January light

At the cabin, shadows are getting long at 4:00 on this January afternoon.  We walk with the dog towards the large flat rock that is a favorite. 

Here we can stand on a broad, red granite slab edged with lichen, and look west towards a distant mountain range that can be seen through a V in the canyon.  We watch the sun scale slowly down into the trees, the glare splayed like sharp spokes of light through the broad branches of Ponderosa. 

I think of Madeleine L’Engle and her star-gazing rock.  There, secrets of the cosmos poke into everyday life, as if the rock were centered under a hole in the rachia, the great solid, perforated dome that formed the primeval sky of Genesis.  Strange truth drips on the rock like rain.

Each year I wonder if I will survive winter, with its frugal light and dust-brown horizon.  I grieve the hibernation of photosynthesis, the absence of green foliage that feathers the landscape and softens harsh corners, green that feeds the world.  I have tried to train myself to the practice of winter, to embrace the bare and the cold, to find beauty in graceful skeletons of aspens and the changeable contours of ice.  It feels like Lent without sweets, or music. 

This January has been better than most.  The several warm days, rare with cordial temperatures, have melted the snow drifts and lure us outside.  Returning from the broad watching-rock, we hike in sneakers rather than boots, without jackets.  Piles of boulders and fallen soldiers of dead trees darken as the day’s light retreats.  Our jagged shadows as we walk eastward are three times our height.  There is a sense we can never live up to them. 

On my left, the grass is illumined in a slice of light.  The waning light catches wheaten stalks, all the way to the base, and highlights every reedy strand.  Grass seeds and panicles glow at the tops of their stalks, each feathery shape picked out clearly like a nimbus or corona.  I turn to look west, and see a field of grasses detailed in their moment of shining, like a delicate blond beard against the rocks.  

What has always been dismissed as “just grass,” a homogeneous green that tickles at knee-level, now becomes a display of diversity.  The grass is not one, but many.  I snap off representative heads of grasses that are curled like the dense tail of a Husky, or sturdy and clutched like grain, or lacy and spread with tiny dill-like seeds. 

Ann Zwinger’s sketches tell us we have seen bluegrass, smooth brome, pine dropseed, and slender wheat-grass.   They have escaped the usual crush of snow.  

 

In a way winter is the real spring, the time when the inner thing happens, the resurge of nature.   - Edna O’Brien

Bird of Happiness – 2

House Wren, by John James Audubon

January has been warm this year, at least in our part of the country.   We visit the cabin to check on frozen pipes (0), animal tracks (rabbit-1, deer-some, mountain lion-0), and critters. 

A house wren moved in after New Year’s Day, just like last year.  I try to nap on my bed, with sun warming a slice of floor.  From the corner of the room to my left, the wren flies to a perch at the top of the open door.  He seems chubby and reddish in the light, with a remarkably white throat.  He notices me on the bed, with a sturdy chocolate Labrador curled against me, and flies down the hall to the other bedroom. 

There is no singing. No cheerful chirping offered as a token of appreciation by last year’s wren.   If we have to deal with an LBJ (little brown jobber) in the cabin, there should at least be some birdsong as we clean up.  And how is this bird getting in the house?

Even the sparrow finds a home,

and the swallow a nest for herself,

where she may lay her young, at your altars,

O Lord of hosts, my King and my God.

Happy are those who live in your house, ever singing your praise.    

–Psalm 84:3-4, New Revised Standard Version