Snowmageddon Gallery

The present: that seductive, smooth-talking diversion, has impinged itself on me once again. 

We have had Snowmageddon in southeast Ohio, winged by the great winter storm Jonas as he waddled east, hunkered down over West Virginia and Virginia, and buried us all. We got a mere 18" to WV and northern VA's 3' or more. Still, it was a lot of snow for us.

It was beautifully powdery, and it fell right off the tree limbs to the forest floor, and no trees fell across lines, and nobody lost power. It was a New Year's miracle! And to Liam's delight he got Friday AND Monday off school!  

I have lived here in Appalachian Ohio since 1992 and have formed a rock-solid Pavlovian association with BIG SNOW and NO POWER FOR DAYS. So I looked at the weather map, saw the giant blue blob headed our way, and started cleaning the house. I figured I'd do all the things I couldn't do anymore when we lost power. Use the lights, the washer, dryer, dishwasher, vacuum cleaner, that kind of thing. It wasn't "if" we were going to lose power, it was just "when." And we never did lose power.

But I kept at it. Two full days it took me, which is pathetic, but I truly hate cleaning. This is a big house and I move very slowly because I find it all so stultifying. I used to clean once a week when the kids were small. I felt like I had to, but I still don't know how I did it. The difference between 40's and 50's, I guess. Now, I'd far rather write or paint or read or run, and nobody else seems to care, so why should I? But with decreasing frequency I still pull myself together to do it, even as I begrudge the time it takes. Time is my favorite thing, the most precious resource. 

It wasn't so bad, though, because as I cleaned I watched the snow piling up outside, and I felt enormously thankful to be safe and warm and snowed in with Liam. Just grateful to have such a nice roof over our heads, to have a house to clean at all.  We had plenty of food because my inner squirrel had been stockpiling for days before the storm hit. I'd laid in all the bird feed we could need, too, and the first day of the storm I made a quadruple batch of Zick Dough Improved, so we were good.

On the morning of January 24 I finally suited up and headed out to catch some hoarfrost atop the snow. Oh boy oh boy! 

That Japanese maple, once a potted bonsai, is becoming a major landscape force. Big enough to sit under, big enough to walk under, big enough to have chipping sparrows and cardinals nest in it. Ahh. Such a good tree. 

Still feeling appreciative, I walked around to see the once-tiny birds-nest blue spruce I moved from Maryland to Ohio in 1992. Oh my. 

And better yet, two very small crape myrtles in the foreground, come up from seed or root, I know not which, from a beautiful shrub that was killed in the horrid winter of 2013. They came up out of nowhere after two years without a sign of life from the shrub's stump. And bloomed this past summer of 2015. And were true to the original, a rich magenta. HOORAY! May they make it through this winter.

A deer, looking for birdseed. Those thin legs move pretty well through snow. I'd have thought they'd yard up in this much snow, but the meadow was laced with their tracks. I think the fact that the snow was so powdery encouraged them to move about. It's crusty snow deer hate, punching through it with their hooves, the crust cutting their legs.

I purely hated to walk on that clean white sheet in the meadow, but I had to, if I was going to get any photos.

Looking at the junco and sparrow tracks, it suddenly hit me that deep snow actually helps them forage.

For instead of the seedheads being high above their heads, forcing them to jump and flutter, the seeds are right at their level. The birds are 18 inches higher on the surface of that snow, and can simply hop from seed cluster to seed cluster. Beautiful! I loved that revelation, that thought that juncos actually like a deep snow. That it makes finding food easier for them. No wonder we call them snowbirds.

So busy, the tracks of their industry everywhere in the meadow. 

The bluebird box with its baffle was steaming in the sun as the hoarfrost burned off.  It looked eerily like a man with a derby on, breathing. I tried to capture the misty exhalation with two cameras and couldn't. But oh, it was cool. 

I like this shot, for the elements it shows--housing for birds and for us, a baffle to protect against snakes and raccoons; a Virginia pine left just because it was beautiful; my meandering path. At this point I'm tired. Slogging through knee-high snow is work!

Under the same pretty pine. Yes, red is the right color for that house. And I can pretend it's an old barn. Especially when I don't feel like cleaning. Har.

At this point, I'm sufficiently snowblind that I can barely tell what I'm shooting. Which makes for some interesting pictures.

The lacework and tracery of frost and grass and stem and shadow has me in its thrall. 

I turn the camera toward myself and the sun. I can't even see it, the sun is so bright. I'm all warmed up, and have been shedding clothes all the way out the path. No hat, no gloves needed when you're wading through deep snow. A mile walked this way is probably worth three on pavement, from a cardiac standpoint.

No Bacon chaser with me. He wouldn't be caught dead in 18" of snow.

My photos get odder and odder. I can't see what I'm doing very well, but I'm fascinated by the light, and I keep facing into it, like a moth.

This could be another planet...

A junco's snowball, growing a crust of hoarfrost.

Probably time to head toward the house. And when I turn my back to the sun, the blue sky and shadows jump out at me. Oh my! what I've been missing!

And when I got home, Chet Baker, who does not gladly suffer deep snow, came out to run the rat maze I had shoveled him all over the yard. I made little alleys to his favorite spots--the compost pit, the spruces, the feeders, the greenhouse.  I made sure they all connected, and all led to the front door. He came out of the woods so proud of himself, and considerably lighter. It had been a day and a half. It was time.

O noble doggeh o' mine!

Delft Days: The Aesthetic Workout

The start of last night's run. This is the only road we can use right now. The main road is too busy and dangerous with snow taking up the shoulders, and the dirt roads like ours are still covered with ice. Talk about dangerous.

I'm thankful for this road, every day. It's been my best friend this winter.

I haven't juiced these photos up at all. They are what I saw. LOOK at the shadowblues!!

My dear friend Hodge, who takes me around Cambridge when I'm there, showing me the most wonderful things, wrote a post on her blog, hereswhatiknowsofar, about the blue and the white.  She hadn't yet seen "Mood Indigo," Tuesday's post. We're just in tune, that's all. We notice the same things.

This synergy between dear friends who live ten hours apart by car inspired me to go look for some more blue and white on a beautiful 34-degree evening. Which was just Wednesday evening. Blue sky, which you see a lot in Cambridge ourfaircity MA, is so very rare here in the mid Ohio Valley winter. I treasure it, for winter blues are singular blues. And these blues help me fight those blues. You know the ones.

I took Phoebe and Chet along. Liam has an iffy throat and a sore neck and wanted to rest instead.

It makes me so happy to run with my kids. I can't go out with them without wondering what I'll do when they leave. I wish I could stop wondering that. Dang it.

Running "with" my kids is a misnomer. Phoebe soon left me in the dust, or more properly the grit. Chet likes to run faster, so he went with her. She picked him up every time a car passed. We do that when the snow eats up our road shoulders. Sometimes I do it just to give him a kiss on the brisket. He waits to be picked up, gives a little lurch up into my arms to help.

The more blue and white I saw, the farther behind I fell. "How do you get anything DONE?" Phoebe, my lithe greyhound, asked. "Well, I consider my runs an aesthetic as well as a physical workout. Stopping is part of that."

Which may be why I feel like so much donut batter poured into my clothes right now. I hate being sidelined, but I have to wait until I have asphalt to run on. It's been a long wait. 

I very much appreciate the fact that Phoebe doesn't make fun of me when I swoon over scenes like this. She does, too. But sometimes when Liam's along the temptation is too great and they laugh at me. That's OK. So many folks drive right by scenes like these without stopping to notice, that I figure I have to swoon hard enough for everybody. 

My favorite lane. Oh my gosh. The corduroy mud, the color harmony with the tree and shed. I almost wept. Just leave me here, looking at all this, the blue, the white, the violet, the russet mud. That little combed cloudlet. 

I always find these trees so graceful, the way they lean toward the road and then correct themselves. Oh, excuse me. I'm not supposed to occlude the road. Maybe it's because they've been trimmed back again and again over the years. Or maybe they just know. But they're all doing this little samba, and the snow points it up.

I see my favorite sassafras peeking between them. She always looks like she's waving her wooden hands, hoping to be noticed. 

No worries, cold Sassy. I notice. But for years, I didn't notice her. I've been tending a bluebird box just downslope from her for probably 18 years, and I never noticed this tree until this winter. And now she's a destination for me. I guess I had to come here a few dozen times before it sank in on me how beautiful she is. Before I wondered what she was and walked up the haymeadow to see. Before I started noticing how she shows in every kind of light and weather.

Chet goes snoopin' around the barn foundation 

while Phoebe and I ogle the first calf of spring. So tiny. Hang in there, little Bully. It's supposed to warm up this week. 

You can see the tiny calf in the background. 

We chug toward the car, parked a little more than a mile and a half away. The whole run is a little over 3 miles.

And it all looks different on the way back, as the sun sinks. Swooning again at the pewter sky and the frosted wheat biscuits, the swoop of the guardrail, the delta of clouds, the plunge of the treeline. If there's anything better for one's compositional sense than iPhone photography, I've yet to find it. My compositional muscles are now much firmer than my thighs. I hope to correct that by summer.

Blue on white, Delft days, the aesthetic workout. Hodge, this one's for you. A blue Valentine to my Cambridge muse.

Mood Indigo

Because I had been sitting all day and seemed a bit off, the babies lured me out on an evening walk. Since they haven't had school for almost three weeks, they have been doing that regularly, walking me like one would an old stiff dog. Denied my daily exercise regime by unrelenting ice and snow, I lose my go-go spark, and they help me get it back.

We were losing light steadily as we walked toward the cemetery. Chet checked for Demon, his pal he loves to bite, but opted not to snowfish through the white yard to see him.

He's wearing an old sweater that helps keep him from freezing solid. 

Anything you hold up high is fair game for a Boston terrier, even a giant snowplank. Gimme that!

The lazy curve of the haymeadow hill, painted violet by the dying sky.

Where the deer go up to check the neighbor's hopper feeder. 

At length we reached the cemetery, where two arbor vitaes, mortally damaged by the fire that burned the collapsing Methodist church down, still stand watch. They are taking their time dying, and I'm glad of it. Hawks and bluebirds, woodpeckers and titmice love to sit in their dead tops.

It was quite a wade for the small dog.

Anyone making a snow angel is in danger of being sat upon. Including Liam.

Your sister is a much more salubrious surface than 8" of snow.

Aided by wind, a little flag makes silent arcs in the snow. 

On the way home, I asked my iPhone to remember me this lonesome scene, and it obliged. I was pleased that it picked up the moon and a couple of planets as well.

We got home, I started to do last prep on dinner, and Bill came in. "Could you guys suit up and help me?" Our ice-packed driveway had had its way with the company van. It was both mired and high-centered just off the driveway. The whole family tried very hard to push, dig and pull the van out of the mire, but in the end only our dear neighbor Sherm and his tiny but powerful Kubota tractor could free it. By then it was 9:30 PM and we, famished, fed upon a thoroughly dessicated, nay, cremated chicken carcass that had been perfectly juicy and delicious at 7:30. An unexpected bonus that we discovered upon coming back in the house was that the van's tires had spun hot mud on me and Bill, from head to toe. Parka washing time.

Truly a winter to remember. Here is a photo of a large, unidentifed anthropoid ape smashing its way back from the compost pit through the dismal, pocked boilerplate masquerading as snow upon our smothered yard. It is not wearing pants because its wife made it take them off so she could throw them in the washer. 

The morning aftermath. That car was not going to go anywhere without a chain and a tractor. 

This winter has given us great beauty, very little school, and no small measure of privation. We are ready for it to pack up its weapons and go home. Scenes like this one notwithstanding. 

We walk to this place
where blue hills meet steely sky
The mood's indigo.
Before we get back
darkness will fall in the woods.
Snow lights our path home.