Four days ago the morning sky was on fire. The clouds were so orange it looked like the world was ablaze.
Ominous, wondrous, glad to have seen it, a momentary wonder made possible by the earth spinning round and round. A few minutes later the show was gone. But clouds never tire of putting on a show. One day it is fire and brimstone, one day it is a puffy face dancing across the sky.
Do you see the nose, the mouth, the chin, even the eye looking back at you? Where is this cloud face going? What on earth is it looking at? What is on the tip of its tongue? Is it laughing?
This last week, hundreds of swans have been on the fields along Chuckanut Drive. They do like the muddy fields. But they somehow keep the mud off their feathers. Though I have yet to see them roll around in the mud the way our dogs love doing. It’s probably why they have black feet. White feet would be too difficult to keep clean.
But what are the swans eating in this potato field? Are they digging up potatoes not harvested? Worms? Bugs?
The winter blooming cherry has a few flowers. There is a sadness to cherry blossoms blooming in winter. No bee will ever visit them and tickle them.
2023 is almost over. In less than a week the days will start to get longer. Here the solstice will happen on Thursday, December 21, 2023 at 7:27 pm PST. I can’t wrap my head around the fact that the solstice is a point in time, an instant, 7:27 pm precisely. Though a minute does not sound precise enough. What is it to the thousandth of a second? A millionth of a second? It doesn’t look like scientists bother to do that. But to satisfy a mad man living in Bow, couldn’t someone calculate the instant of the winter solstice 2023 in the northern hemisphere to at least 30 decimal points? I could live with that. That would satisfy my curiosity. A minute seems too vague and not precise enough for these modern times. I mean hold your breath for a whole minute. It’s a long, long time. A lot can happen in a minute.
The chickens have better things to worry about than the precise timing of the winter solstice. I’d never seen one enter the little dog house until one did. Maybe I should fill it with straw and see if they lay eggs in it.