Fickle is better than polar vortex, right?

The National Weather Service has started talking about the possibility of accumulating snow this coming weekend. In response, we just went and test started the snow blower. If it won't run there's time to get it to the shop. Also, we're hoping that the snow blower's exhaust stream may help deflect any impending storm's track farther South and East, or West and North. We're not fussy as long as it misses us. After some fiddling and several tries, it started. Let's see if our strategy works.

We recently discovered a poet whose work had been unknown to us until a few days ago. She has two books of poems published and a couple of handful of poems on her web site. We enjoy her style and would have ordered the books already but we've already been overly indulgent with ourself this Christmas and have committed ourself to making a major dent in the stacks of unread books before we buy any more. Plus, the Better Half has put a couple of books on her Christmas list and if Santa is nice to her we're pretty sure we'll want to borrow one of them. Some days it feels as though we need three or four more of us to get to all that we need to do and some of what we want. We're truly thankful to have such problems. Anyhow, the poet's name is Julie Cadwallader Staub. Clicking on her name will take you to her site. We're thinking that the two volumes would make nice presents for our birthday near the start of next Summer. By then, with luck and skill and diligence, we'll have made that aforementioned dent.

Sunrise Rive pools, December 8, 2015

Photo by J. Harrington

You may have noticed we've been reporting on local ice conditions over the past week or two. Recently, the channel of the Sunrise River through the pools near County Road 36 has reopened, although not as much  as in the photo above. Warmer temperatures tend to do that. We wouldn't go on any of the local ice for love nor money. And it would be helpful if we got some solid ice made before a layer of snow covers it. That's about it for today. We had another visit with the dentist this morning so we're more in peaked than peak condition. If we've been sufficiently restored by tomorrow, we'll reward ourselves for being semi-diligent about our teeth by going exploring somewhere or other that doesn't involve crossing ice.

Winter Journal: Gray Shadings

By Emily Wilson

Barely discerned clouds

Hard, hard to get here

what worth, what worth

River of steel.

River of no one becoming you.

Trees that are emptier today, more forced in their forms

To focus on them is to be made glad of them in their

       strangeness

The earth extrudes through them toward emptiness

The few elms dismembering

The willow’s bloom above shore like a curtaining

To focus on it is to be mostly taken into its tapes

       and its filters

It is lost to the surface of this river

The dull, impenetrable, intractable surface

resisting, unetchable

Now the faint rain.

I don’t know what to do with all this waiting

things getting themselves readied toward emptiness

The scratchy, shattering elm, its crimped skin, its

       exfoliating, its rivening

       its being disfigured by fortune

       and by wind

A crone with old frills at her hair

The grasp of her toward me

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