You’d never know it’s December by the weather or climate.
I walked outside an hour or two ago, and was struck by the fact that it felt entirely like spring. You know how it is on that first day or two of warming weather, the first day of the year that you can walk outside without a coat, sun on your skin, the sound of the newly-arrived birds in full song in your ears.
That’s May.
Or at least it should be. But instead, this is what early December has become. There are birds in residence that should not be here now; the trees are already budding, in ways that might produce catkins before the first real snow falls.
Always assuming that we get a first real snow. That’s no sure thing now.
With the night comes the cold . . . but not nearly cold enough; our lows now are where our highs should be, and that is a dangerous development indeed.
After a day forced to be about and about in too much sun and warmth, it somehow seems worth the effort to try conjuring appropriate conditions by invoking images of winters past. And there are no better such images among Wings’s body of work than those he captured more than a decade ago — on the first day of 2013, to be exact — when a newly visible sun at day’s end turned our still storm-ridden world to snowfire.
It’s a phenomenon that used to be somewhat common here, or at least something we could count on seeing during the winter season. That, of course, presupposes a winter season, which is no longer guaranteed us. It also presupposes snow, and we have had too many winters over the last seven years with, for all practical purposes, none at all.
At an elevation nearing eight thousand feet, there should be no such thing as a winter without snow.
It’s looking likely for this year, too, unfortunately. But if the spirits of winter weather can be appeased by the knowledge that we remember them, would welcome them again? Well, it’s worth devoting some imagery and words and silverwork in service of such ends.
I referred above to a collection of photos that Wings shot in digital format on January first, 2013, and the subject of this week’s Monday Photo Meditation, above, is one of them. We had been granted a heavy — and seasonally here, an utterly normal — snowstorm for the days that overlapped one year’s end and the new one’s beginning. It had, in fact, been snowing since before Christmas, intermittent lines of storms that culminated in a New Year’s Eve blizzard to wrap it all up in a snowy, fiery bow, and we had something like two feet and more of snow already on the ground.
Late on New Year’s Day, the storm began to move eastward, diminishing in force and fury, leaving large but gentle flakes still falling as it departed. By sunset, the clouds in the west had begun to break apart sufficiently to permit the sun’s glow to filter through the curtain of crystalline flakes, and it created the phenomenon that we call snowfire, when the crimson hues of a descending sun set the snow-blanketed world ablaze in shades of pure flame.
It’s an otherworldly phenomenon, and Wings captured multiple photos in quick succession, several of which will appear in this space over the next few months. This has always been on of my personal favorites, showing as it does the full spectrum of such fire glowing through the snow: gold, amber, coral, rose, crimson, copper, scarlet, mulberry, violet. The weeping willow provided the perfect framing for the light, its own filament-like branches dancing flakes and fire alike.
Of course, what was already well under way at the moment that Wings shot this series was what we also colloquially refer to as the deep freeze. It used to be a given after every large snowstorm: at its end, the temperature would plunge over night, usually well below zero, and we might not get above the zero mark for several days, even a week or more. Such was the case that year, when the mercury dropped to some twenty below that night, as I recall; we spent the next several days shivering in subzero temperatures even at the warmest, brightest part of the daylight hours.
That was, of course, our norm, and we knew when and how to prepare to ride out the icy conditions that were sure to come.
I’m not sure we’ve dropped to single digits at any point this year, even in January, never mind the deep cold that is this land’s historical norm.
At this point, we’ll be grateful simply for sufficient cold and changed conditions to bring us snow — not just a smattering of sleet or graupel, but real flakes, sufficient to deliver some accumulation. A little snow might bring a little seasonal deep cold, too, and with it that celestial magic of winter known as sundogs.
This is supposed to be a time of icy magic, one that brings an indescribable cold beauty to each day’s end before our world turns itself to slumber in the night. If we can persuade winter to return, the medicine of a snowfire sunset is all but assured.
~ Aji
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