Laboring Like the Snow

Snow day. Bring out the sleds!

Like Snow

by Wendell Berry

Suppose we did our work
like the snow, quietly, quietly,
leaving nothing out.

I appreciate Wendell Berry’s sentiment, but snow makes me want to play!  I am not the only one.  Snow is rare in Seattle, and even a light covering of white on the sloping lawn around Green Lake was enough for sledding fun.

Snow day at Green lake

 

Snow Day! A Gift of Time

“I love that snow is mineral, falling as billions of temporary stars.”
— Diane Ackerman, Dawn Light: Dancing with Cranes and Other Ways to Start the Day

Weeping poplar, snowy landscape

“”They seem tentative and awkward at first, then in a hastening host a whole brief army falls, white militia paratrooping out of the close sky over various textures, making them one.”
— Donald Hall, Seasons at Eagle Pond

My neighborhood this morning

Today I woke to a snow-covered world, and when I checked the inclement weather hotline I heard that the city’s branch libraries were closed today and I didn’t have to go to work. Yippee!  A snow day!  A whole day of unscheduled time.  What a gift!

I donned boots and took a morning walk around Green Lake.  So pretty.

Path at Green Lake

Dawn Redwood at lake’s edge

I loved the pattern of the black branches laden with white frosting

Witch hazel

Cedars

Make Way for Ducklings!

Mother duck with ducklings

I had a “Make Way for Ducklings” moment on the path at Green Lake during my morning run this week.  This mother duck had her wings full with a brood of eleven ducklings!  I hope she has a delightful Mother’s Day next Sunday.

Enjoy!

 

February’s Browns and Grays

Structure visible

“January and February are my favorite months.  I like the bare branches of trees, structure become visible, and the subtle colors, all sorts of varieties of browns and grays that are seen only at this time of year, brought into focus by the pellucid light that is as close an analogy as I know to the silence out of which my work emerges.”
— Anne Truitt, Prospect: The Journal of an Artist

Here are some of the beautiful grays and browns in my Seattle landscape this February:

Chinese red birch bark

Fern

Foggy February morning at Green Lake

Green Lake in winter

 

 

Still Pouring, Only Worse

“Still pouring, only worse.  Poor world, she looks so desolate and depressed, as if she did not know what to do with all the wet.  The earth won’t hold anymore.  The sea is full and the low clouds are too heavy to hold up.  The sky leaks, earth oozes, so the wetness sits in the air between and grumbles into your breath and bones . . . ”
— Emily Carr, from Hundreds and Thousands: The Journals of an Artist

“Everything broods today, the sky low and heavy.  Was there ever a sun?”
— Emily Carr, from Hundreds and Thousands: The Journals of an Artist

Winter wetness

Puddles at Green Lake

Rain-soaked path

Moonset on Monday

Moon over Green Lake

Yesterday when I went for my morning run around Green Lake, the super moon was getting ready to set, and the sun was getting ready to rise.  My husband and I had gone out Sunday evening when the moon rose to see the final stages of it’s blood-red eclipse, so the moon was on my mind when I ran out the door — grabbing my camera — Monday morning.  It was a lovely, late summer morning.  Fall is in the air.

 

Wordless Wednesdays: 12 Views of Summertime (from My Photo Archives)

John, Dad and Ben baling hay