Another American Adventure: the look of winter

Sunday, December 11, 2011

the look of winter

Even though it hasn't snowed yet - at least enough to stick to the ground - things are starting to look like winter around here. It was 15 degrees this morning. There have been days of grey skies, and the hills and forests are many shades of brown. Jubilee blends right in to it. (I actually love the bleakness of it all.)

The trees are so bare that you can see right through the forest ...

But the sun has been out this weekend, adding a glorious blue sky. This was outside of Costco, where we went to order new tires for my car so that I'll be ready when the snow comes.

I call this one, Man and Dog on a Hill.

The beginnings of ice forming in the stream.

And Jubilee begging (or asking politely) for a cookie through the hole in John's leg ...

2 comments:

BarbaraDecember 11, 2011 at 10:09 AM
I, too, love the limited palette of winter. It is just below freezing at the moment. There is a dusting of snow that is quickly disappearing.
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beth cioffolettiDecember 12, 2011 at 3:03 AM
I don't know what it is, Barbara, but the greyer and starker the landscape, the more my heart soars. I guess I'm really a desert person at heart. My first real experience of desert was Eastern Washington. We were moving from the lush rainforests west of the Cascade mountains and everyone said "oh, you'll hate that hell hole over there". Coming down the eastern side of the mountains into the Snake River Valley, I could feel this great joy rising in me - before I had even gotten there. I loved everything about it, even the extremes of weather (120 degrees in summer and - 0 in winter).
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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.