Browsed by
Category: weather

Score One for Spring

Score One for Spring

Comments 0 Comment

When I looked out my office window yesterday morning, the world was an unremitting winter gray, with just a touch of green from the grass and hollies.

Today, I see three sprays of yellow witch hazel, which burst into partial bloom with the afternoon’s balmy warmth.

We’ll see how those spare blossoms fare now, with temperatures falling into the 40s and a wild northwest wind battering the bamboo and waving the sweet gum branches.

I remind myself that the witch hazel is hardy and used to such shenanigans. It’s bloomed in far worse. Plus … those small yellow flowers are out among us now — and there’s nothing that winter can do about that.

(The witch hazel in two feet of snow in 2010.) 
Welcome Fog

Welcome Fog

Comments 0 Comment

I woke up to a meteorological marvel, at least in these parts, something we seldom see around here. Morning fog is a soft way to begin the day; it blurs the edges of the world. It may also be giving the groundhog the conditions it needs to predict an early spring, but I won’t count on that.

For now, I’m content to look out my study window at birds perching on the chicken wire, awaiting their turn at the feeder. At the squirrels, hatching their next plan to commandeer the suet block. At the red fox, skulking behind the covered garden bench at the far end of the yard.

Every time I glimpse that bench, which is often, I think for a moment that I’m seeing the tiny playhouse we had when the children were small. It has the same outline, the same lightness against the dark green backdrop of the fencerow. 

But that place was torn down long ago, my girls are all grown up with families of their own. And I’m welcoming the fog, which promises a soft beginning to this new day.

Mom in Manhattan

Mom in Manhattan

Comments 0 Comment

It is February 1, 2022, what would have been Mom’s 96th birthday. On this day, as on several previous February 1sts, I cede this space to the person who inspired me first, and inspires me still. In this post, written in 1994, Mom describes a snowy Manhattan and muses on what the city meant to her.

I have been snowbound in New York now for several days. I look out the window on 27th Street and watch the snow pile up. Hardy New Yorkers trudge through the ever-deepening snow. 

At home in Lexington when it snows, we rarely see a car drive down Colonial Drive and almost never see anyone venture out on foot. Here it is so different. The attitude is “nothing will stop us, even 18 inches of snow.” That must be a part of the chemistry that makes New York City what it is. 

I wish I had lived my life in New York City. It excites me as no other place has. There’s never been a time when I was ready to leave. And each time I have left, there’s been a little bit of myself that’s stayed behind.

(Photo: Vincent Paul, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)

Frozen Walk

Frozen Walk

Comments 0 Comment

It was a frozen world I walked through yesterday. Bundled up in my warmest coat, hooded and thick-socked, I made my way along the Franklin Farm trails, which were understandably empty. You know it’s cold when even the dog-walkers stay inside. 

The paths were mostly clear, but any pooled water was frozen solid. I stopped and examined the ice, snapped photos, wondered why some ice is milky white and other is clear, thought perhaps I should have learned that in high school but did not. Mostly, I moved quickly. A winter walk is bracing, as long as it’s short. 

Being Inside

Being Inside

Comments 0 Comment

It is full-on winter now — temperature in the teens when I woke up. How right it feels, when the furnace hums and the clocks tick and the birds chirp, how right it feels for it to be cold outside. The snow falls and stays. The bare trees stand sentinel.

December was lovely but strange, warmer than some Octobers. Lawn care chores piled up around me. Bulb-planting blistered my palms. 

Now, being inside is not only expected, it is necessary. There is a kind of relief in that.

All the Light

All the Light

Comments 0 Comment

Now that winter is settling in, it’s decided to give us another dollop of snow to freshen up the batch we received on Monday. Which means I’ve been scanning the clouds.

Yesterday we had a swirled and mottled firmament, a stingy winter sky. Though it was a montage of clearing and melting, the sky kept its distance. 

At about 3 in the afternoon, between errands, I looked up and thought: This is all the light we’re going to see. It’s a sober realization but also a practical one. In weather, as in life, it’s good to know what you have. 

Flash Gratitude

Flash Gratitude

Comments 0 Comment

I have in my temporary possession a book called The Best of Brevity. It’s a compilation of short essays from the journal Brevity, which features flash nonfiction. 

The genre of flash nonfiction is relatively new to me, although I write it everyday. It is the true-to-life equivalent of flash fiction. part of a trend — probably long since peaked if I’m catching onto it — toward the brief, the ephemeral, the transitory. 

Let me add to this canon with what I’ve come to think of as flash gratitude. 

Flash gratitude is the sudden, piercing awareness of life’s blessings. Stubbing one’s toe and thinking … at least I have a toe to stub. Or hearing the gentle purr of forced-air heat and giving thanks for the warm home I sit in as a result. 

I had a moment of flash gratitude yesterday when I heard about fellow Virginians trapped for 18 to 20 hours on an impassable I-95. They were cold, hungry, frightened and, most likely, angry. They were bearing the brunt of the snow storm in a real and all-too-personal way. 

Let this be a gratitude trigger, I told myself. Whenever life looks bleak and purposeless, I will conjure up those poor souls trapped in their Kias or Toyotas or Hondas or Fords, those poor shivering drivers and passengers, and my heart will nearly burst with joy that I am anywhere else but on a snow-packed, jack-knifed-tractor-filled I-95. 

(This snow has its beauteous moments, too.)

These Boots

These Boots

Comments 0 Comment

I began yesterday’s walk by pulling on a pair of ancient snow boots. These black beauties have fake fur at the top and a stubborn zipper. But once on, they can take me places.

Down the snow-packed driveway, onto the slushy, icy street and finally to a more thoroughly plowed thoroughfare. 

In the woods, trees were groaning and cracking. The snow was heavy, a burden for brittle branches, some of which gave way within earshot. 

But on the street, it was a different story. You could see the trees from a safe distance, could view the whitened trunks, the felted ferns. The boots gave me traction and confidence. Without them, I would have missed the world transformed.

Snow Day

Snow Day

Comments 0 Comment

We had to wait a week or so, but we finally got our white Christmas. 

In a weather reversal that matches anything in recent memory, we went from the balmy 60s yesterday to snow, sleet and cold today, with several inches of white stuff on the ground and more on the way.

I always think of snow as this blog’s true home. A Walker in the Suburbs began in a snow storm and flourished in one. It might not have come into existence at all were it nor for the windfall of time that flowed from Snowmaggedon.

Now snow is endangered, snow days, too. A work-at-home world does not grind to a halt just because we can’t scrape off the cars and drive to the office. A major disadvantage of telecommuting, in my opinion. 

Who doesn’t need some days when the world goes away? Snow will give us those, if we let it. 

Winterish

Winterish

Comments 0 Comment

It’s not quite 11 a.m. and almost 60 degrees this December 17. The forsythia is confused.  

Yes, it lost its final leaves just two weeks ago, but the soft air and warm earth are belying the scant light, are sending messages of “why not” to the poor plant.

And what of us humans? Does it make sense to pack away the shorts and t-shirts, or should we just tuck them amongst the woolens? Are we navigating a new season here? 

Not quite winter. Let’s call it winterish.