Once over lightly, two up

Happy Anniversary to us (us = writer of and contributors to this blog plus readers of same)! One year together. Shall we go for two? We'll be here if you will.

This morning we were in St. Paul for some meetings when we ran into Sue from Subtext (you know we've long been addicted to alliteration). She congratulated us on making it through Year One. We appreciate both the congratulations and the fact that she reads My Minnesota. Some day soon (to steal an Ian Tyson phrase from Judy Collins) we're going to re-confer with Sue about our list of 25 books everyMinnesotan should read. Maybe we could start a Read Minnesota movement. If Summer vacation is a traditional reading time, the upcoming gift-giving season is also a time when a list of books might come in handy and, if we start getting snowed in, the books themselves might get read instead of a list. Later today we're forecast to get our first shovelable (is that even a word?) and plowable (or that?) snow. Yesterday's sunset looked kind of threatening.

storm cloud sunset             © harrington

To be prepared for Minnesota Winter's worst, with the prospect of getting snowed in, we keep a stack of a couple of dozen or so unread books around. That way we won't get bored with daytime TV and we're not faced with the need to run to the library through a blizzard. (We also have developed a belief that we can't die if the stack of unread books is tall enough. Our penny-pinching New England heritage wouldn't allow it.) Anyhow, if, this afternoon, the local pines start to look like this we think we have food, beverages and books to last until at least Wednesday or Thursday when it's supposed to return to  snow-melting temperatures.

snow-covered pine needles    © harrington

Robert Haight helps us remember what a snow-covered world is like.

How Is It That the Snow

By Robert Haight 

How is it that the snow   

amplifies the silence,   

slathers the black bark on limbs,   

heaps along the brush rows?   

Some deer have stood on their hind legs   

to pull the berries down.   

Now they are ghosts along the path,   

snow flecked with red wine stains.   

This silence in the timbers.   

A woodpecker on one of the trees   

taps out its story,   

stopping now and then in the lapse   

of one white moment into another.

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