first frost, first freeze #phenology

Last night and early this morning, local temperatures fell below freezing. Sensitive plants (that we wanted to protect) were covered or came into the house. Tonight it's forecast to be warmer and to rain so today the plants were uncovered and returned to outside. Those years when we get a frost only this time of year, we just toss some sheets over plants. Its early for a hard freeze. The bird bath was covered with skim ice this morning. See!

ice-covered bird bath

Photo by J. Harrington

The blacktopping crews were back at it today. Now the entire road is blacktopped. There's about a two inch lip at the end of our drive. It's not clear if the crews intend to smooth the transition or not. Since the road committee was concerned about people driving on the edges of the blacktop, if it were me, I might have done the paving some time other than near the opening of hunting season, since about a third or so of the total length of this road borders a Wildlife Management Area open to public hunting, where folks often just pull to the side of the road (across the edge of the new pavement), park, and head into the woods.

frost-covered field and wet spot

Photo by J. Harrington

Now that we've had our first frost, we're eligible to enjoy Indian Summer, according to the Weather Service, or not, if you believe the Old Farmer's Almanac. We've also seen reports from elsewhere in Minnesota that the air has been full of snow flakes. That's not so unusual, since we think July is the only month in which snow hasn't been recorded here in the Northland.

from “Thoreau”

Cole Swensen, 1955

In the essay “A Winter Walk,” which predated the more famous essay “Walking”
by a few years, Thoreau paid particular attention to the astonishing array of whites

from fog to snow to frost to the crystals growing outward on threads of light. The
fact that white is separately known. That it is its own wildness, entirely exterior,

like all weather you notice is a version of an open room coming through
the wind in prisms. White holds light in a suspended state, unleashing it later

across a field of snow or a sheet of water at just the right angle to make the surface
a solid, and on we go walking. Goethe’s Theory of Colorsdepicted each one

as an intense zone of human activity overflowing its object into feeling there is
a forest through which something white is flying through a wash of white, which is

the presence of all colors until red, for instance, is needed for a bird or green
for a world.

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