Winter Wanderings

Even after the craziness of this week's weather and a branch going through our roof, I'm still really enjoying winter this year. I've never been a winter person, even though I grew up in New England. Give me an 88 degree day any day. But some how, I feel that I'm learning to appreciate Vermont's seasons more and more. I've always loved autumn here (what's not to love), but I've also begrudged the long winters. Chinese traditional medicine talks about learning to embrace each season that you are in, and I think perhaps that wisdom is rubbing off on me. Even though I love summer and doing things like gardening, winter allows me the time each year to do a lot more things that I might not get to do if it were warm outside. My life has a lot more variety because of the seasons and I'm learning that these winter times give my body a period of rest, just as the earth is asleep under the snow.



The snow was beautiful on the trees this morning when I woke, so I went outside with my camera and took some photos. The thing I really like about taking pictures is that it causes me to be more aware of my surroundings.. to take a second look and to also look at things from a different angle. Without my camera, I would enjoy the beauty, but not really ponder it and explore that moment more fully. Here are a few from my morning's winter wanderings:

 

 

Walking in a Wild Winter Wonderland

This winter has been very mild. Our plow man was commenting just the other day how difficult it has been for anyone who relies on a steady flow of snow during the winter season. Well.. that all changed last night, as mother nature decided to bestow her blessings of the white stuff upon us. When I woke this morning, I looked out the window to see a beautiful landscape bathed in a silver glow. But I was also abruptly taken out of my awe, when I heard a large crash and ran into the other room to discover that a large branch had somehow fallen with such veracity as to pierce the ceiling of one of our rooms. It was difficult to believe my eyes, but there it was. This snow is extremely wet and heavy and has been causing branches to let gravity have its way throughout the day... and of course we were so brilliant as to park our cars under those lovely beams. The snow is so wet in fact that it has a very strange blue look to it. At first I thought that window washing fluid had somehow gotten into one patch, but then I looked at it was everywhere.

 

Anyway, its supposed to keep snowing all week and someone said perhaps 30 inches. Yikes! Let's just hope the house is still standing next week. My cousin posted this picture on facebook this morning. Perhaps I better start knitting if I want my trees to be happy and keep standing straight.

Let it snow...

I'm sitting by the window, listening to Bach's Double Violin Concerto in D minor 2nd movement, and watching the snow gently fall. I know its a bit odd, but it just seems to me that the snow is in some way listening to the same music I am and dancing on its way down. Yes, I realize that the snow is inanimate, but what an amazing beauty it has and what a way it has of stirring the soul.

And then I ponder on the fact that each one of those snowflakes has a unique expression all its own. Can it really be? There are millions and each one lasts such a short time.. and yet those who study snow have never found one to be exactly identical.


This was first discovered by Wilson Alwyn Bentley (a fellow Vermonter I might add) in 1885, when photography was still a fairly new invention. He discovered that every ice crystal is unique and grows symmetrically in a 6-sided hexagon around a tiny nucleus. Whether the growing shape from that nucleus becomes concentric or dendritic [branching] depends on various factors including temperature and water content.


In general terms warmer temperatures produce rapidly developing crystals that are lacy, whereas lower temperatures will slow the growth of the patterned extenuation and produce denser concentric layers. If growing in isolation the formations of each crystal will tend to be more perfectly symmetrical. All the power of beauty is in the form, as the crystals are colour-less, teamed with the inclusion of streams of light through various densities of microscopic ice shafts, ridges and anomalies.


Anyway, thats part of the 'scientific' aspect of it, and I am thankful to those who have been able to show us in pictures what we can not see with the natural eye. And yet, even if we did not know these things, the falling snow is no less beautiful. I love this quote by Thoreau, who it seems knew the uniqueness of the snowflake, even though he lived before he could ever see these images:

"How full of the creative genius is the air in which these are generated! I should hardly admire more if real stars fell and lodged on my coat.
Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity, so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand." - Henry David Thoreau

There are so many poets and artists who have been inspired by the beauty of the snow. Here are two:

"Out of the bosom of the Air,
Out of the cloud-folds of her garment shaken,
Over the woodlands brown and bare,
Over the harvest-field forsaken,
Silent, and soft, and slow
Descends the snow." - Longfellow