We awakened this morning to cold at long last.
It seems colder than it is; given that highs have been in the seventies for most of the last couple of weeks, temperatures in the forties feel icy by comparison. But we need seasonal temperatures badly and so the cold is a welcome thing here.
Perhaps even more welcome is the grayness of this day. While most of the gray this morning was in fact smoke, the woodsmoke from a thousand woodstoves and fireplaces kept hanging low over the town by the cold’s sudden inversion layer, along the western horizon the blue skies were just that little bit darker, that little bit more opaque than they would normally be.
Now, at midday, the skies are mostly gray — a pale dove shade just this side of white, but they are clouds all the same, driven on the sort of sharpened wind that tends to bring snow with it.
There is no real chance of snow in the forecast before Friday, but for the moment, potentialities backed by real, concrete changes hold the feel of promise now.
We’ll take what we can get.
It’s hard to look out upon the landscape now and see not the shimmering gold of afternoon sunlight filtering onto the snow, but the dull metallic shine of yellowed grasses grown thin upon soil with the consistency of ash. There is not a single inch of white visible upon any of the peaks now, and that is virtually unheard-of for December, even in the worst of these recent years. It’s hard to believe that Wings captured the image above only a scant decade and a half ago, on a late winter’s day somewhere between 2006 and 2008. I can pinpoint the year, roughly, by a couple of different measures, one of which is the knowledge that captured it from our old manufactured home; the other is the presence of the little tin bird on the left, which he commissioned from a local metal artist in the latter half of 2006. It’s become a standing source of humor ever since: He commissioned the artist to create the sandhill crane for which I was named, but that person clearly had no idea what a crane looked like. Of the water birds, it more closely resembles a shearwater, but in truth, it looks like the offspring of a sandpiper and a small hawk.
Whatever its putative parentage, as always, it’s the thought that counts, and here the metal bird remains, through all that has transpired in the intervening years. Wings took this shot with his digital camera (which would also place it no earlier than late 2006), outside the southwest windows of the old house. It was at day’s end, sun setting and at last visible through small breaks in the clouds even as the snow continued to fall. Back then, our snowstorms were measured in feet, not inches, and accumulation was the norm rather than the exception.
The aspens in the background were young then, and healthy. One is already dead now, another dying; one opposite it across the yard is fully dead, too. The tin bird now sits perched atop the extended stump of one in the stand of aspens on the north side of the house, all of the branches and the upper part of the trunk cut off in an effort to save its life. Numerous others have been similarly pruned, part of Wings’s desperate effort this year to cheat the drought’s reaper of its harvest and keep the land alive a little while longer.
We think of winter as cold, and it is, but it is that very quality that, adance with the light, makes the season shimmer like no other: the cold fire of sunlit snow.
As a new workweek dawns, we have been granted the cold and the fire, and the sunlight. Perhaps week’s end will bring us the snow, as well.
After all, we have the tin bird, too.
~ Aji
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