Uh oh. My least favorite time of year is upon me/us. I'm ...

Uh oh. My least favorite time of year is upon me/us. I'm trying, though, as I get older, to embrace its darker beauties: swags of evergreen, blood-red candles, Alum Creek peeking through the naked trees, days so close to night the sky looks like a stormy Atlantic, midnight mass. (When I was a kid we'd go to a church in Cincinnati where a woman sang carols in German).

I have to pay attention to see these things in and around the noise and oh the weird, phantom-pain nostalgia for a family I real...