S'now a New Year

...and a happy snowy New Year!   I got my Christmas wish answered a little late, in the early morning hours of the new year, but I'm still happy to see it arrive.   ProfessorRoush is, by no means, a snow creature, but I do like to see one snow a year, a nice white snow to wipe the slate of summer clean and cover the debris of fall.  This front came in a little growl-ley, a little blizzard-y, but off the Rockies it came, sweeping the plains of Kansas clean.

But once a year is enough, dear Old Man Winter, so stopping it here would be fine, mind you.  The same scene as above, taken yesterday and shown below, is bland for a winter view, but quite desired over the arctic alternative.  This past weekend, outside in 60ºF and cleaning up the crushed remains of my trellis, I was eyeing the perennial beds and thinking I should get a start on them and get ahead for the season.   Today, and probably for the next month, I won't be thinking that again.  I like to see snow, but too much cold weather and I start dreaming of retiring south, a South home of my imagination at present, but I see no reason to spend a winter hibernating once my days of employment are past.  Someday, I want a home up north, here perhaps, perhaps closer to my boyhood home in Indiana, and I'll wait until the first snow fills that empty spot in my soul and then I'll skedaddle south without bothering to shovel the walk.

This little angel of mine, a gift from my father many years back, sits by the front steps, blessing visitors as they pass.  It's seen better days, a wing knocked off by an errant child or pet and glued precariously back, but it has good days yet ahead of it.   Dusted by the storm, it seems to welcome the sunlight of the 2nd day of January, the warm Kansas sun out to begin to melt that snow down into life-changing moisture for the prairie.  Or was it merely watching over me as I cleared the walk, protecting this old man from the strenuous shoveling demise that fells so many?

One the other side of the house, my terra-cotta maiden faces unflinchingly east, a little rouge from her core showing on her weathered cheeks, but otherwise protected from the northern blizzards and drifts that the angel faces.  She doesn't need to look for Gandolf to come from "the east on the first light of the fifth day," for the sun rose here at dawn on the 2nd day of 2022, beginning the cycle of thawing.  The maiden faces a new year, a new fresh garden to grow again, bones in place, awaiting warmth and flesh and moisture to grow and flourish in another year of summer.




  

A Time to Read

Ssshhhh...The garden is silent.  There is no life left here above ground, just cold concrete angels that urge you to respect the dignity of life drawn deep into the frozen earth for winter.  Dry grass, perennials become twigs, stone and stick, all that are left of the season past.  Maidens, demurely dressed, dot the garden and dream to be someday embraced by flowers reborn on all sides.  Patient, they wait for stories to grow, for life to spring forth from their pages, reading the future a season away.

In winter, ProfessorRoush's garden reflects his indoor life, reading now the primary entertainment in both locales.  The angelic girl-child and the grown woman pictured here and engrossed in their books are both full-time inhabitants of my garden, weathering and softening as the years roll by.  Neither will respond when you ask the topic of their study, for both live on a time scale beyond our fleeting lives.  They wait, sparely changing as the seasons past, hot and cold, wet and dry as the sun and weather choose.  

Inside, I join them, reading along in a more comfortable setting and weathering and softening in my own time.  Stack of books wait on the nightstand and bookcase for my winter pleasure, each a quiet escape from the weeks between now and spring.  I'm not sure where I'll start, fiction or nonfiction, fancy or facts, but the time for the feel of warm earth in my hands has past and will be replaced with a good solid book, warm and comfortable indoors while the sharp sunshine of a cold day waits outside my window.

In the garden, birds ring the feeders and rabbits hide from hungry hawks.  A cardinal pair picks at the sunflower seeds, meal-worms wait for the bluebirds, and fat fluffy sparrows dart in for seed, a constant stream of greed.  Besides these, the world waits again in frost for the sun to warm, and the remainder of my garden reads and rests with me.