Doesn't that just frost you?

Minneapolis and St. Paul get an average of 42% sunshine in December. Duluth gets a little less, 39%. We're between the Twin Cities and Duluth, so, to make this easy, let's say we average 40% sunshine. That means that 60% of our daylight hours are cloudy. This would be even more disruptive of our normally sunny personality (see what we did there?) if it weren't for the ghostly beauty added by the combination of fields and wood lots covered with fog/mist/frozen fog and, sometimes, honest to goodness hoarfrost. Today, and for the past few days, we've been seeing lots of frost-covered grasses and forbs in our piece of prairie/sand plain, plus some pine needles coated with frost. The ethereal quality of the dead and sleeping plants shrouded in frost provides a wabi-sabi patina to the area.

frost-covered local marsh grasses

Photo by J. Harrington

Speaking of impermanence, the loaf of bread we baked to go with last night's beef stew is almost gone. The Daughter Person and Son-In-Law arrived about dinner time to facilitate some sort of Christmas cookie swap and help consume the stew and bread. We had tried a new kind of flour for the first time. The loaf of bread turned out more "off-white" than we would have expected and the taste of wheat overpowered any hint of sourdough. The bread tasted good and looked good and was fun to make, but we prefer more of a sourdough flavor. We'll probably play some games with a mixture of the organic wheat flour and some of our regular King Arthur bread flour and see if we like that any better. Now that the Daughter Person has nudged us out of our bread-baking rut, there's no telling what may happen. Meanwhile, the Christmas cookies may have a slightly greater air of permanence, but only because there is a greater quantity of them and it will take us longer to work our way through the supply. If Christmas came every Winter month, we would soon take on the dimensions of a certain portly old elf and. come Spring, probably wouldn't fit into our waders.

the latest bread experiment

Photo by J. Harrington

After Apple-Picking

Robert Frost, 1874- 1963

My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.
I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight
I got from looking through a pane of glass
I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough
And held against the world of hoary grass.
It melted, and I let it fall and break.
But I was well
Upon my way to sleep before it fell,
And I could tell
What form my dreaming was about to take.
Magnified apples appear and disappear,
Stem end and blossom end,
And every fleck of russet showing clear.
My instep arch not only keeps the ache,
It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.
I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.
And I keep hearing from the cellar bin
The rumbling sound
Of load on load of apples coming in.
For I have had too much
Of apple-picking: I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.
There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.
For all
That struck the earth,
No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,
Went surely to the cider-apple heap
As of no worth.
One can see what will trouble
This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.
Were he not gone,
The woodchuck could say whether it’s like his
Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,
Or just some human sleep.

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