Nested

One of those perfect blue mornings which come along from time to time in a northern March, blue sky peeking through the evergreens and the first buds popping out on the young birch and maple trees at the edge of a deep valley on the Two Hundred Acre Wood. There was even a small brown moth or three fluttering among the trees on the weekend.

This morning we are back to winter weather of a sort, darkness, gray skies and dense cloud, rain now and wet snow scheduled to appear this afternoon - there is no sun to be seen, and the day will be crepuscular from dawn to evening. Among the synonyms for crepuscular (one of my favorite words), my tattered thesaurus gives me: Cimmerian, aphotic, atramentous, caliginous, clouded, dim, dingy, drab, dull, dusky, foggy, gloomy, indistinct, lightless, murky, nebulous, obfuscous, obscure, shadowy, somber, stygian, sunless, tenebrous and vague. Today conforms to most, if not all, of those words.

There will probably be no blue skies here for the rest of the week, but the lower temperatures and projected precipitation mean that our maple syrup producing friends in the Lanark Highlands can look forward to an extended maple syrup season, and that is a fine thing. We have already sampled the proceeds of this season's alchemical doings, and they are ambrosial.

Such are threshold (or liminal) days on the cusp of seasonal turnings. What does one do on when walking about on a dark rainy day is not in order? Beyond the somber windows and springtime chores (the linen cupboard for one) are pleasures to be contemplated: sketches and books and tea, all undertaken by the old library table in the warm glow of a good lamp. Later in the day, there will be buckwheat crepes for dinner, served up with the first maple syrup of the season.