You wouldn’t know it by today’s unseasonal weather, sunny and clear with not a cloud in the sky, a high projected to reach 51 and more, but the forecast insists that there is at least a small chance of snow later this week.
If it comes, we’ll welcome it and be grateful.
We know better, of course, than to depend upon it. Where not so many years ago there would already have been a steady layer of inches upon the ground, new storms adding more intermittently but regularly, now, snow has become a rare event even in the depths of winter.
And for now, the calendar stubbornly insists that it is still fall even as winter looms large and close, but the feel of the weather now owes more to Indian summer. A few days ago, in the midst of genuine cold deepened by bitter winds, one solitary golden dandelion flowered defiantly just off the deck. Now, similarly solitary fly buzzes outside the window, apparently the last of his kind for the year, hovering around the glass warmed by the fire inside the woodstove.
Last night, the skies were green with the sunset light — not an early manifestation of the Northern Lights, but rather, the result of the perfect gradient clarity of a high desert twilight. If we are granted another late-autumn snow this week, the green will be confined once again to the winter trees, the piñon and juniper, Ponderosa pine and blue spruce that surround us here, rich blue-green boughs dusted with white and limned by the fire of the sunset light.
Wings captured this image as part of a series he shot in one evening nearly eight full years ago, a dusken day just over the line into official winter. It was the first day of 2013, in those last moments before fall of night. It was a perfect example of one of those rare moments here when weather and light and time conspire to produce pure magic: mysteries and medicine beyond our grasp or understanding. The tiny dwarf blue spruce (no longer so tiny now), its twinned trunks rising from the snow blanketing the earth, transforming it into a spirit more beautiful than any decorated Christmas tree. The old ladders and latillas were sprinkled with golden glitter, snow made molten by the setting sun. And the shadows formed interstices in the snow, like portals or doorways to world normally found only in the worlds of visions and dreams.
It was an example of the great gifts of the winter season (and occasionally, still of fall), one of the reasons why we greet its arrival with such undiluted joy. It’s a gift we may yet glimpse later this week, these portals and mysteries and worlds beyond our reckoning, limned by the fire of the sunset light.
~ Aji
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