Beauty on Ice

Sometimes, when it's so cold you don't even want to stick your nose outside, the colors are so beautiful that you MUST put on coat, hat and gloves and do your duty as an intrepid liver of life. Chet and I walked out to the mailbox to see Phoebe and Liam off to school. The hayfield was a cluster of diamonds.Each stalk of dried Queen Anne's lace was that much lacier.Chet Baker made his way through all that beauty, holding up first one paw and then the other. See how his mouth is all drawn up? That's his cold face.
The milkweed pods had a special magic.Back home at the feeders, things were hopping.

Our gorgeous female hairy woodpecker paused in her search for more suet.

The male red-bellied woodpecker glowed like a hot coal in the single digits.A cardinal offered up his own coals, his tinged with ash.
It's good to get out on cold mornings.


This morning at daybreak, I heard three peents from a woodcock in the field. Just three peents, no display flight. "I'm here. But it's too cold to think of love." I was glad to hear him, and I wondered what he'd been through. While we were gone, our feeders all went empty; all the Zick dough I'd labored to make up in advance had never been put out. It had been in the single digits and we'd had four inches of snow, topped with ice. I grieved for my bird friends, what they'd been through in the worst of the winter without me to help them. Today, I put out three feedings of Zick dough, and three bluebirds, a bunch of cardinals, a red-bellied woodpecker, and the leucistic junco Snowflake (who I've renamed Queen Frostine) came to partake. They're so glad I'm home, and I'm so glad to see them! I know they don't need me as much as I think they do.

I'm running around, re-provisioning, taking out garbage, doing laundry, cooking, watering, digging out. Treated myself to a Shila massage, trying to re-align muscles and bones bent by carrying a backpack full of lead-weight optics all over Guatemala and North America. I was amazed how much more in-tune I felt after some adjustment.

I hope frosty scenes like these will be a distant memory now, in the latest, coldest early spring I can remember. The daffodils are budding anyway. Here's a little titmouse. He looks as wistful for balmy breezes as I feel right now.It's about time for some Guatemala color, don't you think?