Hoarfrost and blue sky
and a horizon softened by haze. It is February, yes; it is chilly, yes; but the sky is lighted with a fuse burning towards spring. Can you say Hallelujah? This silly blue planet spins toward another cycle of rebirth and new life.
For one of the fellows I work with I predicted yesterday that we'll have one more bout of twenty below zero weather about February 21st. I have nothing at all to base the prediction on. Let's see how good a weatherman my imagination would be.
I stand in the driveway. Above, in the tree at the end of the driveway, a female hairy woodpecker klonck-klonck-kloncks into the wood.
Frost on the windshield of the pick-up, as tight as the red paint against our house. It is good to grab the cold morning and wrestle it a bit. Exhaust fumes drift to the northeast as the pick-up idles.
Birds hide amongst branches covered with hoarfrost in the bush at the corner of our driveway. They are common sparrows fluffed out for warmth, they are a sign of life beyond our hunkered down days and nights in our warm houses.
The flag at the Fairwater cemetery barely moves this morning.
Out in the country - what a lusty, frosty, sparkling morning. The sun is doing tricks with mirrors. The air has been stirred with sunlight, like milk mixed into coffee, luminous and soft. Yes, there is a hardness to the shadows of the plow banks along the ditches, yet this is not the whole world, only an edge of it.
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