This new week was born swaddled in a blanket of grays, a blend of clouds and faint snow still falling on the peaks for a Monday morning near winter’s official end. The sun has emerged, for the moment, but so has the wind, and we are making ready for the next wave of the storm.
It won’t be a lot, but it may be more than we anticipated: Yesterday brought us a good four inches of accumulation, already melting despite the cold, and the forecast for tonight and tomorrow suggests another four inches. Given that yesterday was slated to deliver no more than two here, perhaps we’ll get even more.
Or perhaps none at all. Such is the nature of capricious season-straddling weather here now.
Still, the clouds are welcome; a cold winter sun on a blanket of white renders the world too hard, too bright. And we cannot help but hope that it’s an omen for the warmer winds to come, perhaps a year of once-unseasonal spring showers and a more customarily steady rainy season in summer.
And, for someone like me, a gentleness to landscape and atmosphere alike, a softening of hard edges and a rounding of sharp corners.
This week’s photo meditation embodies this softening of the sherds of winter, summons the spirits of precipitation, too. Wings shot this on digital, if memory serves, somewhere between some twelve and sixteen years ago. If I had to pick a date, I’d probably say 2007, given where the gallery was located at that time and the vantage point of this photo and the two that we’ll feature in this space tomorrow, all taken mere moments apart. It was likely a bit later in the season: April, at a guess, given that for the whole of March in that year I believe the Pueblo was still under its annual winter closure for traditional purposes.
Back then, snow was still common in April, as were entirely bare trees. Now, a decade and a half later, April snows are usually half-day affairs, dumping a wet foot overnight and melting away entirely by noon. The trees maintain seemingly no schedule whatsoever anymore; this year, some of the aspens have had catkins fully open and pollinating since before mid-December just past. The only predictable aspect of spring seems its inherent unpredictability now.
But this image takes me back a few years, to a time when late winter and early spring were not all wild swings in temperature and the battering bluster of trickster winds. Time was, this was a season of snow-softened edges, when the highest parapets and the staggering stair-stepped rooflines of North House would still be dusted with a little white frost here, clay corners darkened and damp from the water of melted icicles there.
And above it all, of a morning, the lowering dove-gray sky would wrap the entire village in the softest of blankets.
It was a time of quiet, of peace, of the kind of stillness that does not require total silence, only enough solitude to permit one to feel the Earth’s heart beating beneath our feet.
For this moment, we still have blue skies overhead and plenty of sun shining against the clouds around the horizon. But to the southwest, those clouds have taken on a different tenor now: white and dense as a wall of steam, they are moving in steadily, carrying the snow our way.
It looks as though we shall be granted a bit more medicine this day . . . and with it, a little of the gentleness, of the snow-softened edges of the days when winter dances quietly with spring.
~ Aji
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