Sunlight and Frost Enfolded

There is hoarfrost on the old trees, and a thin skim of glassy ice on the pond. The winter sun sparks pale gold in the pewter sky, lighting up the grove of pines where I am standing. The thin yellow light glosses a woodland pool before my wandering feet, making the ice crystals twinkle and flash - it makes a fine abstract painting, and I watch as the light flows across the surface.  Everything else is muted and hazy this morning, and the damp cold goes right through to the bones.

Late November finds a northern dweller perched like an indomitable bird, perhaps a nuthatch, between Samhain (or Halloween) and the frantic scurryings of Yuletide. Migratory birds are long gone for the most part, although geese remain in the fields and will be here for some time yet. The landscape is a pallid sepia study crowned from here to there with skeletal whiskery trees and crunching field grasses.

An excoriating north wind roars across the highlands and whips through the hollows, scouring the earth, driving fallen leaves, pebbles and small branches before it. The rocks at the bottom of the gorge are lashed with torrents of water a few degrees above freezing, the granite lavishly coated, shiny and sporting the season's first slick shards of lacy ice.

This weather is raw and wild and exhilarating stuff when one is in the mood and wearing both winter woolies and oilskins. Here we go again - another long white season in which the artist dresses up in every warm garment she possesses, slings a camera around her neck, fills her pockets with peripheral devices and notebooks, then goes off to plumb the mysteries of winter.  She can do this, and she is looking forward to it.