Another American Adventure: a cold day

Wednesday, November 30, 2011

a cold day

Today marks the first cold day after a long string of relatively warm ones. There were snow flurries this morning, an emptiness and stillness in the forest as if it is attentively waiting for something.

2 comments:

BarbaraNovember 30, 2011 at 2:29 PM
Yes, there is some tension until the first real snowfall of the season. Waiting for the other shoe to drop. Daytime temps are around 10 deg. F cooler here, but nighttime temps are about the same.
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beth cioffolettiNovember 30, 2011 at 4:51 PM
Just took Jube out for a walk and it is quite cold. Tomorrow it is supposed to be sunny, though ... I am beginning to suspect that PGH gets fewer sunny days in winter than elsewhere. We can have continuous days of cloudy weather here. Quite a change from the perpetual sunniness of Florida.
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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.