A bright clear dawn has turned solidly gray, sky the color of pewter and the feel of snow upon the cold air now.
That doesn’t mean we’ll get any, of course; indeed, the forecast insists that if we get anything at all, it’ll be no more than a dusting, well under an inch. But if air and sky are any indication now, we at least have a chance of something, and that’s more than we’ve had for most of this winter thus far.
In truth, we’ve had no real winter at all. Even worse, neither have the mountains, at least not in any real way. There’s virtually no snow on the peaks, and none at all on the slopes, and that bodes very badly for the land for the year to come.
It’s been seven years since this land plunged from what for more than two decades had been a five-hundred-year drought, serious but relatively stable and less severe at this altitude, to a twelve-hundred-year version that has already proven all too deadly. Certainly, we had bad years and worrying conditions intermittently prior to that point, but in January of 2018, every changed . . . and on what increasingly seems like a permanent basis now.
We had had decent snow the prior December — not a huge amount, but enough for it to seem like winter, and enough to add to the land’s surface water in the form of ponds and streams, lakes and rivers. All that changed with the new calendar year, and we were all wholly unprepared for just how bad it get, and how rapidly.
The photo above, the subject of this week’s Monday Photo Meditation, is from that time. Wings shot it in digital format seven years ago almost exactly to the day: at day’s end on January 10th, 2018. It was part of a small informal series that he captured with his phone only moments apart, taken when we had returned from errands in town, arriving home just before sunset. The other three will appear in tomorrow’s post, but this was, I believe, the first of the group, a shot of the bare limbs of one of the elms up along the highway by the main ditch, standing just north of our gate. It’s one of a pair of tall elms that, when this was taken, were still fully alive, their upper branches a gradient of white and gold and coppery red at the very top.
But it’s the lower limbs, curving and twisted, that highlights their most haunting aspect, the low light transforming ordinary bare bark into shimmering silver against the black snowcloud-studded sky.
It’s one of the great gifts of winter, rendering the world bare and spare, so that nothing is untouched: a whole world wrapped in storm and light, transforming and transformed.
The outside world regards spring as the season of renewal and rebirth, but here, when we should have snow blanketing the ground now, when the earth should be at rest? We know that this is the true season of rebirth — of slumber, of healing respite, of the accumulation of the First Medicine in the form of the snowpack, preparing to become the lifeblood and breath of the land.
This is the year’s true time of transition, of transcendence, too — wrapped in storm and light, transforming and transformed.
And if the forecast truly holds, we may a little transformation by morning.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2025; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
