A Brief Respite

A photo from last winter which I'm sure will recreate itself in the next not-very-many weeks. We had light snow and intense cold for about ten days. An unusual start to our winter but in this age of climate change the unusual is expected.  Then we had five or so days of suddenly spring-like temperatures and mild winds -- a delight!  Now it's very cold again, but seasonably so this time. So far the snow has simply been occasional errant flakes.  I'm sure we all expect much more soon.

Our seasons, especially spring, are always very changeable from day to day, week to week. I have learned to try to take notice of what each day is. I don't like the face-freezing winds, I don't like the black ice that surrounds my car in the parking lot. I walk with great caution, this is a time of broken wrists and sprained ankles and more serious injuries and I want none of them. I've written a small poem about our brief respite of thaw.


Thaw

Unseen crows in full cry
warm, wet fog wraps its wisps
among bare tree tops
a gossamer veil blending
into a skimmed milk sky
ice melts into puddles
hopeful hints of far off spring.
In this temperate latitude
adjustment to fickle weather
is an unchanging fact of life.

On a Cold Morning in January

In our lengthy "cold snap" with the temperatures not above freezing for a couple of weeks writing about anything except the cold is difficult.

Fortunately here in the central part of Cape Cod we had almost none of the serious snow that crippled much of the East Coast.

I am warm at home and bundle up appropriately when I must go out.  I am trying to look on the bright side so I have written a short poem which I hope will be the first of three or four short poems about this January.


Clementines

Globes of gold on my breakfast table
in a blue bowl beside a plate of toast,
their thin rinds pierced by a thumb nail,
I tear them easily to find the  sweet slices
of fruit, inhaling the tang of citric acid.
Hello to a day of sunlight, biting cold,
the satisfaction of a warm home
and  opportunity to write about delight
on a winter morning. I wish everyone could
start their day with such simple satisfaction.

New Year -- New Post

2018!    As a child one cannot imagine living to a day so distant.  But here it is and here I am, the first morning of this new year.  I changed the header to a season appropriate photo. We're in a deep freeze, have been four days already and more to come this week. It was 5 degrees at 6:00 and not to get much warmer today. However the sun is bright and sparkling on the very light layer of snow that drifted down more than 24 hours ago.

The year started auspiciously, although I was in bed at 12:00 drifting toward sleep, I went to a new year's eve party for the first time in a great many years. A fine party in a lovely house with a group of people, most of whom I knew and some of whom I met for the first time. Good talk, good food, drinks were not limited except by our well-learned caution. The only time voices were raised was not out of raucous excitement but to accomodate those who were hard of hearing. We were mostly over 70. This blog was to started to write about life from 70-onward, so it's not  surprising that guests began to drift away as of about 10:30. I gave one guest a ride home about 11:00 and was pleased that the roads were nearly empty. Younger people -- which is to say the majority -- were gathered wherever and waiting for the stroke of midnight. But we had experienced many a stroke of midnight and realized that on a very, very cold night settling under a nice warm duvet was a wonderful place to be.

This morning started well for me. The first email I opened was an acceptance of a poem I submitted to a small publication. They suggested it would be published in the middle of the month so more about that later. It's a bit of a political rant -- well, actually a serious political rant and timely.  I said to the group last night that I am very happy to have found myself accepted in a group of people who mostly have the same political views I have. But when the mutual distress reached a repetitive point, I raised my voice to change the subject a little to the future technology we and our children's children will live with by asking a question that set me thinking several weeks ago:  will the generation that  is in grade school now have to learn to drive? 

One man immediately said, "No. And the infrastructure will be abandoned because the cars will be like hovercraft." Someone else pointed out that some kinds of machinery will still be used on the ground. And so it went, remembering the kinds of telephones we have all experienced, the days before television  and when it was a pleasure to fly, not the ordeal that it is today. S my generation considered the state of the world and the unimaginable future. Probably no previous generation has been so aware that the future is utterly beyond our ability to conceive because we realize that we could not have imagined Skype, or the medical procedures that gave several people new knees, and so on.  Ah, brave new world ... or maybe that is not the correct adjective at all.