It has been half a year since I posted here.
The reasons are many:
- my volunteer position as the newsletter coordinator for the Fibre Art Network, a position that ate up quite a lot of my time in 2018, became a team effort; that was a great move, but a move that required a lot of time for bringing the team members up to speed on their jobs
- at exactly the same time, the staff at the Greenwood Public Library, of which I am board chair, both retired and their successors began their jobs; that too, required a lot of my time
- I encountered a glitch with Marsedit, the blog editing program I use to compose posts offline, and suddenly I couldn’t get some photos uploaded to the blog
- changes in our animal family meant some sad news that I didn’t want to have to tell you, plus some happy news that has also meant a big time commitment
- inertia: don’t you find this? that if you get out of a routine, it’s really difficult to get back into it again? particularly if you’re embarrassed about it?
Way back in November, we awoke to a grey, foggy morning and I just had to bring my camera along on my morning walk with the dogs. I’ve always loved fog because of the way the familiar world becomes something mysterious when much of it is hidden by cloud. We don’t often get it here, so I seized my chance.
It wasn’t just fog but what’s known in the UK as “freezing fog,” very common in the north of the British Isles. It was this stand of frost-outlined wild mustard that made me go back to the house for my camera. I love the way the frost outlines the plant's basic architecture.
Here’s the deck of firewood logs in the barnyard; my dear husband calls it “the woodpile in kit form."
The larch needles had pretty much all fallen, turning the bare dirt a warm gold.
Pearlized St. John’s wort mingles with deep red, late season Oregon grape foliage.
Into the trees, onto the skid trail. I love that sinuous trunk on the right.
The moisture brought forth an explosion of fungus, pushing up through the soil and pine needles.
A branch wearing lichen like a shawl.
Prince’s pine.
She may be elderly, but she’s still keen: Sass bustles down the path.
Strawberry foliage.
St. John’s wort. I love the way the colours change from the top to the bottom of each plant.
Kinnikinnick or wintergreen, I can’t quite figure out which. (Dh says it’s kinnikinnick; I’ll have to look up the differences in the field guide.)
Snowberry.
Sigh. So beautiful. And I’m so lucky, to be out on our land every day, watching the changes, catching sight of grouse, and chickadees, and the red-tailed hawk resident in the field, hearing the tonks and chuckles of the ravens, noting all the deer tracks at the pond and the mice, squirrel, and rabbit tracks in the woods, and so on.
As a final note for this post from this moment in April, six months after these photos were taken and this post composed, I’ll let you know that this was one of the very last walks that Sass was able to take. For most of a year she had been increasingly crippled by arthritis and rarely felt enthusiastic enough about the idea of a walk to join us. A month later, it was clear that pain and immobility, and blindness and deafness, had robbed her of most of her quality of life and we made the hard decision to let her go. I couldn’t bear to write about it at the time. In fact, I still can’t; maybe later. But be aware, dear reader, that this dear dog had just about a perfect life and that she was as well-loved as it’s possible for a dog to be.
I’m sorry to have ended on such a sad note; my next post will reveal a new source of great joy.
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