Pale Gold and Pewter Sky

The morning sun sparks pale gold in the pewter sky, slanting through the grove where I stand and shiver. There is frost on the bare trees overhead, and there is a skim of glassy ice on the puddle below my booted feet. Sunlight claims the pine needles and ice crystals suspended in the water, making them twinkle and glitter and flash by turns. The chancy meeting of the elements forges a pleasing abstract image, but almost everything else is muted and hazy this morning. The damp cold penetrates right through to the bones.

Late November finds northern dwellers perched between Samhain (or Halloween) festivities and the frantic scurryings of Yuletide. Migratory species like loons and herons have been gone for weeks, and only few small flocks of Canada geese remain in local farm fields. Nights are below zero, and many geese have already flown south.

The rural landscape always seems empty at this time of the year, a pallid sepia study carpeted with crunchy field grasses and crowned from here to there with skeletal, whiskery trees. It is beautiful for all that. Never mind shopping malls with their towering gift displays and trite holiday carols, this is where it is at.

A north wind whips through the hollow, scouring the earth and driving fallen leaves, pebbles and twigs before it. A few miles up the road, a favorite gorge is lashed with torrents of water a few degrees above freezing. The rocks glisten, and they wear the season's first slick shards of lacy ice. Winter weather is wild "stuff", absolutely exhilarating when one is in the right frame of mind and wearing the proper gear for rambling.

Here we go again, another long white season in which the doddering scribe/artist wraps up in every warm garment she possesses, slings a camera around her neck, crams her pockets with peripherals and doggie biscuits and goes off to plumb the mysteries of winter. She can do this, and really, she is looking forward to it, at least for now. When she returns home later, she will move autumn's vibrant images from her computer to an archival DVD, and she will create a new folder called "Winter".