Dancing With the North Wind

Beau and I paused in the lee of a big old rock (a glacier dropstone) in the woods yesterday in an effort to get out of the bitter north wind for a while, but our strategy was an exercise in futility. There was no shelter to be found.

Boreas (god of the north wind, winter and snowstorms) howled through the whiskery trees, gulleys and wooded alcoves, crept under our woolly hats, up our sleeves, down our collars and gusted into our eyes. The way the old guy was blowing, it is a wonder any snow was left on the ground, but snow there was and plenty of it.

We were chilled to the bone and soaking wet when we arrived home, but cheerful after a ramble in the woods and the fresh, frosty air. Chattering teeth? Oh, yes.

Wordless Wednesday - Windy

Thursday Poem - Scenic Route

(For Lucy, who called them "ghost houses.")

Someone was always leaving

and never coming back.

The wooden houses wait like old wives

along this road; they are everywhere,

abandoned, leaning, turning gray.

Someone always traded

the lonely beauty

of hemlock and stony lakeshore

for survival, packed up his life

and drove off to the city.

In the yards the apple trees

keep hanging on, but the fruit

grows smaller year by year.

When we come this way again

the trees will have gone wild,

the houses collapsed, not even worth

the human act of breaking in.

Fields will have taken over.

What we will recognize

is the wind, the same fierce wind,

which has no history.

Lisel Mueller

(From Alive Together)

Wordless Wednesday, Dancing With the North Wind

Nature's Delicate Fretwork

Giving Snow to the Wind

Like Honey in Her Cup

The north wind brushes snow away from ice on the river, and clouds of displaced snowflakes swirl through the air like confetti.  Light flickers through nearby trees and everything sparkles: river, snowdrifts, whiskery branches and frozen grasses. The scene is uplifting for a crotchety human in January. She longs for light, and the sunshine is a shawl across her shoulders as it comes and goes through the clouds and the mist over the river—it's like honey in her cup.

Reeds fringe the tributary here and there, their stalwart toes planted in the frozen mud, and their withered stalks swaying in the wind. The spikes outlined against the sky are pleasing when one can actually see them, their artfully curling tops eloquent of something wild and elemental and engaging. So too are the frosted fields, fences and trees on the far shore, the cobalt hues of snow and sky, the diaphanous veil of cold vapor floating  above everything.

There are no caroling birds by the river, and there is silence for the most part, but this week, she remembered the river singing in its exuberant springtime flowing, last summer's great herons motionless in the reeds at sundown.  She thought of Vladimir Nabokov's memoir, "Speak Memory". On another day, that might have been a good title for this post written in the depths of winter.

The world around her is a manuscript written in wind and light. How on earth is she going to fit sky, tempest and dancing snow into one 5x7 image?

The Wind in the Buckthorn

Hill and Blowing Snow

Sunlight and Blowing Snow

Trail and Dancing Snow

Dancing With the North Wind