noticeably shorter.  I wish they’d send some of that global warming this way.

Only kidding, of course.  This past year was just an eddy in the general current of warming trends, I’m sure.  Old timers on the island say that back when they were kids, they used to skate on Gazzam Lake every year.  I don’t think that lake has frozen over anytime in recent memory.

Up here north of the 47th parallel, the sun dips noticeably southward on its trip across the sky.  In the summer, it appears to rise in the Northeast, swings down in a great smile to the south and then back up to where it sets in the Northwest — providing daylight from about 4:30 AM to 10 PM.  As we march towards winter, the whole show just moves south — which means that less of each end of that great arc is visible over the horizon.  By the winter solstice, the sun will rise and set in the south, with a small movement from east to west that provides daylight from about 9 AM to 4:30 PM.  Those of you who live even further north can say “pshaw!” but having lived most of my life a good ten or twenty degrees further south, I notice these things.

The spiders notice.  More and more of them are showing up in the house, looking for warmer places to build.  These are the large Hobo spiders — though not poisonous, they will bite, and the bites can get pretty nasty looking.  My wife screamed this morning when she found a huge one in the kitchen sink.  I killed it without too much of a struggle, but if they get much bigger I’ll have to use a shotgun.

I must be fully adapted to life here in the Northwest. Even after the wet winter that we’ve had, I still like the rain. It plays a soft, percussive cadence on the roof and tinkles into the gutters and downspouts while I sit inside, warmed by the vapors rising from my hot beverage. I even enjoy a walk in the rain with my waterproof boots and jacket on, smelling the fresh air and feeling thousands of tiny pats on my head, shoulders, and arms.

Why do people find the rain depressing? Maybe because the clouds block the sunshine, limiting access to Vitamin D and the healthy effects of ultraviolet light. Or maybe they don’t wear the right gear so they feel cold and damp. But the benefits of rain far outweigh its inconvenience.

Suddenly I’m reminded of a portion of Akhenaten’s Hymn to the Aten:

All distant foreign countries, thou makest their life (also),
For thou hast set a Nile in heaven,
That it may descend for them and make waves upon the mountains,
Like the great green sea,
To water their fields in their towns.
How effective they are, thy plans, O lord of eternity!
The Nile in heaven, it is for the foreign peoples
And for the beasts of every desert that go upon (their) feet;
(While the true) Nile comes from the underworld for Egypt.

It doesn’t rain much in Egypt, so the Nile is the main source of fresh water there. But Akhenaten knew about rainfall in other regions, and how it provided the same benefit — thus a “Nile in heaven”. It’s interesting to me that credit for the water cycle goes to the Sun god here (the Aten), but that’s probably just a coincidence rather than any scientific understanding of the process — the Aten being the only god in Akhenaten’s religion.

As a student of Biblical Literature in college, I became fascinated with Akhenaten’s fourteenth century BCE experiment with monotheism. It represented such a marked break with the ornate polytheism of previous Egyptian religious tradition, and it was just as soon squelched by that priestly establishment after Akhenaten’s death. The images of the Aten (the Sun’s disk) are also markedly less anthropomorphic than other gods of that time, its only human touch being the tiny hands depicted on the end of each of its rays, caressing the king and his family. Of course it’s hard to say whether Atenism was truly a theoretical monotheism or just monolatry (“worship only one god” as opposed to “there is only one god”), it certainly seems to have been purer in practice than any stage of Judaism, Christianity, or Islam. These three continue to condone belief in other divine beings such as angels and demons, who were after all originally lesser gods in the court of the high god El in Canaanite religion. And lets not forget the doctrine of the Trinity, whereby Christians add one plus one plus one and get one. Even if it might all be true, you can’t really call it monotheism.

If you have to choose one thing to worship, then the Sun seems like an especially practical choice. It’s something you can see every day that provides immense benefits to our world (more even than Akhenaten might have realized). “Lord of eternity”, though, is a bit overdone. The Sun may well be the most impressive phenomenon in our daily experience here on Earth, but we now know that it won’t last forever and that there’s much more to the cosmos than our star in one little corner of one galaxy among billions.

We lost power on Thursday along with over a million other Northwest households. It finally came back up last night after 50 powerless hours. I wouldn’t want to be a Puget Sound Energy employee over the past few days, or the next few either. Hats off to them.

We don’t have a generator here, so we relied on flashlights, candles, and the fireplace for light and warmth. Temperatures inside fell to below 50F, but we layered on and managed to stay warm enough.

We plugged in the lights on the Christmas tree so that was the first thing we saw when the power came back on. We cheered, only to have it go down about five minutes later. But then after about a 45-minute wait, it came back on for good (we hope).

Our thoughts go out to the hundreds of thousands of people in the area who are still without power. Especially since it was cold enough outside to frost this morning.

It will take me some time to get everything sorted out and back in blogness. Stay tuned. How are other Northwest bloggers faring? I see that the bay area may also be threatened. Hold on tight, folks.

I love this time of year in the Northwest. The bright new growth on the ends of the hemlock branches looks like painted fingernails on outstretched green giant hands. The purple lilac blossoms tickle my eyes and my nose with color and allergens. The daffodils are gone, but their deep yellow has been replaced by that of the Scotch Broom that grows everywhere but lives in the anonymity of its unadorned appearance until the Spring. Rhododendrons shamelessly flaunt their frills.

It’s warm enough at 5:30 AM to go running in shorts again. Living north of the 47th parallel means that Halley and I enjoy full daylight for those morning excursions. By mid-afternoon, the sun heats things up into the 70′s. Daylight continues until nearly 9:00 PM, and the days will get even longer between now and the solstice.

Later in the year I’ll be ready again for rainy nights by the fire that begin at 5:00 PM, but for now I’m glad to forget them in the sunshine.