Wintry Mix

Where has January gone? Its weeks and days seem as blurred to me as the fine-falling snow outside my windows. (Yes, it's snowing here - hooray! Nothing so heavy as the blizzard back East - just a few fresh inches to fill in the gaps caused by a recent spell of dry and windy below-zero weather.)

There were several blog posts I'd like to have written this month, but life has been crowded and time has been short. So here's a kind of January summing-up - a Wintry Mix post, if you will.

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A few weeks ago I took my camera for a walk, but after one photo, the battery died.

(A nice wintry photo, though. I like to see the oak leaves still clinging to the trees.)

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The Aged P is having a series of extensive skin cancer surgeries on his face and head, which means lots of running for me and my sister, and lots of driving back and forth for the daily dressing changes. Mr. M (bless him!) has nobly pitched in to help with this job, since he passes by Dad's place every day. The plastic surgeon told me that women are generally better than men at changing dressings - but Mr. M has proved pretty handy with the tape and gauze.

We hope and pray that in a few weeks Dad will be whole of scalp once more.

(And the moral of that is: wear your sunscreen!)

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I bought a bag of oranges, and one of them looked like this:

Citrus confusion?

This is what comes of hanging out with those lemon trees in the next field.

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In the intervals of knitting mittens and beavering away at a magazine commission, I've been making some Valentine-y coasters:

Pattern coming soon.

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Yesterday afternoon I took a walk to the park (making sure to have a fresh battery in the camera this time).

It was a damp, chilly, grey-and-white day, punctuated with the tawny and black of last summer's growth. Oak leaves huddled in the corner of the baseball field, waiting for the new season to start:

At the edge of the pond stood cattails wearing brown velvet coats....

Milkweed pods, greyer than the sky....

Once-vibrant prairie coneflower heads....

Delicately lovely wild-grass seed....

And goldenrod, like memories of summer lace:

The gap between winter and summer is so great; it seems an age since these flowers were in bloom. Was there ever really a summer? Yes - and there will be again. The fragile dried blossoms at the edge of the pond are the substance of things hoped for, the promise of warmth to come.

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Have you seen the bright planets aligning in the night and morning sky? We've been looking out for them every clear evening. Even the full moon of a few nights back could not eclipse their shine.

I'm sorry I haven't been able to visit you lately. How is your January going?

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