Another American Adventure: winter solstice

Wednesday, December 21, 2011

winter solstice

The weather has been dark, rainy, foggy - and not so cold. It is in the 50s today and I have opened the windows of our apartment/cave. The raindrops look a bit like the lights strung on a Christmas tree. I find some refuge from the "merriment" of the holiday season in the quiet darkness of this day.

6 comments:

BarbaraDecember 21, 2011 at 1:06 PM
Beautiful photos, beth! You capture so much the feel of the season. It is just below freezing today and freezing rain was predicted. I hope that is an overstatement. It certainly is grey, hardly more appropriate for a winter solstice.
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beth cioffolettiDecember 21, 2011 at 2:41 PM
Really strange weather here, Barbara. After much rain this morning, the sun came out and it was almost 60 degrees! Like springtime. Very different from the cold of last year.
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BarbaraDecember 21, 2011 at 5:20 PM
My wack-o neighbour (who uses a walker!) told me the ice storm wasn't so bad. Well, I went out to get my newspaper and mail and fell on my bum! No harm done -- I'm amazingly adept at falling -- but it freaked me out.
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beth cioffolettiDecember 22, 2011 at 4:18 AM
oh my, Barbara - be careful! Slippery ice is one thing that really scares me around here. And it can happen before you know it. You can be driving down the road, the temperature drops, and all of a sudden you are on ice! The mere name, "Black Ice", carries with it the inherent danger.

Good that you know how to fall!!

We have had more rain after that brief interlude of sunshine yesterday. Such a deep grey sky. But still the temperature is well above freezing.
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BarbaraDecember 22, 2011 at 1:55 PM
It is above freezing today, just barely! I hope to venture out with my bruised bum to get some catfood and renew a prescription. Still have to do my Christmas grocery shopping, although that is minor. I am eating with neighbours, as usual.
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BarbaraDecember 23, 2011 at 11:54 AM
We have snow!!! It is just a couple of centimeters, but it will stick because the temperature will drop way below freezing until at least Christmas. Looks so pretty on the trees, but I hate all the scraping and shovelling. Where is the Angel Ray when you need him???
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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.