Tag: winter

  • Snowmelt Drum Kit

    Barely snow, just enough for a two-hour school delay, ice encasing twigs and needles, smooth and clear and full around as if dipped, as even as a candy-maker’s dream, no Achilles’ heel or naked shortbread where anyone held on, only light, a sense of depth and sparkle, even on a dark day. The lowest branch…

  • Pruning the Prunes Tree

    For years, I called it a prune tree. And my Brooks prune, once it had been in the ground a while, obligingly provided a prune nearly every August. Maybe September. One prune. It dawned on me that perhaps I should call it a prunes tree. Much more obligingly (or equally obligingly, if we follow the…

  • Splash, smooth, silver: A thousand words in pictures

    Ready for the year to turn and the light to return, I took a walk today–after the downpour, in the drizzle break between showers–and watched the full creek rushing muddy and slick through my end of town, and the raindrops poised on the rosehips and unknown (to me) berries, lone splash of color against the green…

  • In memoriam (decedent unknown)

    Unknown to me, that’s all, or only slightly known. Familiar, but not close. I expect (I hope) she was better known to others. There’s an assisted living home down the hill from us, close to the stop where I catch the bus to work. Ours is a neighborhood of hills and uneven sidewalking–sidewalks seem to…

  • Frozen

    After it snowed and before it really started raining this morning, I went for a walk. More of a crunch-tromp-glide-stumble-crunch; the ice crust on the snow was brittle, and the snow was deep. Here where it isn’t supposed to snow–or not snow much–we are frozen on the verge of spring. The ice is clarifying, isolating,…