Red berryThis year for Christmas, we got rain instead of snow. This is our fourth winter here in Blacksburg, and we’re still holding out for a white Christmas.
Rushing (not-frozen) December waterMinnesota delivered snow for Christmas each year, knee deep to children, and every year since we moved away, the kids cross their fingers. Snow at Christmas is magic. So far, it has not happened for us in Virginia.
Streamside mossHowever, after warm heavy rains on Christmas, the sun came out today. We took advantage of the beautiful weather to go for a hike, and we were rewarded with emerald mosses.
Mossy rootsI know the kids wanted snow, but I must admit, today’s hike made me grateful for the rain.
Moss, stone, and rhododendron
trunk with ferns
ferns
mossy stump
Lichen and moss Stairs and stream Cascades waterfall
Streamside stairs
Cascades waterfall
Downstream from the falls
Next weekend it will be cold. Temperatures will turn water to ice. Maybe we’ll hike the Cascades again. Maybe next weekend we’ll find diamonds instead of emeralds.
When I was bored as a child, and my mom kicked me out of the house, I would go outside and search for roly polies. On the tiny island where we lived, they weren’t easy to find. When we camp, or when we traveled to my grandparents’ house in the country, they seemed to be everywhere, but they were not abundant on our little coastal island.
I’d walk up and down the sandy road, along the edge, where grass hung over the rutted dirt. The edge was where roly polies seemed most likely to crawl out. It often took a half hour or more to find one, if I found one at all. When I did finally see a grey armored oval trundle out, I’d poke its hard shell and watch it roll into a ball. I loved that quick, protective reaction.
Some people call roly polies pill bugs, I’m not sure whether for their oval shape when they’re open, or the spherical shape when they’re rolled up. Either way, they were fun to play with, the way they instantly reacted to touch.
I remember a plant that reacted the same way — a mimosa plant, I think it was called. The “sensitive plant.” It has feathery compound leaves, like a fern. The leaves are light and delicate, so that the green is more of a yellow-green because sunlight shines through them. When you touch the fronds of a mimosa, they fold up instantly, just like a roly poly. Just like shy person when attention is called to them. Duck and cover, to protect the vital parts.
I touched and smelled and picked and poked at all the plants and small creatures I could find in our neighborhood. Poor caterpillars. I always wanted to watch them build their cocoons. I punched holes in the metal lids of jars, stuffed in leaves and a twig to build a crysalis on, and placed the caterpillars in their new glass homes. God only knows how many caterpillars I killed.
I’ll make it up to them in the spring, when we plant our butterfly garden.
For the month of November, I am participating in NaBloPoMo and plan to publish every day of the month. Usually, I will publish a 10-minute free write, initiated by a prompt from my prompt box. Minimal editing. No story. Just thoughts spilling onto the page. Follow along with the tag #NovemberDaily.
It has been far too long since I’ve watched stars in the deepest part of the night. It has been too long since I’ve watched stars at all.
Before our childrens’ athletic schedules consumed every weekend of spring and fall, we camped regularly as a family. Here in the Appalachians, we pitched tents near Old Rag, Mount Rogers, and in West Virginia.
In the mountains, the sky is filtered by trees. Our tent is usually sheltered under a dense canopy, and we do not see stars at night. In Minnesota, though, we camped in the open. Our children were small, and we backpacked to an isolated hillside. That night, in a sea of prairie grass, there was no glow of city lights. Nothing masked the vastness of the dark night sky dusted with stars. The absense of interference was absolute, and humbling: it was just us and the deepness of space.
We were small under that big black sky splashed with starlight. Our son, who was six at the time, wanted to sleep outside the tent, without shelter, under the dome of the universe. His dad slept out with him, and they woke to daddy longlegs and dew.
That’s the last time I remember stopping and paying attention to stars. That was six years ago. Maybe it’s time to stop again and look up.
For the month of November, I will be participating in NaBloPoMo and plan to publish every day of the month. Usually, I will publish a 10-minute free write, initiated by a prompt from my prompt box. Minimal editing. No story. Just thoughts spilling onto the page. Follow along with the tag #NovemberDaily.
It’s time to start cooking winter foods: chili, soups, casseroles. Hearty meals that warm you from the inside. As the birds fly south, it’s time to invest in hot cocoa and Baileys.
I wonder what it’s like up there for those birds on the long, autumn journeys south. Do they talk? How do they know where they’re going, and do they revisit the same place every year?
Think of it way up there. Ahead: sky, clouds, the curvature of the earth. Cragged mountains on the horizon — snow-capped in the western United States, domes of skeleton trees in the east. If the birds fly before the leaves drop, then in the east they would see domes of harvest colors: orange, gold, scarlet, brown.
Below, the birds would see patchworks of farm land: green, yellow, and brown quilts. They’d see the squiggles of rivers, the the density of trees in a park surrounded by roads and development; they’d see the world at a scale we rarely see as humans, unless we travel in airplanes a lot.
What a way to be. To travel great distances every year, seeking a climate that suits the season, covering vast expanses of of earth and sky, watching it all, unencumbered by the shield of a car and a seatbelt, or the encasement of an airplane, or even the chin strap of a helmet.
Thank you to Grumpy Axolotl for the prompt “As the birds fly south.”
For the month of November, I will be participating in NaBloPoMo and plan to publish every day of the month. Usually, I will publish a 10-minute free write, initiated by a prompt from my prompt box. Minimal editing. No story. Just thoughts spilling onto the page. Follow along with the tag #NovemberDaily.
I grew up on Tybee Island, Georgia, where we spent nearly every summer weekend at the beach, on sand. I love sand under my bare feet, especially underwater. I love how sand is golden in the shallows of southern east coast beaches. It sparkles in morning and evening sunlight, and it’s firm under my feet but soft between my toes.
At low tide, when the Atlantic is calm and flat, you can shuffle your feet in the sand off the beach to feel for the hard disks of sand dollars. I used to love finding sand dollars, to lift them above the green water and watch their hundreds of bristle legs glisten in the sunlight.
Later we moved to Florida’s Gulf coast, where the sand is white and fine. The sand there contains limestone and bleached seashells in addition to the quartz grains that dominates both Gulf and East coast sand — quartz from the Appalachian mountains we now live in.
This is my favorite thing about sand: its origins. I remember learning about sand in elementary school, or maybe in earth science in 8th grade — about how the sand on our beaches at Tybee Island used to be stone at the top of Appalachian mountains. How it is old. So old thtat it was once solid rock, but eroded into smaller stones, then got pummeled into smaller and smaller bits as it worked its way down rivers, until eventually it was ground to the tan quartz sand of our beaches. When you hold a handful in the light, you can see sparkling bits of mica, and the orange tint of iron in the glittering quartz.
I’ve heard the Appalachians mocked by folks in western states. They laugh, “Those are hills, not mountains.” The sight of them may not stagger, but the the Appalachians are mountains. They are old mountains. So old they’ve rounded off in their age. So old they’ve worn down. So old that they are subtle, not imposing; they are soft not jagged. The are old enough that they span solid earth to fine grains of sand, and have spread, from mountaintop to coastal plain.
For the month of November, I will be participating in NaBloPoMo and plan to publish every day of the month. Usually, I will publish a 10-minute free write, initiated by a prompt from my prompt box. Minimal editing. No story. Just thoughts spilling onto the page. Follow along with the tag #NovemberDaily.
I am ready for winter. Glittering palaces of ice where waterfalls once flowed. Crystal ornaments in trees, where dew drops froze. A smooth flat of ice on puddles and ponds — skating rinks for the right sized feet.
One of my favorite books is The Snow Child. Much of my love for that book is for the delicate descriptions of winter, snow, and ice. The Snow Child is set in interior Alaska, and the author Eowyn Ivey makes me want to disappear into her shimmering snowscape.
Unlike most fantasy, where the villain occupies any icy peak and threatens to kill with cold — as if eternal winter were a more exacting hell than eternal fire — The Snow Child is stunning in its portrayal of the tundra beauty. Beryl glaciers. Glowing blue spires of ice. White snow with berries like rubies poking through. Ivey’s prose sparkles like snow in moonlight.
Here in Blacksburg, the ice is like silver. I don’t remember many wet storms during our winters in Minnesota — it was too cold for much besides dry powdery snow — but Appalachia knows how to throw an ice storm. Limbs droop under the weight of shining crusts, leaves drip with streams of water frozen mid-drop, roofs and roods glisten with sheets of slick black ice, and when the sun comes up, the whole world glitters as if encrusted in diamonds.
Ice can be treacherous — when the power goes out and you don’t have a backup heat source, or when you have to drive somewhere and you fear for your life — but if you remove those annoyances, if you bundle up and take a walk out in the frozen, silent world, ice can be one of life’s great glories.
For the month of November, I will be participating in NaBloPoMo and plan to publish every day of the month. Usually, I will publish a 10-minute free write, initiated by a prompt from my prompt box. Minimal editing. No story. Just thoughts spilling onto the page. Follow along with the tag #NovemberDaily.
Butterfly Mind 