Bi-Weekly Topic for Dec. 15, 2004
Winter shadows
By Hoarded Ordinaries
If this were Punxsutawney, PA instead of Keene, NH, if it were February 2nd instead of December 15th, and if I were a groundhog instead of a human, we’d definitely be in for six more weeks of winter.
For the first time in days, the sun is out and shining brightly here in Keene, and with the sun come the shadows. As I walked the dog around Central Square this morning, I tried to snap a picture of the sun-drenched facade of the Cheshire County Courthouse. Back in October, I posted up-close pictures of the Courthouse, but I’ve long wanted to get a photo of the Courthouse juxtaposed with the steeple of the Methodist church further down on Court Street. Today from the vantage point of the island of green at the eye of the Central Square rotary, I snapped this picture of the Courthouse and Methodist Church, but what I didn’t notice until I got home was the huge impressive tree shadow that spreads over the street like a spiderweb. If I were a groundhog in Pennsylvania (or a groundhog anywhere, for that matter), I’d be taken aback if I popped my head above ground to spy a shadow of such looming immensity.
We’re in for far more than six more weeks of winter here in the newly frigid Northeast. Winter solstice, the official start of winter, isn’t until December 21, but Mother Nature is running ahead of schedule. Yesterday our daytime temperatures dipped to 20-something degrees with a brisk wind that made it feel notably colder; this morning my hands ached with cold as I waited for my body to acclimate to walking in the 17-degree chill. These temperatures are merely chilly by New Hampshire standards: 17 degrees feels like bikini weather compared to that day last February when the temperature hit 14 below. But since temperature is a relative phenomenon, a new chill feels colder than an accustomed freeze: it just might take my body until December 21st to acclimate to winter weather.
Winter solstice is the day when the northern hemisphere is tilted the farthest from the sun: the shortest day of the year. But because winter solstice is also the day when the sun shines at the greatest slant, it’s also the day of the longest shadows, a phenomenon marked at megalithic sites such as Stonehenge, Newgrange, and even New Hampshire’s own Mystery Hill.
Without traveling to England, Ireland, or even Pennsylvania, though, I can tell you what’s afoot: the sun is low, the shadows are long, and the wind is cool and getting colder. Like Bob Dylan said, you don’t need a weather man to know which way the wind blows. Here in New Hampshire, the wind is blowing in winter, long months of it: the shadows are long and, for the next few days at least, growing.
This is my contribution to the Ecotone biweekly topic Solstice Place.Comments
Source: http://hoardedordinaries.wordpress.com/2004/12/15/winter-shadows/
On the edge
By P.
If this were Punxsutawney, PA instead of Keene, NH, if it were February 2nd instead of December 15th, and if I were a groundhog instead of a human, we'd definitely be in for six more weeks of winter. For the first time in days, the sun is out and shining brightly here in Keene, and with the sun come the shadows.
As phenomena go, this one may be too well known.
The snowfall has finally stopped. The day, still cloudy, is coming to an end. Outside, the wind has fallen still and a layer of snow thick enough to cover all the blemishes on the lawn has coated everything. And as the failing light gives up its power to cast a shadow, a lovely, ethereal phenomenon takes hold.
All the world turns blue, the cool cobalt blue of clear skies, and the snowy ground seems to give back the light that the clouds no longer provide. Tree branches, the swing set and the bushes stand out black, in sharp individual silhouette, and the little marks where an overstressed twig dropped its load or a squirrel hustled to a new hiding place disappear.
For a moment, everything is still -- as still as can be in a city where uncaring traffic hisses and scrapes a few hundred yards away.
Then, like the expiring day's last breath, the wind rises. The daylight fades further, the lights go on and the world shoulders us into ordinary night. Afterward, it is possible to remember the Christmas cards whose illustrators tried to copy the scene, to realize that what you've just seen is as commonplace as Baroque music this time of year. But during that hushed moment you can't help but suspend thought and watch, hushed yourself, as if the vision were new.
Source: http://my.core.com/~pzicari/text/Twi.html
Oil Spills Near the Solstice
By Feathers of Hope (Pica)
The ship that is breaking up off Unalaska has my colleagues on alert; if a lot of oiled animals start coming in and they need a vet, somebody's going to have to work over Christmas.
The problem is, there are only six hours of daylight. The spill seems not as bad as feared, and it's possible they'll blow up the ship and release the oil in a controlled manner, as long as they get good weather, which is in short supply in the Aleutians in winter, along with the light.
Long nights. Getting off work and it's already dark. My brother and sister-in-law who live in Juneau get this darkness thing a lot worse than we do, yearn for the snow because at least it brightens up the long darkness.
The darkness, though, makes the light so much more welcome when it returns. I'm not sure I'd enjoy the tropics with sunset at six year-round. How then can you drink cocoa?
Written for the Ecotone's Solstice Place.
Posted by Pica at December 16, 2004 09:56 PM
Comments
The suddenness of sunrises and sunsets in the tropics is also very disconcerting. One minute the sky is pink, the next minute the sun's up.
Posted by: Dave at December 17, 2004 10:39 AMHot chocolate is enjoyed in intense air conditioning under wide ceiling fans under the arcades of hotels with colonial names such as Raffles or the Peninsula. It's not so much season-less as all-season all the time.
Posted by: Nicole at December 17, 2004 02:18 PMRemember the darkness in Boston? Though the winter days were often beautiful, I just couldn't get used to waking up at 6 in the darkness, bicycing to work along the Charles in darkness, sitting inside the office building all day without a window while the daylight glided by outside, and then, after three, the world descending back into darkness after which I bicycled home along the Charles, again in darkness. All while the trees were bare and the streets were grey with people in black coats walking about. Dismal.
The tropics have color. And cocoa is a tropical drink (isn't really logical, is it?). I've never lived in the tropics but I think the animals would more than make up for the brisk, clear mornings.
Posted by: butuki at December 17, 2004 04:51 PMI once visited Juneau in mid-June, a week before the summer solstice. The light barely dimmed at 10 p.m., and my wife and I strolled delightedly around after a late dinner. I'm not sure I could live with the dark end of the year, but the other end -- ah, wonderful.
Posted by: p. at December 19, 2004 04:21 PM
Source: http://www.magpienest.org/feathersofhope/archives/2004/12/16/oil_spills_near_.html
A certain slant
By Via NegativaPut it off all you want; there's no escaping the pull of the blank page. We writers stare into it the way, in ages past, a body might have confronted and tried to befriend its own mortality. It was considered greatly enlightening, in fact, to acknowledge one's "inner death" that way, back in those benighted centuries before the gospel of unlimited Growth unseated the old values of poverty, humility and hospitality.
Mid-afternoon a few days before the winter solstice and I'm up at the spruce grove at the top of the field. The air is as clear as it gets and the view out toward the east is spectacular, but I've seen it too many times to become entranced. Mountains and rivers without end, big deal. But turn around, go into the grove. Look: a small patch of sunlight on the needle-covered ground illuminates an otherwise invisible, glistening tapestry. Marvellous!
I kneel before it, run my fingers along the ground to make sure this isn't some kind of wintertime mirage. A few threads bend to the pressure of my fingertips, but most of them somehow escape my touch. They are extremely fine, and stretch right across the surface of the ground: the ruined webs, I suppose, of what I always like to think of as handkerchief spiders. They are too taut simply to have fallen from the trees, I think. The whole network trembles in this barest ghost of a breeze, while all around the unlit ground looks bare and ordinary.
Then a few minutes later at the so-called vernal ponds along the crest of Sapsucker Ridge, another kind of revelation: three flat, white spaces on a forest floor otherwise free of snow, blank pages for the tracks of coyote and white-tailed deer and the long shadows that stripe them from end to end. I stand and stare at the largest one, contrasting its present opacity with my memory of how it looked on my last walk here a week ago. It was a few hours closer to dusk, and I stood watching the dark outlines of tree trunks shake and shimmy against a reflected sky for so long, I almost managed to convince myself that I was being given a glimpse into some other time, some other forest.
Now this frozen and snow-dusted pond in the woods is the opposite of a looking glass. But with the sun so bright and the sky so blue, its surface offers a sneak preview of coming attractions one or two months away. The long shadows will be just this shade of blue, yes, and in between, the granular surface of the snow pack will glisten, just like that. I will time my walks and set my course so as to head as much as possible into that "certain slant of light," alert for anything that gleams. I remember how my friend Crystal Dave used to walk when he was out searching for quartz in a freshly bulldozed site of a future subdivision, head down, hands clasped behind his back. "You just go along blinking into the sunlight," he said, ever the night owl, "and look for that one stone that winks back."
*
There's a certain Slant of light,
Winter afternoons -
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of cathedral Tunes -
Heavenly Hurt, it gives us -
We can find no scar,
But internal difference -
Where the Meanings, are -
None may teach it - Any -
'Tis the Seal Despair -
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the Air -
When it comes, the Landscape listens -
Shadows - hold their breath -
When it goes, 'tis like the Distance
On the look of Death -
(The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition, R. W. Franklin, ed., Belknap Press, 1998, # 320)
__________
A contribution to the Ecotone wiki topic Solstice Place.
Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20050516115503/http://neithernor.blogspot.com/2004/12/certain-slant.html
solstice in the suburbs
By alembic
This post is for the ecotone wiki's joint blogging topic Solstice Place:
Where I live, in this pocket of Northern of California, just a short drive north from San Francisco, the week preceding the longest night of the year is my favorite time ' provided that the storms and rains keep their distance.
Most of the deciduous trees have shed their leaves by mid-December. Bare branches on tall trees and ripe red berries on fat bushes that are still wildly green provide specks of intense color. There is fresh new grass everywhere you look, on hills, by the banks of the creek, in cracks on the roads. Brilliantly red blooms on the bottlebrush plant swirl in wind, just a few feet from the windows of my office and kitchen. At certain times of the day, small birds flock to these branches, chattering and fluttering, as if this were a festive occasion.
Sometimes, around mid-December, it gets really cold around here, especially after the sun slips behind Mt. Tam. When I am out in this cold, I get excited, out of an old childhood habit of waiting for snow. Back then I loved snow. I loved how it felt, how it smelled, how it whitewashed the drabness and poverty of the eastern European town of my childhood.
Of course, it rarely, if ever, snows here. Most of the time, the sun's winter-slanted* light illuminates ' instead of heating up ' the valley and the hills. It's all picture perfect, even if the night does descend rather early and hangs on for hours on end. But that is another blessing of sorts. With the morning light coming late, so do the crows with their urgent cries. And the chainsaws and the leaf blowers, those grunts and groans of suburban aspirations, are missing. And there is no chorus of dogs, locked in yards alone, whose barks and yaps and howls, at most other times of the year, bounce from ridge to ridge, amplified by winds.
Solstice in December is the pause, the breath held for a moment, when you feel free of time and the labored rhythms of your lungs. In the long quiet night and the brilliant shine of day, the brief period before solstice gives me a chance to lose sight, however briefly, of the poverty of a busy suburban life.
* tribute to Emily Dickinson (and dave's solstice post on via negativa)
Posted by maria at December 18, 2004 12:45 PM
Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20050129031138/http://www.ashladle.org/archives/000487.html
Solstice Place
SOLSTICE SUNRISE
Moved as I was by Stonehenge when I finally saw it, fifteen or so years ago, rising above the Salisbury Plain, I’m not a solstice person. Here in the hills of Vermont there are a number of people who observe a self-styled blend of New Age beliefs and pagan practices, including quite a few women my age or older who favor Birkenstocks and long flowing skirts printed with moons and stars, and wear their graying hair down their backs; some of them know how to dowse, or to make aromatherapy essences from flowers; some of them weave or spin; they like to talk about crystals, and labyrinths, and angels in their gardens, and it seems to me that they don’t have much to do with men. I’ve been invited a few times to attend some of their gatherings for one or the other of the solstices, but I politely decline; I guess I’m too much of a Christian to feel comfortable there (while acknowledging the pagan aspects of the holiday I am celebrating!)
But that doesn’t mean I’m not affected by the solstice, or that I don’t notice it. It would be impossible not to, living this far north, where light for living things feels in short supply even in the summer. And still, Vermont is not really northern; it’s barely halfway to the pole. The other night I handed my Icelandic neighbor a couple of radishes from a plate of crudités before dinner. He looked skeptically at the red orbs in his hand, and then bit into one. “Hmm,” he said, looking surprised. “This is not bad!” He explained that in Iceland the growing season is so short that radishes are one of the few things that people grow, and kids are always given seeds and a little plot of ground. “But they always taste awful,” he said. “Woody and musty, or just tasteless. Not like this at all.” According to him, no Icelander even tries to grow a tomato outdoors, or a green bean. I should be grateful.
On these shortest days, I think of the longest ones, when the evening light glances warm and golden against the delphinium and roses. Today, the house is frigid, and by three p.m. it was starting to get dark. Now, at five, there is less skylight than at nine on a midsummer night, and it is a deep blue shading to azure, split by black tree branches, and grounded by coldly reflective snow.
The last year I was in college, my roommate and I had an apartment in the student ghetto. There were two bedrooms, and a kitchen, small bath, and living room between the two. When we moved in, in the fall, we tossed a coin. I got the light-filled southwestern bedroom, and A. got the smaller, darker bedroom on the north side. We planned to switch at midyear. Every evening, we’d emerge from studying in our bedrooms, make dinner, and sit at the little wooden table in the kitchen to eat, watching the sun set over the lake in the distance. Thunderstorms swept across the valley from the west, and sometimes lake-effect snows obscured all vision. But the sun kept up its determined journey.
We got in a habit of marking its setting place each evening on the window glass. In late December, we marked the sun at its furthest point south, and I mentioned that it was time to switch rooms. I hated the thought of moving into that cave, but didn’t say so – fair was fair. But to my astonishment, A. said she had come to like her dark room; she’d come home from several hours at the piano in one of the equally tiny basement practice rooms in the music building, close her bedroom door and study or read with the blinds down all day. It felt safe, she said. I knew she was unhappy about her life, a failed love affair, confused about what to do after graduating. I urged her to take the bigger, lighter room, but she insisted. So we kept things as they were, meeting in the kitchen every night to cook a simple supper and eat together and talk about music, books, friends, professors, love; and watching as the sun now made its slow progression toward the north. We kept marking the days on the window glass, each little dot representing one day closer to leaving this existence we both loved, for another unknown one.
A. lives in Georgia now, and I’ve just set up a household even further north than that relatively northern apartment. Our lives diverged; we traveled miles from those dreams and heart-to-heart talks, and despite a friendship that was once extremely close, we’ve lost touch. But writing this I've realized that back in that apartment, the sun has faithfully traveled up and down the window thirty-one times.
This is my contribution to the Ecotone wiki topic for mid-December, SolsticePlace
Source: http://cassandrapages.blogspot.com/2004_12_19_cassandrapages_archive.html#110368304525251750
Dec 16, 2004 at 1:38 pm
I love that pic with the shadows.
Dec 17, 2004 at 10:15 am
Yeah, I was out Wednesday evening and thinking, man I guess I haven’t adjusted to the cold yet because I’m freezing. It wasn’t until I got home and saw the thermometer reading in the teens that I realized it really was cold. But as you say, it’s all relative. I’m hoping it doesn’t get like last winter’s sub-zero temps! I’ve noticed lately on my walks how fat the sheep look and I wondered if that means we’re in for a very cold winter. But maybe they always look that puffy in their wool coats and I just didn’t notice before.
Dec 21, 2004 at 10:33 pm
HEY! ANYBODY HOME?
Kevin