Here Comes the Sun!

Sun sun sun, here it comes!

 And here's what it does.

Good day, sunshine! I feel good in a special way. I'm in love with a sunny day!

Suspended Animation

waiting for what comes next

Danger Signs

Fewer odonates than usual.

Warmer temperatures than usual.

This from our local Weather Underground station keeper on November 19:

Last night, 0.17" of rain was recorded with a peak wind gust of 44 mph. Only 1.14" of rain since Aug. 29. The avg temperature during this drought period was 68.2º, 5º warmer than this period in '15, and 9º warmer than in '14. Wind advisory until 6pm, and freeze warning in effect tonight.

Shallower lakes than usual.

This from the University Office of Environmental Stewardship and Sustainability:

Here you can see a comparison of Lake Jackson from Nov. 14 and Oct. 15 of this year. The red line indicates the Oct. 15 Level. Last week, the Sewanee Utility District (SUD) officially announced mandatory water restrictions in response to the drought. SUD is asking local residents to restrict watering of vegetation to specific days of the week from 5AM to 10AM and prohibits the washing of commercial and non-commercial motor vehicles, trailers, and boats.



Less moss in the yard than usual.

Browner woods than usual.

Fewer deer than usual.

More official announcements than usual.

This from the Sewanee Utility District

Due to the ongoing drought and a continued dry forecast, two of our neighboring systems have implemented mandatory water restrictions on their customers. In accordance with our regional drought management agreement, SUD will implement mandatory drought restrictions for our customers as well. We are asking all of our customers to cut back on the amount of water they use in order that our supplies will last longer. Hopefully, these restrictions along with some rain will keep us from taking more drastic measures in the future.

Restricted:
a) watering of lawns, flower gardens, trees, shrubs, etc., are restricted to assigned days of the week and only from 5 AM to 10 AM: addresses ending in an even number may water on Wednesday, Friday, or Sunday, and addresses ending in an odd number may water Tuesday, Thursday, or Saturday;
b) watering of fairways on any golf course and all ball/athletic fields restricted to sprinkling/irrigation to the hours of 12:01 AM to 5 AM; and
c) normal scheduled fire hydrant testing is restricted to 50% of the schedule.

Prohibited:
a) washing sidewalks, driveways, parking areas, tennis courts, patios, or any other hard surfaces by commercial, industrial or residential customers except for sanitary or safety purposes;
b) filling or re-filling of swimming pools;
c) non-commercial and commercial washing of motor vehicles, trailers or boats;
d) use of water for dust control or construction compaction; and
e) firefighting training.

This from the University's Office of Community Relations:

On Monday Governor Haslam issued a proclamation declaring a regional burn ban that includes Franklin, Marion, and Grundy counties. This ban supersedes the burn ban issued by the Sewanee Police Department on October 26 and INCLUDES all outdoor fires including those in Turkish fire pits, chimenea, and all other similar exterior fire enclosures. 

A violation of a burn ban is punishable as a Class A misdemeanor, which carries a fine of $2,500 and/or up to 11 months, 29 days in jail. 

Charcoal grills remain permitted, but users should be diligent to make sure there are no hot embers remaining in the grill when dumping ashes. Several fires have been started in the Nashville area recently by careless cleaning of charcoal grills.

Activity on My Own Deck

The neighborhood cat, raccoons, birds (even woodpeckers), possums, and other creatures visit the birdbath.

yesterday's squirrel balanced on ice to lick up moisture

today I got there first

Sorry, Todd Vorenkamp, but

I had to skip Exercise 4 today.

Why?

Let's just say ice and freezing fog (or cloud).

So.

I went out. Once. (My porch was slippery and my hands cold.)

I photographed the ice hanging off my dragonfly sculpture (spoon, marbles, cans, wire), and came back inside.

Then I made up my own exercise:

RH Exercise 1: Make Something of Nothing

That Spot of Red

in the water bead: me.
Selfie with bluebell,
both of us
holding the cold.

Exercising Patience

By this time two years ago, I had already seen Fragile Forktails.

This year, it is ice, or fog, or rain, or snow.

I must wait, just as the buds on the Kwanzan cherry and crabapple do.

And like the Little Engine That Could, I feel myself chugging up and up and up toward spring, thinking Soon, soon, soon.

When Sleep Comes

I surrender. Even during the day, even when induced by medication. Even if it means I miss the sparkle of iced branches and buds.

And I am grateful.

Sometimes Predictions Come True

I.
Yesterday.

US National Weather Service Nashville Tennessee

To quote our friend @NashSevereWx, I have no words of warmth to give. I am sorry. We must forecast these awful things. Alas, the cold front has just passed through Nashville. The mercury shall drop and drop and drop. The rain shall fall, shall change to an icy mess. The roads shall freeze and bring their silent havok. And still the mercury shall drop and drop and drop. As I foretell these terrible deeds, it is still a pleasant 52°. By this time tomorrow morning, it will be 23° with anywhere from a sixth to a third of a foot of snow, ice pellets, and, the worst of all wintry deeds, freezing rain. Tomorrow night, nature shall deal perhaps its cruelest blow: a temperature of 7°. Indeed, William Shakespeare was most apt: "I, that did never weep, now melt with woe/That winter should cut off our spring-time so."

II.
Today. 

When the Fog Lifts

Lake Cheston reveals its treasures.

Two Views of Winter Sun

I
Through icicle blades turning gutters and eaves into hilts.

II
On Adirondack chairs begging for sitters.

Lake Cheston ABCedarian: V

V is for VIBRANT

sun broke four days of fog and sleet and freezing fog

and blue water met wet sand and stone

and where ice still coated the lake's surface

stars burst on bluebird song

What Comes Down

outside

        and in.

Three Good Things and One Lingering Question Pondered on an Icy Day

1.

Homemade raisin scones shared with a friend.

2.

Spider silk strung in neatly stacked staple-size ice squares.

3.

Memories of hours spent with my Magic Designer. 

(Lingering question: Why can't I buy one now?)

What Might Be Seen

I had not known
spiders wove and waited
in bare azalea 
until ice 
falling in a new front 
transformed webs 
into beaded strands,
but I should have known
spiders wove and waited
even in winter
as in every season
living things
keep living.

There's Cold and Then There's *Cold*

Halfway around the lake, a woman and her Doberman caught up to me.

"Hi!" I called, unfolding myself from the icy moss where I had been lying (my favorite photographing position).

"Hi!" When she caught up to me, she said, "Do you live here? I mean, right at the lake?"

"Near enough."

"I've never been here in the snow before. I'm from Nebraska," she said.

Before we could pursue Nebraska or why she's here, we discovered two large coffee containers, still topped, sitting upright in the sand.

"Is there a garbage can nearby?"

"Yep. Look right over there on the other side of the beach," I said.

"If my child did this, I'd lecture her. Do people litter here often?"

"Oh yes, all the time. You wouldn't believe what I pull out of the lake."

After dumping the cups, we discussed the weather, of course. (Everyone has been discussing the weather. My Birmingham family and friends had challenges yesterday, and we've hit single digits more time this month than I remember in ten years here.)

"I heard the students complaining about the cold," she said. "They should come to Nebraska where the wind blows 30 miles an hour, and then they'll know cold!"

I asked if she had seen the footprints on the lake ice -- large ones, clearly a male's, with a love note by one of the footbridges and small ones -- child size -- across from the beach.

"We teach children in Nebraska that you don't walk on a lake or pond until the water has frozen all the way down to the bottom," she said.

"That sounds wise."

And with that, she and the Doberman continued on, into the woods.

There's cold and then there's cold. For her, it's wind in Nebraska's winter snow. For me, it was 20-something with 100% humidity in New Orleans.

But for Lake Cheston, cold is cold, and continued cold has meant myriad patterns of ice -- flowers, bubbles, sheets, striations, chains, beads. I'll take this cold anytime because it's so beautiful.

Yesterday There Were Geese

Today there were none at the lake. 

But the water came alive, ran like a tide under brittle and cracking ice, lighting the margins between water and earth in waves of blue and white, and then receding, leaving leaves burning brown and red.

I came home burning with cold, the wind so strong I had struggled to balance, and I read ice poems until I found one I love.

Here it is, a gift of the season:

Year's End
by Richard Wilbur

Now winter downs the dying of the year, 
And night is all a settlement of snow;
From the soft street the rooms of houses show 
A gathered light, a shapen atmosphere, 
Like frozen-over lakes whose ice is thin 
And still allows some stirring down within.

I’ve known the wind by water banks to shake
The late leaves down, which frozen where they fell  
And held in ice as dancers in a spell  
Fluttered all winter long into a lake;  
Graved on the dark in gestures of descent,  
They seemed their own most perfect monument.

There was perfection in the death of ferns   
Which laid their fragile cheeks against the stone  
A million years. Great mammoths overthrown  
Composedly have made their long sojourns,  
Like palaces of patience, in the gray
And changeless lands of ice. And at Pompeii

The little dog lay curled and did not rise  
But slept the deeper as the ashes rose
And found the people incomplete, and froze  
The random hands, the loose unready eyes  
Of men expecting yet another sun
To do the shapely thing they had not done.
These sudden ends of time must give us pause.   

We fray into the future, rarely wrought
Save in the tapestries of afterthought.
More time, more time. Barrages of applause  
Come muffled from a buried radio.
The New-year bells are wrangling with the snow.

What Ice Conceals

Fall's leaves
bronzed blue
snapped twigs
fatter limbs
flat stones
smooth pebbles
green water-plants
soft silt
& 
Odonate nymphs --
lurking
darting
eating
molting
waiting

like me

for spring.

Ice Houses

I

In childhood, my family sometimes spent summer weekends at a "camp" on the Black Warrior River. We stayed in Cabin 1, a two-bedroom wooden affair with a screen porch along the front and no running water. To cool our drinks, my father would stop on the way out of Birmingham at an ice house, which sold dry ice, block ice, and chipped ice. Inside the big cooler, where I was sometimes allowed, everything shimmered starry blue.

II

Years later, when I lived in New Orleans, I knew the family that founded and ran Pelican Ice. From my friend, I learned about the contributions of the ice company during hurricanes. Until then, it had never occurred to me that ice was such a precious commodity, especially along the coast. 

I was a late-learner.

III

I am not a late-appreciator of the beauty of ice, however.

After picking up our ice for our River trips, I loved running my hand across the block, feeling the cracks and crevices, the watery bits and the sticky bits. Or when my father or a brother chipped it, I loved the thunk of hammer and tinkle of chips collecting, spattering and sputtering against a metal container.

IV

I have always known ice storms. Birmingham is sometimes the epicenter of dangerous ice storms that bring down power lines and trees, marooning folks inside their homes for days.  Strapping on my boots and jeans, I headed out to the creek, walking across slippery leaf litter and railroad ties, just to look at the slickery rocks and frozen bits of weed or limb along the shoreline. Sometimes, I headed to the neighbor's hilly lawn for a ride downhill, trudging through knee-high weeds encased in ice.

V

Today, the lake shimmered, and I thought about the river, the Behres, the creek, and the ephemeral beauty of ice.

Surface Ice

6 AM: 28 degrees.
8:30 AM: Ice coats the lake's lip along the dam. 
I pop my walking stick 
on hexagonal plates like a bongo.
In a few places, air bubbles speak coming heat. 
2:11PM: 57 degrees, the air nearly balmy in full sun.

It's as if leaf and silt, 
fish and salamander, 
odonate larvae and grass 
rise with those oxygen bubbles, 
breaking thin winter into spring.

When Words Fail Me

Today, a friend complimented some of my photographs, calling them poems. I was happy to hear her words.

I once wrote poems, or I once tried to write poems. 

Often I could not move beyond an image or the sounds of words conversing with one another on the tongue and teeth and lip.

"But what does it mean?" workshop readers would ask.

Often, I didn't know. 

Often, I don't know what words mean.

For example, what fell overnight? 

Not sleet, I think, since it was not wet ice, not slickened and frozen, shmeared on the windshield. Not hail, I think, only because it was tiny, like nuggets of shaved ice in a snowball, but firmer. Ice pellets, perhaps, but I've never heard a weatherman or woman announce, "Warning: pellets falling!" More confusing, the Internet tells me that the term "ice pellets" is synonymous with "sleet," but my experience of the two reveals significant difference. There is no one right word.

There is often no one right word for much of my experience. 

Words, some writer once wrote, are like clear glass: you see through them to meaning. But for me, words ripple like winded water blown this way, then that, their shape distorting and changing, winding in new directions, leading toward new channels.

And sometimes the channel just stops.

Like this.