A Winter's Day

Last night's rain had ended sometime in the middle of the night leaving puddles of slushy ice where footprints in snow had been.  It was the first morning in five days without snow or freezing rain.  The temperature was somewhere in the thirties, I'm guessing, and warm enough to leave my heavy winter coat behind.

 It was the first time in days that I could go outside using only my red and black wool shirt as a jacket.  As I walked the slushy path down to the garden.  The snow was still deep enough to watch my footing as a skirted the large wood pile.  It had been there for two weeks now.  A crew cutting down trees a mile or so away dropped a large load of wood in my driveway at my request.  I saw the wood stacking up where they were cutting and could not help but stop and ask for some.  They were more than happy to get rid of a large truckload and I was more than happy to add it to my winter supply.  We started chopping the cut rounds in to smaller pieces that would burn easily in our wood stove, but that lasted two days and the rest of the stack sat untouched as the snow storm had come and covered it ... the axe still leaning, snow covered,  against the pile.  As I headed down our small hill to the garden, I used our one casualty of the storm for support.  A beautiful tree in the garden that had broken under the weight of the heavy snow on the first day of the storm.  It was an unexpected loud crack that we noticed at the time but had not realized where the noise had come from.   And now half of the tree lay on the snow connected only at the splintered trunk.  We are surrounded by hundred foot tall evergreens and when it does snow it is always a concern that one of these will come down, but I had never expected this beautiful little tree, sheltered in among the giants,  to be a casualty of any storm.  Once the snow is all gone I will take a chain saw and see what of the tree can be saved.  The rest will be added to our pile of firewood.  The artistic shape of that tree and the sweet smelling purple flowers will be missed.

 The garden itself had fared well under the snow.  

Large rings of melted snow surrounded each container and the snow covered branches and vines of yesterday were now bare.  With all to see, the first thing that I noticed was not visual, but the sound of the wind in the evergreens.  The rush and flow as if the sound of waves against a beach.  I have always loved the sound of the wind in the trees ever since I was a small child.  It is a soothing and comforting sound to me and one of my first memories as a small child.  I can never hear it without thinking of a canyon across the street from the house I was born in.  I moved from that house when I was only three, but the sound is still locked in my mind.  Spring is still a long time away, but life still goes on in the garden under the snow.

 Red berries, green moss, the red and green colors in the strawberry leaves. 

 Even a dandilion or two trying to decide if it was warm enough for yellow flowers to unfold.