Bringing the indoors outdoors in the snow

Shiva–a Hindu deity–sits on a snowy fence

Optical illusion?

The first time you’re called an old lady…

Ice forming on Silver River

Sipping peppermint tea, another day, another coffee shop.

Waiting for our daughter’s plane to fly the friendly skies toward Chicago, the Windy City.  It’s windy here, too, and the plane is delayed.  I’m not moving one inch toward home until she’s above the clouds, smiling in the sun, winging her way back to NYC.

Am. So. Tired.

Have nothing to blog about, but, gosh darn, the typing fingers are moving again, searching for lower and upper case letters.  They’re determined to tell a story, never mind that I want to snooze.

Guess what happened a couple of weeks ago?  I was slipping and sliding on ice near the post office, walking oh-so-carefully, one foot down, the other up, careful now, don’t fall, don’t you dare fall, is it really winter again, and how many months til spring?

Tomfoolery of our Santas and Snowmen

Dear readers, it’s just about time to go a’diggin’ down in the basement closet and find our multi-colored Christmas lights and Grandma’s ceramic tree and the reindeer ornament that hangs on the wall by the door.  Don’t forget some garland, and the box for Christmas cards, and that red-and-white Santa pillow, and who knows what else?

Oh, yes, some of you know what else, don’t you sly long-time readers?  Yes, the Santas and Snowmen must come upstairs and find a special place to sit on their tic-tac-toe board.

I really want to introduce you newcomers to the Santas and Snowmen.  (Some of you spotted them in a recent post and admired the way they marched around outside in the snow.) However, I really didn’t want to type the story again.  So I am copying and pasting a blog post which originally ran in Lake Superior Spirit on December 25th, 2010.

(I wrote it just four days after my gall bladder surgery, so it proves that the doctor didn’t remove any sense of humor along with that organ.)

Tomfoolery of our Santas and Snowmen

Great Caesar’s Ghost! (And other Weather Channel Predictions)

We’re expecting a snowstorm this afternoon, kids.

I peer at the radar loop and see a swirling blue mass approaching.

I shared the approaching snow storm with our daughter in New York City.

“Yes,” she said.  ”It’s Caesar.”

Caesar?  What the heck you talkin’ about, kid?

It’s all the Weather Channel’s fault–or credit.

They’ve recently decided to name the winter storms, just like those feisty tropical storms.

Brutus? Athena?

Blue plums, almond stove, needle in eyelid, Charley Brown tree

Tomfoolery of our Santas and Snowmen

Pale weak limpid sun rises lower and lower in December’s horizon.  It rarely shines through gray clouds, although today stratus clouds allow its orb to deck the skies with sunny cheer.

We’re buying a new almond stove, our first stove in thirty years.  They’re discontinuing the color “almond”.  It’s a gas stove, it has to be, due to our regular power outages when trees blow down over electrical wires.  We bought locally this time.

I wonder what makes some of us want to share our lives, while others prefer anonymity, silence.  What makes some of us want to share words about pale suns and almond ovens, while others don’t?

Endless clink of logs: filling the wood room another moonlit night

Full cold steady stare of white moon’s face illuminates our wood room filling adventures.

Sparkling snowflakes gleam against dark evergreens like fireflies.  Soft and alive and diamond, then gone.

We crank open the heavy wood room door.  An endless winter chore.  Three and a half tall rows of split wood must be hauled in from the tidy silver tarp-covered wood pile and stacked in our wood room.

We fill the unfinished wood room after dark.  It takes three nights because we’re–dare I label it?–almost elders.  It takes middle-aged folks longer than spry young’uns.  We fill maybe an inside row each evening with the heavy maple logs. (In our pioneer youth with willing children, if we were lucky to get willing children to help, we did this in a night.  I swear it was so.)

Wolf. Sideways blowing snow. Chicken enchiladas with spicy mole sauce.

Monday.  Brown-furred wolf runs south to north in front of my car.  His legs pump, his haunches strain.  Masterful, he sprints, his legs sure, not slipping and skidding like those long skinny-legged deer who sometimes fall and splay all four legs as they attempt to gain traction on ice.  Solid, purposeful, the wolf crosses snow-covered asphalt, his eyes staring straight ahead, almost oblivious to the barreling car.  He darts into the woods, immediately  in a grove of evergreens, concealed in plain sight.

Snowy spruce

Waking up to five inches of snow…

Our Little House in the Big Woods

This post is for our children who are far, far away.  May you enjoy the walk around your childhood home.

This post is for you southerners who dream of snowflakes but rarely see them.

This post is for you northerners anticipating the bright beauty of new snowfalls.

Please enjoy the scenes outside our little Upper Peninsula house in the Big Woods.

If you get cold, how about a cup of hot chocolate to get your winter started off on the right foot? (I mean boot.)

White Winter Hymnal Magical Fox Child kind of day.

It’s spitting snow today with our thermometer shivering at 27 degrees (-2.8 C).  It’s hard to ponder going outside.  North wind cuts through flimsy autumn jackets, demanding winter garb.

I’m reading.

My friend Emma recommended The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey.  Just started lapping up the words and paragraphs last night, mesmerized by stark white descriptions of an aging couple living in Alaska in the 1920′s.

Here’s the book description:  Alaska, 1920: a brutal place to homestead, and especially tough for recent arrivals Jack and Mabel. Childless, they are drifting apart–he breaking under the weight of the work of the farm; she crumbling from loneliness and despair. In a moment of levity during the season’s first snowfall, they build a child out of snow. The next morning the snow child is gone–but they glimpse a young, blonde-haired girl running through the trees.

This little girl, who calls herself Faina, seems to be a child of the woods. She hunts with a red fox at her side, skims lightly across the snow, and somehow survives alone in the Alaskan wilderness. As Jack and Mabel struggle to understand this child who could have stepped from the pages of a fairy tale, they come to love her as their own daughter. But in this beautiful, violent place things are rarely as they appear, and what they eventually learn about Faina will transform all of them.

I haven’t read beyond Page 80, so can’t determine if I’ll like the book or if it shall end “happily ever after” but am fascinated by the Fairy Tale child-fox sprinting in the trees of imagination, in the landscape of hope and possibility.

Speaking of magical, would you like to listen to one of my all-time favorite songs?  Prepare to be transported into this White Winter Hymnal by Fleet Foxes.  The video is pure delight!

“How long will she stay THIS time?”

I'm not gone yet, people... You can't wish me away.

How’s the weather in your neck of the woods?