Q: How is the goodness of God manifested even in the clothing of birds and beasts?
A: Small birds, which are the most delicate, have more feathers than those that are hardier. Beasts that live in the icy regions have thicker, coarser coats than those that dwell in the tropical heat.
~ Jenny Offill, Weather: A Novel (Knopf, February 11, 2020)
Photo: European Starling by Ostdrossel
This is the blessing for the first garden tomato:
Those green boxes of tasteless acid the store
sells in January, those red things with the savor
of wet chalk, they mock your fragrant name.
How fat and sweet you are weighing down my palm,
warm as the flank of a cow in the sun.
You are the savor of summer in a thin red skin.
~ Marge Piercy, from “The Art of Blessing the Day” in The Art of Blessing the Day: Poems with a Jewish Theme. © Knopf, 1999.
Notes: Photo – Katharine Hanna with Organic vine-ripened tomatoes. Poem – A Year of Being Here
WE WERE RUNNING
in memory of Annie Zeke*
We were running up the slope of a hill,
that dog and I, an early winter rain
beginning to fall, wind-driven and sharp,
the clouds so black the edges of the hills
were etched and incandescent. That dog
and I were running, the two of us
apart and yet together, and even now,
in the solitude of a quiet hour—the days
and that dog long gone—I can follow
those far-blown traces of unexpected joy
and find my way back again: heart wild,
lungs filling with the breath of winter,
and that dog beside me running headlong
into the world without end.
~ Peter Everwine, “We Were Running” in A Small Clearing (Aureole Press, 2016)
Notes:
Silence…
thrilling cold —
so much beauty.
Like breathing pure oxygen.
~ Susan Sontag, from “As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks 1964-1980“
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)
january wakes up with the first light of dawn. swings his feet out from beneath the blankets to touch a cold floor. the air around his is quiet and crisp. today starts a new day. a day to be kinder. a day to be braver. a day to be more.
~ Kelsey Danielle, @ Misguided Ghosts
Photo Credit
Q: Is the image based on something you saw? How did it come to you?
“More than being based on something I saw, I would say it comes from something I experience often. I was trying to capture the feeling of being immersed in a book to the exclusion of everything around you. I think my love for reading comes more from the need to connect with my inner reality than from the desire to escape the external one. Proust described it perfectly as “that fertile miracle of communication that takes effect in solitude.” …
My first time in New York was in 2010, when I spent three months there, during the winter. My most vivid memories are connected to that first stay. I remember big blue skies, ice-cold feet, hot black coffees, fresh bagels, and huge pizza slices.
The gif was animated by the talented Jose Lorenzo. I often collaborate with him—I love the way he brings my images to life. We didn’t want the image to be too frenetic. For me, it was important to maintain that feeling of peace and timelessness that happens when you’re reading. I also wanted to show how easy it can be to find your own quiet place in the city without having to go far out of your way.”
~ Anna Parini, in response a question from Françoise Mouly, on this week’s cover in The New Yorker, which shows a rare moment of calm amid the bustle of a new year. Parini, who has contributed illustrations to the magazine since 2015, grew up in Milan but is now based in Barcelona. Mouly spoke to Parini about New York’s wintry charms and the process of creating an animated cover image.
(Source: Anna Parini’s “A New Leaf”, The New Yorker, January 7, 2019)
To the Editor:
Re “The Solace of Birds in Winter” (Op-Ed, Dec. 15): I am smitten with my backyard birds. What is it about the industrious little souls leaping delicately about my tray feeder that so lifts the spirit? Their spunk? Their equanimity no matter the weather? The variety in their eating habits?
Mourning doves plunk themselves down in the center of the tray to chow down. The red-bellied woodpecker grips the edge and won’t yield his position. The chickadees and nuthatches take a seed each, one at a time, to a nearby branch to nibble.
A chickadee weighs less than half an ounce. Its coat of feathers, half an inch thick, keeps its tiny body at about 90 degrees even when the air temperature is zero. It is this, then, that takes my breath away and is the source of my affection — the miraculous, every day in winter, not 15 feet from my window.
Margaret McGirr
Greenwich, Conn.
New York Times, Letters, December 17, 2018
Photo: Project Feeder Watch titled “See Red” by Stephen & Judy Shelasky, Longmeadow, MA. 4 male Cardinals, a Red-bellied Woodpecker and a little sparrow checking out a female Cardinal as she flies into view.
