really cold days

Squeak of boots on snow on really cold days. Kicking snow off those same boots when coming inside. Frost collecting on the bottoms of doors. Ice skating rinks are busy. This is the rink in East Aurora.

Wolf Moon

The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow gave the luster of mid-day to objects below.

Twas the Night Before Christmas
Clement C. Moore

Happy Birthday!

Yesterday it was -24 on New Year's morning. We are in the middle of a real cold snap. These usually occur in January, but this one started in late December. I'm sure that's happened before, but the last time I remember it being this cold in December was the December before John was born. The high temperature on Christmas day that year was -15, the low was -35. Happy Birthday John! Full moon, the "Wolf" moon either tonight or last night depending on your calendar.

It's always just beginning. Everything is always just beginning.
Jakuso Kwong
Zen page-a-day calendar

Happy New Year

Mt. Mansfield

Happy New Year! Drove home from Buffalo the other day. It's about a six hour trip on the NY Thruway. As I came over the final hill into West Rutland, I got my first real view of the snow covered Green Mountains east of Rutland. It was so beautiful. I can honestly say it was the most beautiful scene I saw on the entire trip. It's pretty nice here on the Other Side of the Creek, even in January.

Merry Christmas!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpFudDAYqxY

Skating away to Buffalo for a few days. Merry Christmas!

solstice

Ponds frozen over. Sound of the snowplow. Yesterday was the winter solstice. The days will start to get longer now.

It is in midwinter that I sometimes glean from my pines something more than woodlot politics, and the news of the wind and weather. This is especially likely to happen on some gloomy evening when the snow has buried all irrelevant detail, and the hush of elemental sadness lies heavy upon every living thing. Nevertheless, my pines, each with his burden of snow, are standing ramrod-straight, rank upon rank, and in the dusk beyond I sense the presence of hundreds more. At such times I feel a curious transfusion of courage.

December
A Sand County Almanac
Aldo Leopold

chapstick

Winter settling in. Winter coats, boots, hats, and gloves accumulating in the kitchen. One pair of gloves I pulled out had wood chips on them from the last firewood season. Throw rug out of mothballs on which to deposit snowy boots when coming inside. Sighing of the iron pot on the wood stove when getting up in the middle of the night. Season of chapstick.

In the deepest snows, the path which I used from the highway to my house...might have been represented by a meandering dotted line, with wide intervals between the dots. For a week of even weather I took exactly the same number of steps, and of the same length, coming and going, stepping deliberately and with the precision of a pair of dividers in my own deep tracks,- to such routine the winter reduces us,- yet often they were filled with heaven's own blue.

Former inhabitants and winter visitors
Walden
Henry Davis Thoreau