3rd Day of Christmas B

I started on this last night at 9:30 when the falling snow began to stick to the sidewalk as the temps dipped toward freezing. I was finished two hours later after repairing wing damage. The snow I had piled up earlier was sodden with two days of melt and six hours of rain. It was also rather dirty snow, something I can usually avoid when the skies let loose. This time the beggar couldn’t be a chooser. The more forward wing fell off completely because it was so heavy and I had to rebuild it. Besides this anxiety causing fix much of my time was spent taking the dirtiest snow and hiding it and trying to take cleaner snow and use it toward the front where the viewing audience would be gazing up at my flickering hope for peace. I figure I have until Christmas to achieve it. I don’t want to think about the alternative but its been limiting me to a few hours sleep for a couple weeks now.

My wife reminded me I was going to have lunch with one grandson today just before we went to see the other’s school holiday performance. I lowered my head remembering that I’d set up an emergency meeting to discuss peace talks through the lunch. Fourth meeting in five days.

I’ll miss lunch with Jake but somehow I’ll get to the song fest.

I have a request of my readers. Tonight at the School Board meeting, should you come, please don’t sign up to speak and take the heads off of anyone. One of my slenderest chances to keep the peace is to hold not only my own fire but everyone else’s. That won’t be easy and, nerve wrackingly, keeping that peace at our meeting even with the audience has become a make or break precondition.

We have a closed meeting at 5:30 to discuss the Superintendent’s evaluation. I’ve already given Mr. Gronseth all my thoughts and I am likely to skip out early to patrol the Board room to request anyone signing up to hold their peace where school board conflicts are concerned. If my peace mission fails there will be many months ahead to bring grievances up again so I hope its not asking too much to resist that flammable subject tonight. The stakes are very high. Its no less than the health of our schools and the education of our children.

On the other hand, I don’t think I should be held to account to keep taxpayers still tonight because we are having our legislatively mandated “Truth in Taxation” hearing tonight as part of our regular monthly meeting. Still, I’ll ask that speakers stick to the issue of taxes and stay away from commenting on feuding among School Board members.

The dove above is not quite like the one that my Mother made back in the 1950’s. We artistes all follow our own eccentric muses. Mine has a little plastic evergreen in its beak simulating an olive branch. Still, I thank her again for this inspiration.

About the author