winter and fall
Jan. 31st, 2016 07:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
marycatelliBurning bush is ill-named. It is a pure, ruby red, not flame-like at all. And as autumn wears on, it fades to a pink and pale yellow that look more spring-like than autumnal.
A hawk sits in the middle of the lawn. Brown back, pale belly, brown tail lying behind it, large -- if it holds its head right, so that you can't see the beak, you also can't be certain, from a distance, that it's not a cat.
The stream showed that it rained quite a bit. Still, the full spate had come and gone -- you could see the plants bent over on the stream-banks, and the leaves and other flotsam left by the receding waters -- and only the center of the stream was murky with muck. Along the edges you could see the stream bed.
A pear tree has shed every leaf, but the pears still hang from the branches, rotund, goldish brown, like Christmas ornaments -- two or three on every single bough.
Finally a spell of weather below freezing for more than two days dents the hardy annuals. The leaves of the snapdragons are withered, and the pinks are flatter than they were, with a sheen of silver frost over them, and even the silvering does not hide how the blossoms are a far deeper shade of rosy red.
Poppies perish like wilting lettuce.
The ground is hard. Not the diamond hard of frozen solid, but not the yielding effect of a balmy spring.
The ice flows on the rock faces are deep enough to be showing sky blue, though they are only vague Cthulhu like in shape.
I drive by a field in twilight, and even after slowing down, I'm only pretty sure the herd of animals grazing there is deer. Moments later, a coyote -- or maybe a wolf -- trots briskly across the road, across a field, and into the growth of a swampy area.
Such odd variation in how iced over the ponds are. Where the swampy land turns to water, unsurprisingly little; shallow water would warm swiftly. But where the ponds go deeper, one side of the highway has a smaller pond iced over, and the larger with sheets of ice and broad expanses of water.
A hawk sits in the middle of the lawn. Brown back, pale belly, brown tail lying behind it, large -- if it holds its head right, so that you can't see the beak, you also can't be certain, from a distance, that it's not a cat.
The stream showed that it rained quite a bit. Still, the full spate had come and gone -- you could see the plants bent over on the stream-banks, and the leaves and other flotsam left by the receding waters -- and only the center of the stream was murky with muck. Along the edges you could see the stream bed.
A pear tree has shed every leaf, but the pears still hang from the branches, rotund, goldish brown, like Christmas ornaments -- two or three on every single bough.
Finally a spell of weather below freezing for more than two days dents the hardy annuals. The leaves of the snapdragons are withered, and the pinks are flatter than they were, with a sheen of silver frost over them, and even the silvering does not hide how the blossoms are a far deeper shade of rosy red.
Poppies perish like wilting lettuce.
The ground is hard. Not the diamond hard of frozen solid, but not the yielding effect of a balmy spring.
The ice flows on the rock faces are deep enough to be showing sky blue, though they are only vague Cthulhu like in shape.
I drive by a field in twilight, and even after slowing down, I'm only pretty sure the herd of animals grazing there is deer. Moments later, a coyote -- or maybe a wolf -- trots briskly across the road, across a field, and into the growth of a swampy area.
Such odd variation in how iced over the ponds are. Where the swampy land turns to water, unsurprisingly little; shallow water would warm swiftly. But where the ponds go deeper, one side of the highway has a smaller pond iced over, and the larger with sheets of ice and broad expanses of water.