Yesterday’s Easter morning sun halo — photo by Rachel Vogel
God loves each of us as if there were only one of us to love.
~Saint Augustine
When I am one of so many
there can be nothing special
to attract attention
or affection
When I blend into the background
among a multitude of others,
indistinct and plain,
common as grains of sand
There is nothing to hold me up
as rare, unique,
or exceptional,
worthy of extra effort.
Yet it is not about my worth,
my work, my words;
it is about His infinite capacity
to love anything formed
by the touch of His vast hand,
by the contraction of His immense heart,
by the boundlessness of His breath
reaching me
as if
as if
as if
I were the only one.
I wish one could press snowflakes in a book like flowers. ~James Schuyler from “February 13, 1975”
More snow predicted before winter is done with us.
Despite my fervor for spring, lit by the appearance of a snow drop here and a crocus there, I still want to acknowledge this winter for the adventure it has been:
like a momento snowflake preserved between two pages, it fades quickly from memory but the damp spot remains behind. It is not lost — simply a mere wrinkle in time.
…step outside into an indecision of weather, night rain having fallen into frozen air, a silver thaw where nothing moves or sings and all things grieve under the weight of their own shining. ~ James McKean from “Silver Thaw”
Freezing rain needs to happen once a decade just to remind Pacific Northwesterners that regular rain isn’t such a bad thing. We’re in the midst of just such a silver thaw right now. Trees and heavy branches are crashing everywhere, the power is off, the farm generator is on and life as we know it comes to a standstill under an inch thick blanket of ice.
We webfoot Washingtonians tend to grouse about our continuously gray cloud-covered bleak dreary drizzly wet mildew-ridden existence. But that’s not us actually grumbling. That’s just us choosing not to exhibit overwhelming joy. They don’t call Bellingham, the university town ten miles from our farm, the “city of subdued excitement” for no good reason.
When the temperatures drop in our moderate climate and things start to ice up, or the snowflakes start to fall, we celebrate the diversion from rain. Our children are out building snowmen when there is a mere 1/2 inch of snow on the ground, leaving lawns bare and green with one large snowman in the middle. Schools start to cancel at 2 inches because of the lack of snow removal equipment and no bunkers of stored sand for the roads. We natives are pitifully terrible snow drivers compared to the highly experienced (and at times overconfident) midwestern and northeastern transplants in our midst.
But then the weather gets indecisive and this little meteorologic phenomenon known as freezing rain with its resultant silver thaw happens. It warms up enough that it really isn’t snowing but it also really isn’t raining because the temperatures are still subfreezing at ground level, so it spills ice drops from the sky–noisy little splatters that land and stay beaded up on any surface. Branches resemble botanical popsicles, sidewalks become bumpy rinks, roads become sheer black ice, cars are encased in an impenetrable glaze of ice and windows are covered with textured glass twice as thick as usual.
In the midst of this frozen concoction coming from the sky, we delay farm chores as long as possible, knowing it will take major navigation aids to simply make our way out the back steps, across the sidewalk and down the hill, then up the slick cement slope to open the big sliding barn doors. Chains on our muck boots help, to a degree. The big rolling barn doors ice together when the northeast wind blows freezing rain into the tiny gap between them, so it is necessary to break foot holds into the ice on the cement to roll back the doors just enough to sneak through before shutting them quickly behind us, blocking the arctic wind blast. Then we can drink in the warmth of six stalls of hungry Haflinger horses, noisily greeting us by chastising us for our tardiness in feeding them dinner.
Wintertime chores are always more time-consuming but ice time chores are even more so. Water buckets need to be filled individually because the hoses are frozen solid. Hay bales stored in the hay barn must be hauled up the slick slope to the horse barn. Frozen manure piles need to be hacked to pieces with a shovel rather than a pitchfork. Who needs a bench press and fancy weight lifting equipment when you can lift five gallon buckets, sixty pound bales and fifteen pounds of poop per shovel full? Why invest in an elliptical exerciser? This farm life is saving us money… I think.
Once inside each stall, I take a moment to run my ungloved hand over a fluffy golden winter coat, to untangle a mane knot or two, and to breathe in sweet Haflinger hay breath from a velvety nose. It is the reason I will slide downhill, land on my face pushing loads of hay uphill to feed these loved animals no matter how hazardous the footing or miserable the weather. It is why their stalls get picked up more often than our bedrooms, their stomachs are filled before ours, and we pay for hoof trims for the herd but never manicures and pedicures for the people residing in the house.
The temperatures will rise, the overwhelming ice covering will start to thaw and our farm will be happily back to drippy and overcast. No matter what the weather, the barn will always be a refuge of comfort, even when the work is hard and the effort is a challenge for these middle aged farmers.
It’s enough to melt even the most grumbly heart and therefore the thickest coating of ice.
Winter, a lingering season, is a time to gather golden moments, embark upon a sentimental journey, and enjoy every idle hour. ~ John Boswell
As temperatures rose 40 degrees from a snowy/icy first half of January to a balmy third week, it feels like our winter isn’t going to linger long after all. As much as my frozen fingers appreciate the reprieve while during barn chores, I am wistful that winter may have already decided to pack up and move on for another year. It seems its departure was a bit hurried from the scattered reminders left behind — a bejeweled owl feather here, a molding leaf there, crusts of melting ice everywhere.
We need a little more of this season of bare bones and stark landscapes, of time for remembrance and restoration. I won’t bid goodbye yet, hoping it may yet linger a while longer.
A narrow pond would form in the orchard, water clear as air covering grass and black leaves and fallen branches, all around it black leaves and drenched grass and fallen branches, and on it, slight as an image in an eye, sky, clouds, trees, our hovering faces and our cold hands. ~Marilynne Robinson from Housekeeping
In time, the sons of men filled the earth with their evil deeds. And God beheld the desolate wastes the soiled streets the bitter brown of barren fields and the sin of the world cut him to the heart.
“I will blot from the earth the memory of these things. Behold, I will make all things new!” So he gathered up clouds from the four corners of the sky, billows pregnant with promise. He gathered them in great, dark piles on the horizon of hills while the weathermen watched grandmothers gazed schoolchildren pressed their noses against the glass.
And God said, “Let there be snow.”
First, small white flakes like lace, drifting.
Then—wind driving snow before it, a blizzard hiding hills from view (and the tops of church steeples and street lights, too).
For forty days the land was covered in white, the wretched lines of a wretched world blurred soft overnight— buried, forgotten as God birthed grace upon the earth. ~Sara Arthur “Advent in Michigan”
I wish one could press snowflakes in a book like flowers. ~James Schuyler from “February 13, 1975”
…Then how his muffled armies move in all night
And we wake and every road is blockaded
Every hill taken and every farm occupied
And the white glare of his tents is on the ceiling.
And all that dull blue day and on into the gloaming
We have to watch more coming.
Then everything in the rubbish-heaped world
Is a bridesmaid at her miracle.
Dunghills and crumbly dark old barns are bowed in the chapel of her sparkle.
The gruesome boggy cellars of the wood
Are a wedding of lace
Now taking place.
~Ted Hughes from “Snow and Snow”
Out of the bosom of the Air,
Out of the cloud-folds of her garments shaken,
Over the woodlands brown and bare,
Over the harvest-fields forsaken,
Silent, and soft, and slow
Descends the snow.
The troubled sky reveals The grief it feels… ~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow from “Snow-flakes”
I’m roused by faint glow
between closed slats
of window blinds
at midnight
The bedroom suffused
in ethereal light
from a moonless sky
as a million tiny stars fall silent
The snow lights all that is broken,
settling gently while
tucking in the downy corners
of a snowflake comforter
as heaven comes down to
plump the pillows,
cushion the landscape,
soften the wretched,
illuminate the heart.
She lingered in that charming little garden to say hello to the gnomes, such a glorious infestation! How few wizards realize just how much we can learn from the wise little gnomes-or, to give them their correct names, the Gernumbli gardensi. ‘Ours do know a lot of excellent swear words,’ said Ron… J.K. Rowling in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
It is hard to say exactly when the first one moved in. This farm was distinctly gnome-less when we bought it, largely due to twenty-seven hungry barn cats residing here at the time, in various stages of pregnancy, growth, development and aging. It took awhile for the feline numbers to whittle down to an equilibrium that matched the rodent population. In the mean time, our horse numbers increased from three to seven to over fifteen with a resultant exponential increase in barn chores. One spring over a decade ago, I was surprised to walk in the barn one morning to find numerous complex knots tied in the Haflingers’ manes. Puzzling as I took precious time to undo them, literally adding hours to my chores, I knew I needed to find the cause or culprit.
It took some research to determine the probable origin of these tight tangles. Based on everything I read, they appeared to be the work of Gernumbli faenilesi, a usually transient species of gnome preferring to live in barns and haylofts in close proximity to heavy maned ponies. In this case, as the tangles persisted for months, they clearly had moved in, lock, stock and barrel. The complicated knots were their signature pride and joy, their artistic way of showing their devotion to a happy farm.
All well and good, but the extra work was killing my fingers and thinning my horses’ hair. I plotted ways to get them to cease and desist.
I set live traps of cheese and peanut butter cracker sandwiches, hoping to lure them into cages for a “catch and release”. Hoping to drive them away, I played polka music on the radio in the barn at night. Hoping to be preemptive, I braided the manes up to be less tempting but even those got twisted and jumbled. Just as I was becoming ever more desperate and about to round up more feral cats, the tangling stopped.
It appeared the gnomes had moved on to a more hospitable habitat. I had succeeded in my gnome eradication plan. Or so I thought.
Not long after, I had the distinct feeling of being watched as I walked past some rose bushes in the yard. I stopped to take a look, expecting to spy the shining eyes of one of the pesky raccoons that frequents our yard to steal from the cats’ food dish. Instead, beneath the thorny foliage, I saw two round blue eyes peering at me serenely. This little gal was not at all intimidated by me, and made no move to escape. She was an ideal example of Gernumbli gardensi, a garden gnome known for their ability to keep varmints and vermin away from plants and flowers. They also happen to actively feud with Gernumbli Faenilesi so that explained the sudden disappearance of my little knot-tying pests in the barn.
It wasn’t long before more Gardensi moved in, a gnomey infestation. They tended to arrive in pairs and bunches, liked to play music, smoked pipes, played on a teeter totter, worked with garden tools, took naps on sun-warmed rocks and one even preferred a swing. They are a bit of a rowdy bunch but I enjoy their happy presence and jovial demeanor. I haven’t yet heard any bad language as we have a “keep it clean” policy about bad words around here. They seem quite hardy, stoically withstand extremes in weather, and only seem fearful when hornets build a nest right in their lap.
As long as they continue to coexist peaceably with us and each other, keep the varmints and their knot tying cousins away, and avoid bad habits and swear words, I’m quite happy they are here. Actually, I’ve given them the run of the place. I’ve been told to be cautious as there are now news reports of an even more invasive species of gnome, Gernumbli kitschsi, that could move in and take over if I’m not careful.
A few feathery flakes are scattered widely through the air, and hover downward with uncertain flight, now almost alighting on the earth, now whirled again aloft into remote regions of the atmosphere. ~Nathaniel Hawthorne
It was a fairy-tale world, child-like and funny. Boughs of trees adorned with thick pillows, so fluffy someone must have plumped them up; the ground a series of humps and mounds, beneath which slinking underbrush or outcrops of rock lay hidden; a landscape of crouching, cowering gnomes in droll disguises— it was comic to behold, straight out of a book of fairy tales. But if there was something roguish and fantastic about the immediate vicinity through which you laboriously made your way, the towering statues of snow-clad Alps, gazing down from the distance, awakened in you feelings of the sublime and holy. ~Thomas Mann from The Magic Mountain
“You wake up on a winter morning and pull up the shade, and what lay there the evening before is no longer there– the sodden gray yard, the dog droppings, the tire tracks in the frozen mud, the broken lawn chair you forgot to take in last fall. All this has disappeared overnight, and what you look out on is not the snow of Narnia but the snow of home, which is no less shimmering and white as it falls. The earth is covered with it, and it is falling still in silence so deep that you can hear its silence. It is snow to be shoveled, to make driving even worse than usual, snow to be joked about and cursed at, but unless the child in you is entirely dead, it is snow, too, that can make the heart beat faster when it catches you by surprise that way, before your defenses are up. It is snow that can awaken memories of things more wonderful than anything you ever knew or dreamed.” ~Frederick Buechner
You should see my corgis at sunset in the snow. It’s their finest hour. About five o’clock they glow like copper. Then they come in and lie in front of the fire like a string of sausages. ~Tasha Tudor
“one day you stepped in snow, the next in mud, water soaked in your boots and froze them at night, it was the next worst thing to pure blizzardry, it was weather that wouldn’t let you settle.” ~E.L. Doctorow
coyote in the field
Snow not falling but flying sidewise, and sudden, not signaled by the slow curdling of clouds all day and a flake or two drifting downward, but rushing forward all at once as though sent for. And filling up the world’s concavities, pillowing up in the gloaming, making night light with its whiteness, and then falling still in every one’s dreams… ~John Crowley
blowing snow in the barnanother barnstorming
“The smallest snowstorm on record took place an hour ago in my back yard. It was approximately two flakes. I waited for more to fall, but that was it. The entire storm was two flakes.” ~Richard Brautigan
Out through the fields and the woods And over the walls I have wended; I have climbed the hills of view And looked at the world, and descended; I have come by the highway home, And lo, it is ended.
The leaves are all dead on the ground, Save those that the oak is keeping To ravel them one by one And let them go scraping and creeping Out over the crusted snow, When others are sleeping.
And the dead leaves lie huddled and still, No longer blown hither and thither; The last lone aster is gone; The flowers of the witch hazel wither; The heart is still aching to seek, But the feet question ‘Whither?’
Ah, when to the heart of man Was it ever less than a treason To go with the drift of things, To yield with a grace to reason, And bow and accept the end Of a love or a season?
~Robert Frost “Reluctance”
A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning ~Gerard Manley Hopkins from “Spring”
poplar row behind the apple orchard
Awake! Awake! for the earliest gleam Of golden sunlight shines On the rippling waves, that brightly flow Beneath the flowering vines. Awake! Awake! for the low, sweet chant Of the wild-birds’ morning hymn Comes floating by on the fragrant air, Through the forest cool and dim; Then spread each wing, And work, and sing, Through the long, bright sunny hours; O’er the pleasant earth We journey forth, For a day among the flowers.
~Louisa May Alcott Lily-Bell and Thistledown Song I
a favorite rhododendron
It was such a spring day as breathes into a man an ineffable yearning, a painful sweetness, a longing that makes him stand motionless, looking at the leaves or grass, and fling out his arms to embrace he knows not what. ~John Galsworthy
a happy day put out to pasture
At morn when light mine eyes unsealed
I gazed upon the open field;
The rain had fallen in the night —
The landscape in the new day’s light
A countenance of grace revealed
Upon the meadow, wood and height.
The sun’s light was a smile of gold,
Ere shut by sudden fold on fold
Of surging, showering clouds from view;
No sooner hid than it broke through
A tearful smile upon the wold
Where earth reflected heaven’s blue.
The sky was as a canvas spun
To paint the new spring’s nocturns on;
A blended melody of tints —
The sea’s hue, and the myriad hints
Of garden-closes, when the sun
Hath stamped the work of nature’s mints.
~William Stanley Braithwaite
a happy day put out to blue skies in the breezerosemary
Flesh and fleece, fur and feather, Grass and green world all together, Star-eyed strawberry breasted Throstle above Her nested
Cluster of bugle blue eggs thin Forms and warms the life within, And bird and blossom swell In sod or sheath or shell.” – Gerard Manley Hopkins, The May Magnificat
Kale going to seed
“A delicate fabric of bird song Floats in the air, The smell of wet wild earth Is everywhere. Oh I must pass nothing by Without loving it much, The raindrop try with my lips, The grass with my touch; For how can I be sure I shall see again The world on the first of May Shining after the rain?” – Sara Teasdale, May Day
grape hyacinth and tulips
“Every spring is the only spring – a perpetual astonishment.” – Ellis Peters
“Some will tell you crocuses are heralds true of spring Others say that tulips showing buds are just the thing Point to peonies, say when magnolia blossoms show I look forward to the sight of other flowers though Cultivate your roses, grow your orchids in the dark Plant your posies row on row and stink up the whole park The flower that’s my favourite kind is found throughout the land A wilting, yellow dandelion, clutched in a grubby hand.” – Larry Tilander, Springtime of My Soul
“Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers to-day; And give us not to think so far away As the uncertain harvest; keep us here All simply in the springing of the year.
Oh, give us pleasure in the orchard white, Like nothing else by day, like ghosts by night; And make us happy in the happy bees, The swarm dilating round the perfect trees.” – Robert Frost, A Prayer in Spring
skimmia
“Poetry is the silence and speech between a wet struggling root of a flower and a sunlit blossom of that flower.” – Carl Sandburg
yew pollen
“With the coming of spring, I am calm again. “ – Gustav Mahler
the first of dozens of peonies
The wealthy man is not he who has money, but he who has the means to live in the luxurious state of early spring.
~Anton Chekhov
Virginia Creeper starting to do its creeper thing
Canadian mountains to the north
“This spring as it comes bursts up in bonfires green, Wild puffing of emerald trees, and flame-filled bushes, Thorn-blossom lifting in wreaths of smoke between Where the wood fumes up and the watery, flickering rushes. I am amazed at this spring, this conflagration Of green fires lit on the soil of the earth, this blaze Of growing, and sparks that puff in wild gyration, Faces of people streaming across my gaze.” – D. H. Lawrence, The Enkindled Spring
“The sun was warm but the wind was chill. You know how it is with an April day. When the sun is out and the wind is still, You’re one month on in the middle of May. But if you so much as dare to speak, a cloud come over the sunlit arch, And wind comes off a frozen peak, And you’re two months back in the middle of March.” – Robert Frost
spring sunrise over Mt Baker
“Hark, I hear a robin calling! List, the wind is from the south! And the orchard-bloom is falling Sweet as kisses on the mouth.
Come and let us seek together Springtime lore of daffodils, Giving to the golden weather Greeting on the sun-warm hills.” – Lucy Maud Montgomery, Spring Song
“If you’ve never been thrilled to the very edges of your soul by a flower in spring bloom, maybe your soul has never been in bloom.” – Audra Foveo
Sam stops to smell the tulips
“It’s spring fever. That is what the name of it is. And when you’ve got it, you want – oh, you don’t quite know what it is you do want, but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you want it so!” – Mark Twain
someone is looking his age….it was a rough winter
“Every year, back comes Spring, with nasty little birds yapping their fool heads off and the ground all mucked up with plants.” – Dorothy Parker 😉
Barnstorming 