I can't sleep…
That sound of settling into the sheets and the covers has to be one of the best things in the world. Sleep is a mercy. You can feel it coming on, like being swept up in something.
– Marilynne Robinson, Lila: A Novel
Notes: Photo: Tatiana Koshutina (via see more). Quote via quotespile
Notes:
Speedskating on natural ice is a beloved Dutch national pastime. The tradition is alive and well — just not necessarily in the Netherlands, where climate change now yields winters too warm for the waterways to freeze over with any consistency. The consequences of this have been felt most profoundly in a historical event called the Elfstedentocht, a one-day, long-distance speedskating tour through 11 cities of the Friesland province. It maintains a sacred place in Dutch sports culture. This week, the original Elfstedentocht is passing a worrisome milestone: Friday will be the 8,070th day since the previous edition, the longest period without a race since its inception. But the Dutch refuse to let its spirit die. So every winter, close to 6,000 people from the Netherlands make a pilgrimage to Weissensee (Austria)…
A thousand Dutch skaters congregated before dawn on the frozen surface of the Weissensee, the long, slender lake that gives this small Austrian mountain town its name. The sky was dark, and the headlamps of the shivering skaters cast a spiritual glow onto the charcoal ice. They had been warned not to remove their goggles, lest their eyeballs frost over in the wind. The conditions, by any reasonable standard, were brutal. But the skaters were in heaven. “The most beautiful thing in life is skating on a floor of black ice, in the cold, hearing the sounds of ice skating in nature,” said Wim Wiltenburg, 53, a banker visiting from Tilburg. “It’s better than sex.”
~ Andrew Keh, from Racing the Clock, and Climate Change (NY Times, Feb 7, 2019)
The moon is out. The ice is gone. Patches of white
lounge on the wet meadow. Moonlit darkness at 6 a.m.
Again from the porch these blue mornings I hear an eagle’s cries
like God is out across the bay rubbing two mineral sheets together
slowly, with great pressure.
A single creature’s voice—or just the loudest one.
Others speak with eyes: they watch—
the frogs and beetles, sleepy bats, ones I can’t see.
Their watching is their own stamp on the world…
I steel myself for the day.
~ Nellie Bridge, from “February 11″ from Echotheo Review, July 18, 2011
Notes: Poem from 3 Quarks Daily. Winter Moon photo in Norway by Maren Fredagsvik
The Great Cold Snap of 2019 has given us a ton of terms we didn’t know we needed: Frost quakes. Snow squalls. Steam fog. Now we can add another one to the list: ghost apples. Andrew Sietsema was pruning apple trees in an icy orchard in western Michigan when he came across some. “I guess it was just cold enough that the ice covering the apple hadn’t melted yet, but it was warm enough that the apple inside turned to complete mush (apples have a lower freezing point than water),” Sietsema told CNN. “And when I pruned a tree it would be shaken in the process, and the mush would slip out of the bottom of the ‘ghost apple.'”…
~ Doug Criss & Gianluca Mezzofiore, Another byproduct of this extreme cold: ghost apples (CNN, February 8, 2019)