Friday Ramble - Winter Gathering

The word abundance made its first appearance in the fourteenth century, coming to us through the good offices of the Middle English and Old French, thence the Latin abundāns, meaning overflowing. The adjective form is abundant, and synonyms for it include:ample, plentiful; copious; plenteous; exuberant; overflowing; rich; teeming; profuse; bountiful and liberal.

It's a word we use to describe circumstances of fullness, ripeness and plenty, a word which was in lavish use in summer and early autumn as we weeded and reaped and gathered in, turning the earth over for next year's garden, "putting things by" and storing the bounty of summer in our larders. Like squirrels, we scurried about and hoarded the fruits of our planting and harvesting for winter, for the short days when the wind howls in the eaves and snow lies deep and white and billowing across the landscape.

Winter's eye is as passionate as summer's eye, but it views the world in a different way, watching not for the shapes of wildflowers and butterflies, but for the graceful arch of bare branches against the clouds, for light falling across old rail fences and making sharp deep blue shadows on the snow, for dead leaves dancing in the wind, and the thousand and one worlds resting easy within a glossy icicle down by the frozen creek. There are bales of hay in the fields too, but they are cloaked in snow, and if not quite forlorn, they are poignant in their silent windswept places.

Winter is about harvest and abundance too, but an inward harvesting and a quieter abundance, questions, questions, questions..... At the end of February I always seem to find myself questioning the shape of my journey so far - the progress through this world with camera and notebook in hand, the images captured or described, even the eyes with which this old hen is seeing the world.

Such questions are part of the journey and the harvest too. There is not the slightest chance that I shall ever capture even a scrap of all this wonder and grandeur around me, and lo, these days on the earth are numbered. In the warm darkness of my uncertainty, I gather them in and rejoice.