(After you’ve read my list, please add your own items as comments.)
Freshly fallen snow has a fragrance brighter than summer.
New snowflakes cut into the trail’s icy hardpack under your boots, providing a pretty good grip.
Deer, fox, bird, and squirrel tracks are more numerous than human and dog tracks.
Till the big lake freezes, it’s voice is omnipresent, no matter how tucked into the trees you are.
Unless the dunes are buried deeply with snow, sand moves, sometimes hundreds of yards in a single storm, which almost always blow from the west. Early winter rearranges the dunes and moves them inland.
Bright white, often solitary gulls fly, even in heavy winds. In fact, they seem to play.
Beech tree saplings hold onto their leaves all winter. Some years they’re the color of sugar sand, others new copper pennies.
No matter the bitterness of the wind or the coldness of the ambient temperature, wooded trails around the bases of the dunes are always warm enough. But you will have to give up panoramas.
During thaws, the puddles in footprints teem with minuscule black bugs.
When the wind blows from the east, the sound of the interstate penetrates farther than during the leafy seasons, even into swales.
Once the lake freezes, the cold and the quiet become monumental.
Leaves and twigs scrape and chickadees twitter, all winter long.
There’s no bad weather, only bad clothes.
Happy Solstice. Beginning tomorrow, we’ll have a little more daylight each day.
Even on the other side of the season, on the other side of the State, the memory of sand, golden in the evening’s glow, warms me.
Even winter conjures summer, doesn’t it. Or maybe I shouldn’t say “even.”
The eagle rests atop my oak above the marsh once more.
Thank you.
This is now one of my all-time favorite works of yours, Alison. So beautiful.
Thank you so much for letting me know.
Outside my front window, the mawing darkness of the ever moving stream is outlined curve by curve by the snow. At night, it all changes as the illuminated reflection of my ancient beech replaces dark with light.
Beautiful.
Walking in the dunes near midnight beneath an incandescent full moon the snowcover is crosshatched with the dancing shadows of beech and birch trees.