Turning

There is snow on the ground and on the old trees, a thin skim of glassy ice on the pond. The winter sun rising flashes a pale gold across the pewter sky, lighting up the grove of pines where I am standing for just a moment. Everything else is muted and rather hazy this morning, and the damp cold goes right through to the bones.

Late November finds a northern dweller perched like an indomitable bird, perhaps a nuthatch, between Samhain (or Halloween) and the frantic scurryings of Yuletide. Migratory birds are long gone for the most part, although geese remain in the fields and will be here for some time yet.

The landscape is a pallid sepia study crowned from here to there with skeletal whiskery trees and crunching field grasses. An excoriating wind roars across the highlands and whips through the hollows, scouring the earth, driving fallen leaves, pebbles and small branches before it. The rocks at the bottom of the gorge are lashed with torrents of water a few degrees above freezing, the granite is lavishly coated, shiny and sporting the season's first slick shards of lacy ice.

This weather is raw and wild and very exhilarating stuff when one is in the mood and wearing both winter woolies and oilskins. Here we go again - another long white season in which one dresses up in every warm garment she possesses, slings a camera around her neck, fills her pockets with peripheral devices, then goes off to plumb the mysteries of winter.