First things first

April 15
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April 18
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April 19
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April 21
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April 23

This is round three of the paperwhites I’ve been forcing on my kitchen windowsill all winter. The bag of bulbs I bought last autumn was one of my best investments of the years, I think. I still have enough bulbs to get me through the rest of this winter and well into daffodil season.

And I’ll need them, too. Our recent snowfall (nothing major, but enough to close area schools and require shoveling out driveways and sidewalks) reminded me that there’s still a fair amount of winter left…

I just spent the last hour or so watching tonight’s total lunar eclipse (the last one for three years). For the first half hour, I observed it from my living room. But when the moon moved behind the branches of a nearby tree, I put on my heaviest coat, hat, and super-warm mittens (not thrummed mittens, but gauntlet-shaped, insulated snowboarding mitts with fleece liners, to boot—toasty, indeed!) and headed outside. I pulled up a chair and sat down to watch the disappearing moon do its dance over the barely snow-covered landscape.

It’s amazing how quickly the moon moves. You don’t really get a sense of it unless you spend a few minutes just watching it. One minute you can see the whole thing, and the next minute half of it is hidden behind some tree branches. (Hmmm. Maybe it was the tree that moved. Ents, anyone?)

It’s cold outside, but not so frigid that I’m miserable sitting outside for a little while. The sky is remarkably clear—I can’t remember when I’ve seen this many stars over eastern Pennsylvania. (The best night sky I’ve ever seen was over Canyonlands National Park, in southeastern Utah, where there were so many stars that it looked like someone had just thrown handfuls of glitter into the sky. Tonight’s was pretty good, though.) I even saw a shooting star.

Sylvia is sleeping now, and Jan is out. Even though I could hear the hum of the nearest major road (this is suburbia, after all), and even though all of my neighbors have their inside lights on (and sometimes their porch lights on, too—why do people leave those things on all night, I wonder?), the quiet and stillness and cold made it seem like it was just the moon and me out there tonight.

Yesterday afternoon, shortly after Sylvia went upstairs for her nap, it started to snow here. At first the snow accumulated only on the grass and bushes, but after half an hour it started to stick to the roads and driveways, too. I stepped outside to take a few photos and breathed in the silence.

The snowfall reminded me of the winter I spent in a small town in Switzerland. I rode the bus to the university in the nearby city 12km away, and my local bus stop was in the center of the town where I lived. Actually, it was the only bus stop in the town. (Yes, it was a pretty small town.) The center of town was about a fifteen-minute walk to the farm where I lived—well, fifteen minutes in the morning (when I had to contend with a 16% grade hill) and half that time in the evening.

On Wednesdays I had an evening class, which meant I didn’t get home until well after dark. One winter Wednesday evening, another snowfall started to cover the white blanket that already lay on the ground. As I walked alone down the road toward my farm, I became acutely aware of the silence. All of the animals in the fields around me were silent, and there was this peaceful heaviness in the air. It was as if the cows knew that the snow and the dark and the cold made for a magical moment.

I live in a far more (sub)urban environment these days, but yesterday’s late-afternoon snowfall—cold and quiet—was like a Proustian madeleine taking me back to that winter in Switzerland. When Sylvia woke up and Jan came home, the three of us went into the front yard to create “a girl snowman” (at Sylvia’s insistence), snow angels, a castle, and footprints. The snow didn’t last long, though: by midday today, nearly all of it had already melted away.

Last week, daytime temperatures were in the 20s. I wore my flannel-lined jeans all the time, and put on a hat, scarf, and mittens whenever I went out.

This week, daytime temperatures are in the 50s and 60s (with one day’s high at 69!). I believe that general warming trends are harbingers of bad things to come (Al Gore is right, people!). But I love those one or two balmy days you get in January (always in January—why is that?) that offer a quick break from winter. Some wishful (or extremely cold-tolerant) types go so far as to wear shorts and t-shirts on those days. Me, I’m just glad not to have to wear a heavy sweater and wool socks for a little while. And I’m also glad when it’s mild enough to permit non-bundled-up playtime outside—and a game of hopscotch.

Spring really isn’t that far off. Look what’s been arriving in my mailbox over the past few weeks. Now that Christmas is over, I expect a deluge of these things.

It always seemed odd to me to celebrate the start of a new year when we are still locked in winter’s embrace. Yes, I know there’s that whole “now the days are getting longer” thing. But frankly, whether or not the days are getting longer doesn’t seem any more important to me than whether or not the days after getting colder. And on the first day of January, there’s still a lot of cold weather ahead. Brrrrr!

I love flowers.

In the spring and summer, I’m happy to see them outside my windows. The winter, however, is a different story. I can’t afford to have cut flowers around often, and we don’t have many good spots for houseplants, so I usually content myself with forcing paperwhites on a windowsill in the kitchen. A few years ago, I got very ambitious and potted up crocuses, hyacinths, and all sort of other bulbs that require hardening, but they took up a lot of real estate in my refrigerator for a long time, so now I just do paperwhites.

I buy a bag of them in October or November and force just one or two of them at a time, placing them in mason jars with smooth river rocks on the bottom. The first of this year’s bulbs started flowering a couple of weeks ago, right around Thanksgiving, and I expect to have enough bulbs to last until the daffodils start appearing in my yard in the spring.

Some people don’t like paperwhites because of their smell. If you have a whole bunch of them, yes, their fragrance can be cloying. But just one or two at a time produce a mild perfume that wafts through the air and reminds me that green spring will be returning soon.

You know how you see something amazing and take a photo of it, then see that your photo doesn’t look anything like what you saw? (Sunsets are perhaps the most famous example of this sort of thing.)

Well, the other morning, I looked out my dining-room window while Sylvia and I were eating breakfast, and I saw that, seemingly overnight, the trees ringing my backyard had dropped many of their leaves. They’d been green through the unseasonably warm October and early November, and finally started turning a week or so ago. I sort of imagine that the trees, holding on to the last vestiges of summer, were relieved when the cold damp weather came at last, sighed as a huge responsibly was lifted from them, and let themselves start falling asleep for the winter.

When I saw the blanket of newly fallen golden leaves (with plenty of green ones still clinging up high, as you can see–but not for long…) I took a picture of it, thinking it would never look quite like the magical view from my window. But it does (even with a part of the window frame at the top). And I am pleased.

Last week we had summer-like temperatures, but now, as the air is cooling, it’s obvious that autumn is truly here. There are a few flowers left in my yard, such as these anemones, which were planted by my Dutch father-in-law, a horticulturalist who knows the Latin names (but not always the English ones) of pretty much every plant in my area (and in lots of other places, too). It’s an autumn-blooming perennial. When I see its stems start to rise from the ground in late summer, I wonder, “Will the flowers arrive before the winter?” And they do–and it’s a joy to see these delicate white blossoms that seem to float in the air.

And then there are the hydrangeas. We have one large plant near the patio and three smaller plants in other places; they all produce blue-green blossoms. I didn’t cut a whole lot of them this year, so the plants are covered with flowers that have been slowly drying out over the past few weeks–fading to pale green and eventually turning into brown paper.

The early days of autumn are always a surprise to me. The river birch along the back fence is one of the first trees to shed its leaves, and it does this even as most of the trees are still quite green. A handful of golden brown leaves scatter themselves across the lawn…and in the blink of an eye, it seems, the grass is obscured by a carpet of leaves (and it’s a thick carpet: last year we composted forty paper lawn bags of shredded leaves) and all the trees are bare.