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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. 

Timbers Sighing

Timbers Sighing

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The wind came barreling in from the west last night, and as usual in this house, it’s quite a noisy experience. It’s not just the wind itself, howling and yawping (that latter word courtesy of a book I’m reading about the poet Walt Whitman); it’s the way these four walls respond to it.

The bamboo (rid of Monday’s ice) scratches the siding, and the sound this leaves in its wake makes me think of an old-fashioned sailing ship. There is that same sense of being at the mercy of the elements, of the very timbers sighing. 

To counteract these harsh noises, though, there is also the purring of the furnace. The colder the night, the more often it’s on, of course, and in it, there is the promise of warmth and safety and civilization.

White Stuff

White Stuff

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I just peeked at the weather forecast to see what Christmas might have in store and learned that snow showers are predicted for the morning of the 25th. While I doubt this will hold up, we’ve had more snow on the ground this week than in the last two years, 

This morning I awoke to a coating of fresh flakes on yesterday’s hardened ice crust. There’s just enough of the white stuff to flock the holly and dust the deck. And since it’s only 28 degrees outside right now, it might last.

It will be a strange Christmas; that much we know. But wouldn’t it be nice if it was a white one, too?

(I took this photo during Snowmaggedon … not today!)

November Question

November Question

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Warm Novembers confront us with a question: Is it the early darkness that makes the month gloomy — or the cold temperatures? Melville would say the latter, I think, at least he would if we take the famous opening lines of Moby Dick with its “damp, drizzly November in my soul” as proof of where the novelist stood on the matter.

For many of us, though, it’s not just the damp drizzle; it’s also the early darkness, the dying of the light. I saw this first hand in the parakeets yesterday. Lulled into autumnal complacency by the mid-70 temps, I brought the birds out onto the deck to share the glass-topped table with me as I worked. 

They were chattering and happy, doing their best to respond to wild bird calls … until the sun began slanting lower and lower in the sky.  Then, as if on cue, they quieted and calmed, began tucking their heads into their wings. 

Even when it’s warm, the early darkness has its way with us. 

Gathering Rosebuds

Gathering Rosebuds

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The weather gods have given us one more warm day, one more day to walk and bounce and write outside before the cold moves in. It could be 30 degrees cooler tomorrow than it is today.

I can hear the lawnmower outside. Does it only seem more fast and frantic because I’m feeling that way about making the most of this day?

The second bloom roses I’ve been enjoying brought this verse to mind:

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
   Old Time is still a-flying;
And this same flower that smiles today
   Tomorrow will be dying.

Remembering Cold

Remembering Cold

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After months of high humidity, warm mornings and sultry afternoons, cooler weather has returned. At night temperatures are in the low 40s, and though sun drives us into splashy bright afternoons, the bones don’t completely recover from the morning lows. 

The first cold is always a shock: the way the air enters the nostrils, the need to feel warm merino wool against the skin, the return of layers, the chapping of lips and the drying of hands. 

You know the cold is out there in the summer, up there at the poles, or circulating in another hemisphere. And you feel whenever you step into a super-chilled supermarket. But you can’t step out of today’s cold. 

This is not the end of the warmth and humidity (it can’t be!) but a taste of what’s to come. And it makes me shiver, just thinking about it. 

Humidity

Humidity

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Humidity and dew points are meteorological variables that I’ve yet to fully understand. But I feel them and I see them and this time of the year that’s all that matters.

On after-dark walks with Copper I see dew glistening in the grass like so many diamond chips. Moisture lingers in the morning, so much so that the doggie comes back from his early constitutionals with tummy hair drenched by it. 

As the day heats up all this moisture becomes a weight I try to move with fans and shifts of posture and anything else I can come up with. Sometimes I give in and move inside. But mostly, I just live with it in the outside office I persist in inhabiting. Because it’s summer, and it’s humid, and before long it won’t be either.  

Blackberry Winter

Blackberry Winter

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Though the heat and humidity are building here, for the last few days it’s felt like Blackberry Winter, which is what I grew up hearing an early summer cold snap called. Curious about this expression, I just learned from the Farmer’s Almanac that it’s primarily a southern term used to describe a bout of chilly weather that happens when the blackberries bloom.

There are lots of words like this in my lexicon, though I’m not pulling others up right this minute, language that harkens back to the deep roots of my Kentucky childhood. These turns of phrase created a world view that was part lore, part poetry and only a small part reality. For instance, I recall few blackberry blooms in my neck of the woods. It’s only since I’ve lived in Virginia that I’ve been aware of when the blackberries bloom, which is, interestingly enough, right about now!

As for the weather, it won’t be cool much longer. Already the heat and humidity are building, the rain that fell yesterday becoming steam that rises from the lawn, aromatic and ever-so-slightly suffocating, too.