Another American Adventure: winter

Tuesday, November 30, 2010

winter

So far, I love winter. The darkness, the cold, all of it - I think that December must be the most mysterious month of all.

Here are some photos from the drive back from Wellsville to Cranberry TWP. The snow was melted by the time we got south of Erie. There's no snow at all here now, just rain today, but it's supposed to snow on Wed. and Thurs.

Here are some random leftover shots from Wellsville.

We'll be going to NYC this weekend. Aunt Mil died and we are going to her funeral.

2 comments:

BarbaraNovember 30, 2010 at 1:04 PM
Sorry to hear about your Aunt Mil dying. Safe journey and a peaceful putting your Aunt to rest.

I adore that first photo -- very dramatic!
Here the first snow that stuck is mostly gone now with the subsequent rain and above freezing temps. A very grey day today, very grey and dark. Winter is so mysterious, the passing of another year.
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beth cioffolettiNovember 30, 2010 at 1:49 PM
Aunt Mil was 94. She was always so warm and welcoming to me ... and she made the best homemade raviolis I have ever had. She was still bowling high scores up until about a year ago.

I totally agree about the mysteriousness of winter. I am under its spell.

Very rainy, dark and grey here today as well. Jubilee and I are laying low, watching.
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"In those first days, people said, a squirrel could run the long length of Pennsylvania without ever touching the ground. In those first days, the woods were white oak and chestnut, hickory, maple, sycamore, walnut, wild ash, wild plum, and white pine. The pine grew on the ridgetops where the mountains' lumpy spines stuck up and their skin was thinnest.

"The wilderness was uncanny, unknown. Benjamin Franklin had already invented his stove in Philadelphia by 1753, and Thomas Jefferson was a schoolboy in Virginia; French soldiers had been living in forts along Lake Erie for two generations. But west of the Alleghenies in western Pennsylvania, there was not even a settlement, not even a cabin. No Indians lived there, or even near there.

"Wild grapevines tangled the treetops and shut out the sun. Few songbirds lived in the deep woods. Bright Carolina parakeets - red, green, and yellow - nested in the dark forest. There were ravens then, too. Woodpeckers rattled the big trees' trunks, ruffed grouse whirred their tail feathers in the fall, and every long once in a while a nervous gang of empty-headed turkeys came hustling and kicking through the leaves - but no one heard any of this, no one at all."

Annie Dillard, An American Childhood.