snow – Grongar

Where webs of snow are drifting

Snow has already come and gone several times in the last few weeks, but today’s snow has a feeling of permanence about it, as if it’s going to become the bedding layer for a winter-long sedimentary cover. Or, as Christina’s Rosetti put it:

Earth stood hard as iron, water like stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow.

I could be wrong. It could all melt tomorrow, but even if it does, this Monday snow is the harbinger: It’s coming. The locking in and locking down. The lights, the fires, the snowshoes, the shovels. The cocoa, the latkes. The frozen gate latch, the frozen water buckets. The hot water buckets, the snowflakes on goat lashes. The jumble of boots by the door, the hoping for a snow day call from school. The thick novel, the hot water bottle. The post office trips, the cinnamon tea.

If it’s not here already, it’s coming.

Let’s bake cookies. Let’s reenact our traditions. Let’s create stories to share. Let’s play games. Let’s fortify ourselves with song. Let’s power on the turntable and put those old records on. Yes, that one, the one that rings in the first real snowfall of the year. And then let’s sing along.

Winter comes to November

Falling Leaves and Early Snow

In the years to come they will say,
“They fell like the leaves
In the autumn of nineteen thirty-nine.”
November has come to the forest,
To the meadows where we picked the cyclamen.
The year fades with the white frost
On the brown sedge in the hazy meadows,
Where the deer tracks were black in the morning.
Ice forms in the shadows;
Disheveled maples hang over the water;
Deep gold sunlight glistens on the shrunken stream.
Somnolent trout move through pillars of brown and gold.
The yellow maple leaves eddy above them,
The glittering leaves of the cottonwood,
The olive, velvety alder leaves,
The scarlet dogwood leaves,
Most poignant of all.

In the afternoon thin blades of cloud
Move over the mountains;
The storm clouds follow them;
Fine rain falls without wind.
The forest is filled with wet resonant silence.
When the rain pauses the clouds
Cling to the cliffs and the waterfalls.
In the evening the wind changes;
Snow falls in the sunset.
We stand in the snowy twilight
And watch the moon rise in a breach of cloud.
Between the black pines lie narrow bands of moonlight,
Glimmering with floating snow.
An owl cries in the sifting darkness.
The moon has a sheen like a glacier.

Wordless Wednesday ~ Ha ha ha! Very funny, April. Very funny.

52 Photos ~ Wide open spaces

The Snow Man

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

–Wallace Stevens

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This photo and post are in response to this week’s theme for the 52 Photos Project. You should participate, too! Read about how it works here. You can see a gallery of everyone’s photos for this week’s theme here. To see a list of all my blog posts for this project, go here.

Here, and nearly there

There are so many tictoc

there are so many tictoc
clocks everywhere telling people
what toctic time it is for
tictic instance five toc minutes toc
past six tic

Spring is not regulated and does
not get out of order nor do
its hands a little jerking move
over numbers slowly

we do not
wind it up it has no weights
springs wheels inside of
its slender self no indeed dear
nothing of the kind.

(So,when kiss Spring comes
we’ll kiss each kiss other on kiss the kiss
lips because tic clocks toc don’t make
a toctic difference
to kisskiss you and to
kiss me)

–e. e. cummings

Wordless Wednesday ~ Black and white and red all over

52 Weeks ~ Winter (48/52)

Snow-flakes

Out of the bosom of the Air,
  Out of the cloud-folds of her garments shaken,
Over the woodlands brown and bare,
  Over the harvest-fields forsaken,
   Silent, and soft, and slow
   Descends the snow.

Even as our cloudy fancies take
  Suddenly shape in some divine expression,
Even as the troubled heart doth make
  In the white countenance confession,
   The troubled sky reveals
   The grief it feels.

This is the poem of the air,
  Slowly in silent syllables recorded;
This is the secret of despair,
  Long in its cloudy bosom hoarded,
   Now whispered and revealed
   To wood and field.

–Henry Wadsworth Longfellow