A bootless endeavor

The beauty of the winter woods is hard to capture on camera. There are technical difficulties, of course--sun reflecting off snow makes exposures difficult, producing blown highlights and washed-out details. But before you even think about finding the right settings to capture both bright light and deep shadows, first you have to get out there, all bundled up in coat hat scarf gloves boots, except I don't have boots that fit right now so I wore thick socks and the same ratty sneakers I wore on the beach last week. I figured the sneakers would serve as an effective alarm system: when my feet got wet, it would be time to go back inside.

I had to dig deep in the hat-and-glove basket to find the deer-hunting gloves I used to wear when I was a journalist covering cold outdoor events, thick lined gloves with flaps that fold back to allow the fingers freedom to adjust camera settings. Those gloves must be 30 years old and I rarely wear them but when I want to use a camera in the cold, nothing else will do.

I took my walking stick, not just to keep steady in the slippy spots but to probe the depth of the drifts I was wading through. Light, gentle snow has been falling on and off for two days and at any given moment it doesn't look like much of a storm, but over time it covers everything.

When the world looks like a black-and-white photo, every subtle flash of color stands out: rusty brown oak leaves, mottled green and gray sycamore bark, faded beige yucca pods. At the birdfeeders cardinals and bluejays provide a splash of color amidst the crowds of little gray and black birds--titmice and chickadees, woodpeckers and juncos. 

I kept seeing shades of blue-gray in the frozen creek, pink in the sky, purple in the shadows surrounding snow drifts, but the intensity of the white overwhelms all else. It felt pure and clean and sculptural, but it also felt cold, very cold, and my feet got wet and warned me to go back inside, where my photos don't seem to convey the still beauty of the scene so I have to rely on making pictures with words.

Bear's head fungus capped by snow.

Maybe we all need to hibernate

Everyone was dragging yesterday despite having just returned from an extended break. I provided a rude awakening to one student who forgot that he's scheduled to give a class presentation on Wednesday, but mostly I spent class time trying to gently prod my students into alertness and engagement. They're tired, they say. Well I'm tired too. We're all tired. Who wouldn't be tired in the final weeks of the fall semester?

This morning I've been reading student drafts and right now I'm tired of asking students to spell my name correctly. It's not that difficult! Only five letters! One set of papers features four different spellings of my name, which is nearly as annoying as the paper that keeps referring to Maxine Hong Kingston's memoir as The Women Warrior. I'm tired of seeing references to a women and I'm tired of seeing then where than should be.

But I'm also tired of the paper that looks absolutely perfect, with no spelling or punctuation errors, but that our AI detector flags as being mostly machine-generated. I'd rather see a student spell woman wrong a dozen times than to go through the whole process of figuring out who or what wrote a perfect paper and what I'm supposed to do about it. 

I'm tired of the cold already even though it's barely begun. I'm interested in seeing how my new car handles snowy roads, but not interested enough to wish for a blizzard. This morning I drove through scattered flakes that melted when they hit the ground, which barely counts as a flurry. If I'd blinked, I would have missed it.

I'm tired of class preps and grading and meetings meetings meetings, but the good news is it's nearly over (for now). On Wednesday my students will discuss their final reading assignments of the semester; after that, it's a week and a half of drafts, revisions, presentations, and final exams. So much to do before winter break! Just thinking about it makes me tired.

 

 

  

Ephemeral autumn

Friday afternoon I arrived home just after a rainshower and found myself surrounded by fall leaves glistening and sparkling in the sudden sunshine. I reached for the camera bag but it wasn't in the car but before I'd unzipped it the sun had ducked behind the clouds and the rain was falling again.

Every year at this time I keep catching moments like these--sun hitting red and yellow leaves until they appear to be lit from within, my road passing between walls of shimmering color, the sky above dotted with brilliant red maple leaves. And every year I try to capture those moments on camera, with little success. Sure, I get some colorful leaves, but the picture lacks the sound of leaves rustling and woodpeckers chattering and squirrels skittering through the woods, and somehow the colors in the photo lack liveliness and brilliance.

Autumn color is so ephemeral. Right now my house is surrounded by colorful trees, but every gust of wind sends a cascade of yellow and red flying past my windows, and the hillsides along my route are already showing big patches of brown where the tree limbs are bare and foreboding. I love this season while it lasts, but once the leaves start turning there's no stopping them. Which means, I suppose, that we'd better go outside and enjoy them while we can, with or without the camera.

 

Friday poetry challenge: seasonal haiku

It's not just the calendar pointing toward autumn: on these cool mornings I drive through dense fog along the river, wearing a jacket or sweater that I'm bound to leave behind somewhere when the sun comes out. The pollinator garden has reached Peak Sunflower while the grass around my house seems to have finally slowed down its frantic summer growth. And the cool nights are already inspiring mice to seek a warm indoor space to spend the winter--time to bait the mouse-traps!

At school the changing season means my students suddenly find themselves facing demands in every class, from history exams to chem lab reports to oral presentations. And in my classes they'll all be submitting drafts--all my students--over the next week and a half. "Do you read them all?" asked a student this morning, but of course I do: read and re-read and respond and reach out. So the honeymoon's over for me as well as my students; a week from now I'll be struggling to keep up with the flood of drafts alongside class preps and committee meetings. ("I feel like you go to a lot of meetings," said our new administrative assistant, but we all have a lot of meetings! Maybe I just complain about them more.)

Between the morning fog and the flood of drafts, I keep wishing someone would toss me a lifeline. I wish I could follow the advice in Wendell Berry's poem "Stay Home," except then I'd have to deal with the mouse problem. Let's write some haiku!

Fog blankets the road,
blanks out my thoughts, bringing
the promise of autumn:

Sunflowers hover
above us who hunger for
transient colors;

their heads droop with seeds,
ours under workloads that mag-
nify gravity.

Light in the fog, or
lines on the page: a lifeline!
Let autumn roll on.

Oh snow!

Look out any window to see a scene of loveliness: at home, bright red cardinals standing out against a snowy background; at the office, a blue college flag flapping above the snow-covered campus. From safe within a warm house or office, the snow adds an enticing layer of white to the otherwise bleak midwinter, a soothing vision for my fatigued eyes.

But driving in this weather is another story altogether. For days I've been fighting my way through a mixture of snow, slush, fog, rain, sleet, and ice every time I leave the house; the snow isn't particularly deep but it keeps coming, so it's really hard for the roads to stay cleared. This morning I followed a snowplow most of the way to work, rarely moving at more than 30 mph even on the highway, but even behind the plow the road remained slick and treacherous.

Yesterday's drive was the worst; I arrived home feeling wet, cold, exhausted, and miserable, but then I opened the door and smelled bacon. My adorable husband had made breakfast for supper, eggs and bacon with homemade bread inside my warm cozy house where I could look out the window and enjoy the beauty of winter without the cold nipping my cheeks and toes. 

I ought to put my boots on and go out for a tromp with the camera--which, as far as I can remember, hasn't been out of the camera bag for the entire month of January--but I'm stuck on campus for meetings and course preps and teaching observations, because yes, the tenure and promotion committee still has a heavy workload this semester so I'll be visiting a bunch of classrooms over the next three weeks. But the days are getting longer so I may get home before dusk, and if I do, I'll try to make some footprints in the snow so I can say I enjoyed winter before all this loveliness melts clear away.