Escape

Spring buds on the maple trees

This week’s photo challenge at WordPress is:  Escape.

Just wanted to let you know.  We’ve finally busted out of winter here in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula after almost seven months.

We’ve successfully escaped.

We can only hope someone hid the keys of that winter jailor…

Hullabaloo

During the snowstorm

Such a hullabaloo in the Northern forest!

Spring Seed Boy fell in love with young Snow Maiden.

Oh, it’s forbidden, don’t you know!

Icy beauty

The Winter Queen, in her fury, locked Spring Seed Boy in a shed behind the six-foot snow bank.

Spring Seed Boy cries and it rains.  Young Snow Maiden weeps and it snows.  The Winter Queen gripes and it snows some more.

The oregano silently stews.

The Sun King tried, yes he tried, to negotiate a truce.  He shined his hardest, but to no avail.

The Mourning Doves in the bird feeder mourn.  The poor robins, just in from the sunny south, look in vain for worms beneath the endless white snow.  The bear refuse to leave hibernation.  The trees refuse to leaf.  The ice on the lake refuses to melt.

Day in My Life: Inside a two-room schoolhouse

Our little two-room school

Imagine you’re a six-year-old in 1911.  You live on a farm about a mile from the nearest neighbor.  It’s time for you to be educated, Ma says.  You’ve got new shoes–your first shoes ever–and you’ll walk with your big brother and sister down that dirt road, maybe three miles, and you’ll start school at a one-room or two-room school.

Your brother will help the other big kids stoke the wood stove that sits in the corner of the classroom.  You’ll eat your lunch out of a silver pail and make friends with perhaps the only other 1st grade student and you’ll play outside at recess even when it’s ten below zero (-23 C).  And you won’t freeze to death.  You’ll walk the three miles back home and do chores before supper.  Then you’ll start your homework.

Weekly photo challenge: Leaf a comment, will you?

How the leaf actually looked.

Can you believe how the green life is slowly retreating from the leaf as it dies?

Leaf again.

Let’s play with the green leaf photographically-speaking, shall we?  How can we renew this dying leaf?

Weekly Photo Challenge: Solitary (We’re born alone & we die alone)

Solitary cart.

We are born alone and we die alone.

Wait a minute!  you argue.  We’re born surrounded by a mama and papa (if we’re lucky) and a doctor who doesn’t throw his bloody gloves against the wall.  If we’re lucky.  The on-call doctor who delivered our firstborn was so angry at the interruption of his sleep that he shoved forceps around the head of our precious innocent baby and tugged him out ferociously before throwing his bloody gloves against the wall.  Don’t forget sweet nurses who coo and cuddle and wrap us in swaddling clothes (if we’re lucky, like we were, after the doctor stomped from the delivery room.)