We’re burning through January here on the farm. Farmer’s winter is punctuated by a series of tractor troubles, storms and junk pile emergencies. “Junk pile” is what he calls my mini-van. Since Christmas it’s sat lifeless most times I’ve tried to start it.It seems there’s a statue of limitations on battery life. I neglected to check and make sure a switch was off and once depleted in polar conditions, the battery refused to hold a charge. During one compelling emergency I was even forced to drive Farmer’s new-to-him truck. He wasn’t pleased.
Farmer’s hoping I’ll pay closer attention to sources of battery drain and prevent future losses. I’m dreadfully thankful for all his help and sorry for the inconvenience caused both to him and the poor fellow at the Co-op who ended up fussing with my bothersome battery change on his very busy day.
Farmer puts up with a lot. An hour after midnight again tonight he passed me on his way to the bathroom while I grabbed slippers, preparing to write. Fragments of Elie Wiesel’s Night are haunting me.
Awake again, there’s nothing else for a night like this except to read or write. What else is winter for anyway, except to learn, contemplate and plan for a better spring for ourselves?
A Nobel Peace Prize winner, Wiesel cannot abide the notion of Holocaust denial. Believed or not, his is another eye witness account of the largest and fastest extermination of humans in recorded history.
In this compelling story: Wiesel saw his mother and siblings for the last time on a railway platform. He marched with thousands in various “selection” lines, witnessed babies tossed into a burning pit, his own father starved, worked, frozen and beaten to death, and in a mirror at the end of it all, his own skeleton.
I’ve read many such accounts but Night stands out in that Wiesel includes the warning signs that were flatly rejected in his community. The once esteemed man who warned them was suddenly shunned as the village idiot. Had they listened instead and fled, many may have been saved.
Warnings are gifts nobody wants tied in simple packages. It’s no coincidence Wiesel’s book comes to me after two others sounding alarms on climate change.
Heed the messages or not, we’ve all been warned: earth’s current freeze/thaw vitals signal the lighting-fast extinction of countless species.
