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Category: seasons

Walker Meets Ice

Walker Meets Ice

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These days, walks are timed for optimal warmth and light. They must also flow around work projects and meetings, which is how I found myself looking for strips of pavement amid the icy patches on our street yesterday about 3 p.m. 

The snow had finally stopped, which wasn’t altogether welcome — it was fun living inside a snow globe for a few days — and a stiff breeze was drying off the wet parts of the road. The problem was that it was freezing the slush almost as quickly. 

I’m a fearless walker … until ice enters the picture. I have a healthy respect for it and will be glad when it melts away. Until then, I will make my way through the landscape very slowly … if at all! 

(Above: where ice should stay, in my humble opinion!) 

Snowscape

Snowscape

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The snowy Sunday quietly and steadily remained a snowy Monday, and has now — wonder of wonders! — become a snowy Tuesday. 

As I write, the flurries that made it difficult to keep a path clean for Copper down the deck stairs (he’s old and slips a lot) have continued flying. The railing I scraped off yesterday has at least another inch or two of white coating. 

Best of all, the winter wonderland brought to us by 28 degrees and enough cold aloft to produce these flakes still falling remains a vision, a snowscape, a sight for sore eyes. 

Snowy Sunday

Snowy Sunday

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It’s not just that the snow fell, finally, the first significant accumulation in two years, but that it fell on Sunday, when many of us could enjoy it. Into the snow went dogs and babies (two of the latter for the first time!). Out of it (and the time if provided) came photos; chicken and wild rice soup; and chocolate chip muffin bread.

Mostly what came of it was total relaxation. There wasn’t much I could do outside. And although there was much I could have done inside, the snow gave me permission to ignore it. 

I read in the morning, watched television while eating lunch, and as the soup simmered and the bread baked, I sat in the darkening living room looking at the white world outside. 

Pilot Light

Pilot Light

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Yesterday would be the best day of the week, the weather folks said. Work and freezing rain had kept me inside the last day two days, so I wasn’t taking any chances. Into the outside I went, all parka-ed and gloved. 

The wind that has been picking up steam for the last 12 hours was only getting started then, so I could make my way along the usual loop, up and down the neighborhood’s main street.  Still, it felt colder than it should have felt.

We’ve come to that point in the winter when my blood feels thinned out by shivering. So much of it is a mental game. Not the cold itself — I know there are actual numbers involved there — but how I approach it. 

Looseness is key, not tensing the muscles, not resisting the chill as much as moving through it like the human stove that I, that all of us, can be. But sometimes, yesterday for example, it feels as if my pilot light has gone out. 

Stop Time

Stop Time

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The rain fell and froze last night, and now the bamboo is bowing under the weight of it. Poor bamboo! It’s a nuisance in so many ways, but it forms a lovely screen for the deck, so I hope the day warms fast enough to free the gangly plant before it snaps.

Ice storms lack the beauty of snowfalls. They hold within themselves the hard edges of winter and none of its softness. 

Still, there is beauty in the glinting and there is wonder in the way droplets are trapped in poses they had hours ago. Ice stops time in its tracks. 

Warm and Light

Warm and Light

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In my quest to be winter-hardy, I’ve discovered the many virtues of merino wool. I have a couple of merino wool blend “base layers,” which in the old days I would have called undershirts, and I’m wearing them now underneath everything: turtlenecks and cardigans and pullovers and sweatshirts. 

The fact that we keep our house temperature in the mid-60s means that I need at least three layers even when inside. When I go for a walk I throw a jacket over the ensemble, cover my ears and hands, and I’m good to go.

The key, I’ve realized, is warmth without weight. It sounds like an advertisement for pricey athleisure wear — in fact, I’m pretty sure it is — but it actually works. I feel warm with three layers on, providing one of them is my base layer.  And the “weightlessness” means I’m not stuffed like a sausage into my clothes. Warm and still able to bend my arms — what more could I want?

Rejoice!

Rejoice!

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Yesterday was Gaudete Sunday, the third Sunday of Advent, when the message shifts from one of “beware and prepare” to “rejoice and prepare.” 

I love both Advent messages. For that matter, I love Advent. It’s a season of anticipation — and isn’t anticipating an event usually always better than the event itself? 

More than two decades ago, I happened to read Kathleen Norris’s book The Cloister Walk during Advent. It was a busy time for me as a writer and a parent, and when I’d collapse in bed each night I’d savor a chapter or two of this fine volume and be transported into the silence of the cloister.

The image I have of Advent is one of cold stone and plainsong, of middle-of-the-night awakenings for prayer and devotion. Though Norris spent time in a monastery in Minnesota, it was the old churches of Europe that came to mind as I visualized her progress through the liturgical year. The long centuries of hope condensed into an annual calendar. 

By the reckonings of that calendar, we have already begun a new year. 

The Standout

The Standout

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It’s a broad, bare expanse I see when I look out an upstairs window now. Tall, straight trunks sprouting tangles of limbs and branches — all  brown or gray or a shade yet unnamed that is their pairing( (bray?). 

If it’s a sunny day, add a splash of blue for the sky. If it’s not, then a lighter shade of gray for the firmament.

The eye, in this case, is drawn to the standouts, the few trees yet to lose their leaves. There’s only one of those left in the backyard — a shrub of some indeterminate breed. But what a thrill it is to spy its rich crimson. 

“Here I am,” it seems to shout. “All is not lost.” 

Winter Sight

Winter Sight

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As seasons pass, dimensions change and distances shrink. The greenery that hemmed us in only last month has thinned and drooped. Leaves have shriveled and blown away. What was once a screen is now an open book.

We hear about winter light, the low-slanting sun, but not as much about winter sight.

My woods walks lately reveal shiny new objects: small metal discs hammered into tree bark. Some trees have been tagged recently because the metal gleams and the discs swing freely on their nails. The older discs have dimmed and dulled; some you can hardly see because they have been swallowed up by bark. The trees have grown around them. Eventually those markers will seem little more than a metal eye.

While these older markers have been there all along, I saw them as if for the first time over the weekend. It was the winter landscape that drew my eyes to them, the same bare expanse that lets us glimpse a hidden stream or the outline of a hill, once shrouded in green. It is winter sight.

Aural Warmth

Aural Warmth

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It’s our first frost of the season, and though I haven’t ventured outside yet, I can predict how it will feel: crunchy beneath the feet, the white spears of grass tufted and hardened, winter here before we’ve even seen the first days of December.

It was 27 when I woke up this morning — and 62 inside the house, which we are keeping cooler for various reasons, including stuffy sinuses and easing the transition from inside to outside (thus prolonging this infatuation I have with working al fresco). 

I have to say it feels mighty fine now to work inside the house, with hot air pouring from the vents, warming the air to a relatively toasty 67. Even the sound of the furnace makes me feel warm. As does the roar of the electric kettle coming to a boil. 

If warmth were aural we could do away with hats, scarves and mittens, so I know a lot of this is in my head. But they are lovely sounds just the same.