Let It Snow!

It's been a mild, mild kick-off to the winter season in Wisconsin so far.  We didn't harvest our last Swiss chard until Thanksgiving, and we're still getting bits of thyme and sage.  JoyMama has enjoyed bike-commuting to work into December, and JoyDad has appreciated the reprieve from snow-removal.

Rose, however, was pining for snow, making wistful observations about the chances of a white Christmas.

Sometimes, though, when you have no snow, you make your own!

This photo is from Saturday, a clear, relatively-mild day for December.  That white stuff that Joy is gleefully kicking looks for all the world like snow, but look a little closer...

That's not snow, it's cattail fluff!  Turns out that the brown part of the cattail is actually made up of densely-packed seeds, each attached to a bit of fluff to carry it away on the wind.  When you unpack a dried cattail, it explodes into more "snow" than you ever thought possible!  (Even up close, it looks a little like frost-tracings, doesn't it?)

Fortunately, at least to the girls' minds, we had no need to turn to the cattails on Sunday:

Above is the scene in our garden, glorious sticky mantle-of-white all over the fence and the stacked tomato-cages.

And there goes Joy, ready to revel!

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas...

n of 1, and the Myth of Fingerprints

Two apparently contradictory concepts floating in my mind this morning with regard to Joy.

First is how incredibly unique this little kiddo is.

In a discussion with one of her therapists earlier this month, we ended up describing her as "n of 1". How can you apply other people's research studies to this particular individual, really? How can you generalize anything about her to anyone else? She keeps busting our expectations right and left.

It makes me think of fingerprints. And snowflakes. Not gonna find any two the same, though I understand that with snowflakes at least, it's technically possible.

And yet, when we look outside our window, we see a blanket of white, and the individual snowflakes all blend together into a lovely sparkly layer (a much thinner layer than it was earlier this week, thanks to a wild spate of warm temps and rain!)

And then I think of a line from a Paul Simon song from his Graceland album:

He said, "There's no doubt about it,
It was the myth of fingerprints --
I've seen them all, and man, they're all the same."

All human, we are.

All children of God.

All us neurodiverse, amazing people.

And now, we can't have a reference to Graceland without making the Elvis connection... there's another line in that song that sounds for all the world like he's singing:

Elvis is the watermelon.

I'm serious! Give it a listen. I defy you to hear it any other way...