This year the winter solstice is the coldest, shortest, whitest, bluest day of the year. This morning it was only 8ºF, -13ºC. When it is this cold, if you have any doubt as to if you are alive or not, all you have to do is step outside. The cold will immediately slap all the nonsense out of your brain. Clarity will return instantly.
Much of the pond is frozen. The pump is keeping a small wading area free of ice. This winter there are over 50 wood ducks on the pond. We’ve never had that many wood ducks before. Last year there were about a dozen which spent much of the winter and early spring here. Somehow they told other wood ducks what a great time they had.
The sky is so blue today. Should I call it solstice blue? Frozen blue? After-the-snow blue? Coldest, shortest, whitest, bluest blue?
When I saw the forecast for snow, I ordered this new shovel as last year’s snow shovel was cracked. This snow shovel has an extra handle so you can use both hands to toss the snow. And it works. It didn’t take long to clear the driveway.
If it is going to snow, it does help if it is cold when it snows. If it is cold enough, the snow that falls is lighter than air and shovels without effort.
Despite it being so cold, the house is warm, the water is flowing, and there is plenty to eat. If you are warm, have food to eat, water flows when you open a faucet, and your toilet flushes, most of life’s problems are solved. The rest is icing on the cake.
Snow in the Mountains, Swans on the Fields
It’s the darkest time of the year. Snow in the mountains and swans on the fields relieve some of the darkness. November started out very wet, but turned out being quite dry with plenty of sunshine. December is more of the same. Our current clouds and rains are forecast by Sunday to become days of sunshine with cold nights.
We did have a cold spell with heavy frosts, a light snow, and sheets of ice on the ground. But that is past and cool, wet, dreary days of gray skies burden the soul.
But even on the dreariest of days, beauty abounds. What are the physics that caused these swirling white lines to form on the ice. What mathematical formulas explain these circles and squiggles? I suppose to a mathematician the formulas are even more beautiful and haunting than the circles and squiggles. But you almost want to believe that a forest fairy took a feather in hand and drew these white lines in the ice as it formed.
And if a forest fairy drew these circles and squiggles, maybe they mean something. Maybe they are a poem or a love letter the fairy left for another fairy to read.
I always leave some apples for the winter birds to peck. Little by little they carve away at the apple. A pair of Pileated Woodpeckers are in the neighborhood. They like apples.
Pileated: “having the feathers of the top of the head elongated and conspicuous,” 1728, from Latin pileatus “capped,” from pileus “conical felt cap without a brim,” which is perhaps from Greek pilos “felt; felt hat,” also “felt shoe, felt blanket,” or they may be from a common source (somewhat similar words are found in Germanic and Slavic). Beekes calls it “an old culture word of unknown origin.” Applied in natural history to sea urchins and certain birds, notably the pileated woodpecker, a large species of North America.
The first Pileated Woodpecker I saw was in a park in Seattle on Lake Washington. The sight of that magnificent bird clinging high above the ground to the trunk of a tree enthralled me. The black, white, and red of those birds is so brilliant. And their piercing calls are so distinctive.
I don’t harp about products much, but after years of enduring gasoline powered chainsaws, I finally found a battery powered chainsaw large enough to handle the tasks I have. It’s an 18″ chainsaw from Ego. I’ve enjoyed the string trimmer they make so much that I felt comfortable getting their chainsaw.
No more needing to make gasoline and oil blends. No more dealing with yanking on a starting rope to get the thing going. The most remarkable thing is how quiet it is. With a gasoline chain saw, the roar of the engine is deafening. Even when you’re not cutting, an idling chain saw is ear shattering loud.
The only time the Ego chainsaw makes any noise is when the chain is running, and you can easily carry on a conversation with the amount of noise it makes. I used it yesterday to buck a log and it took just one job for me to see that I won’t be using a gasoline chainsaw again. This one also has a headlamp so that if you need to go out in the middle of the night to clear fallen branches or a tree, you can turn on the headlamp and see what you are cutting.
Sometimes things get better.
First Frost of the Season
The first frost of the season gave the little Buddha a frosty white head. This year was odd because we had our first snow of the season the night of the 7th, before our first frost. The sun melted the snow yesterday, and this morning our first frost prickled the leaves and the head of this patient Buddha.
It feels like winter. According to the traditional Chinese solar term calendar, yesterday was the start of winter, the 19th of the 24 solar terms in a year. 立冬, which translates to “winter standing up.” I can go along with that.
The rains have lifted. The rivers dropped. And the vast lake of a few days ago where the swans swam is a green field again. Here one day. Gone the next. Nothing stays the same.
Even this morning’s frost is quickly fading. And by noon it will be all gone.
I’ve been reading The Song of the Cellby Siddhartha Mukherjee. It’s a fascinating read on what we know of the cells that make plants and animals. What interests me is how little people from just a hundred or two hundred years knew how life really works. Even now, there is so much that scientists don’t know how cells work.
Which makes me wonder why we pay any attention to what the ancients thought. They had no understanding of how the human body worked. It was less than 400 years ago, in 1628, that physiologist, William Harvey, described the heart as a pump that circulated blood through the body.
Think about that. People before William Harvey published his research in 1628, had no idea that the heart pumped blood through the body with one pump, and through the lungs with another pump. Round and round and round. And when he did publish his work, there were eminent researchers who scoffed at his ideas.
And it’s been less than a hundred years since scientists discovered that the pancreas made insulin! Prior to 1642, scientists considered the pancreas to be a cushion that protected the stomach. But in 1642 two anatomists discovered that there was duct inside the pancreas and realized that a pancreas was more than a cushion because a cushion would have no need for a duct inside it. But it wasn’t until the 1920’s that scientists discovered that the pancreas made insulin.
So why do we bother to take seriously the thoughts and ideas of the ancients who knew less about how the universe and life works than grade schoolers of today? Would you take seriously anyone who doesn’t know that the heart pumps blood through the body? Or who doesn’t know that the earth revolves around the sun?
Swan Lake
A little more than a week ago this was a dry, parched field, as bone dry as the Sahara. And the air was acrid with forest fire smoke. But after a week of rain, the dusty field has turned into Swan Lake. Contented swans trumpet ceaselessly. Imagine if the swans had arrived ten days earlier. They wouldn’t have stayed. Not in a bone dry desert.
It’s enough to make you believe that swans are infused with the divine power to pull rain clouds behind their wings. So that wherever they go, they turn dry, dusty fields into swan lakes.
Maybe in drought stricken places, they should fill the air with the trumpeting of swans to beckon swans to come and pull rain clouds behind them.
Anyone looking at this idyllic scene of swans floating merrily along would never believe that a short time ago this was desert land.
Or that this was barren land. Yesterday, I drove into town to get chicken feed. But I had to pull off Chuckanut Drive when I crossed the Sammish River and saw that it was full and overflowing its banks. Flood waters cover the driveway of the homes along the new lake. The homes are marooned as if on an island.
What other magical powers do swans posess?
Do Swans Have Calendars?
Do swans have calendars? I wonder sometimes. They have an uncanny ability of showing up on November 1. Not on October 31 or on November 2. But precisely on November 1. And this year was no exception. I was outside in the woods on November 1 when I heard their trumpet calls high in the air. So I dashed out of the woods and saw them fly overhead. But I didn’t have my phone with me so I ran inside, grabbed it, ran back outside, and managed to catch a distant view of them as they flew south.
Nine swans, flying in from Alaska on their migration to the Skagit Valley. Where did they take off from that morning? How many hours had they flown when they flew overhead at 2:35 in the afternoon? I think it would take migrating swans posting their flights on TikTok to get me to join TikTok.
And yesterday, as we drove around doing errands, we saw flocks of swans on the lakes and in the pastures and fields. So the first ones are back for the winter. And they all used the same calendars.
The next day when I went to get the mail, I knew there had to be a rainbow someplace because the sun was out and yet there was drizzle in the air. And on the way back home, I spotted the rainbow. What do swans do when they see a rainbow? Do they avoid it? Flap their wings like crazy to fly through it?
The fall colors are almost over. Steady and at times heavy rains have moved in. Blustery winds tonight will knock many of the leaves away. Japanese has a special word: 木枯し – Kogarashi. It means cold winds during late autumn and early winter (the end of November and beginning of December) which blow from the north and scatter the fall leaves off the trees. That’s a lot of meaning to pack into a word. It was on the news the other day during the weather forecast. The weatherman was predicting the first Kogarashi of the season.
