The wave of green has reached the higher peaks of the southern mountains now, the canyons and corridors of leafery having become the only view from all but a few open vistas along the Blue Ridge Parkway. Yesterday’s  performance by cooperative…
I have been feeling the pain these past few well-below-freezing April mornings knowing what our local vegetable farmers are suffering at the hand of winter that won’t give it up. Thousands of tender sets and sprouts in long rows, the…
Low biorhythm warning: don’t stand too close to me. Might be catching. I won’t indulge myself in self-pity or list the long string of things fallen apart. You know the kind of one-then-another calamities of which I speak where one…
I just ran across this image from late March 2011. It tells me two things. First, today’s surprise snow storm is not uncommon for this time of year. Second, as I have contended elsewhere, we are about 10 days behind…
I rarely am outraged at the cold. It is merely the passive absence of heat. But wind… Wind is alive, vicious, intentional, malevolent. It seeks me out, and having found me aims cruelly for the rift between collar and neck,…
There are still some things about water I do not understand. I see puzzles in the creek ice and in the shapes and textures and patterns of snowfall as it ages. There are some who have nightmares about ice. Like…
Excerpt from Winter Walk, from Slow Road Home ~ a blue ridge book of days by Fred First 2006 …When winter comes, our morning walks don’t end, but they are no longer a casual tiptoe through the woods. Winter walks are a…
Mid-morning yesterday, a VDOT contract snow-worker came through with a pitifully small blade–two passes, east and west–and if we’d gotten all the snow we were going to get for the day, it would have helped. We got another six inches…
We will be suiting up momentarily to take our first steps into the snow. Neither one of us have boots high enough that the fine powder won’t pour down onto our socks. It is the cost of doing business. And…
 An approaching cold front yesterday brought clearing skies and strong winds that pushed tattered clouds before the leading edge of it. The thermometer dropped back into all to familiar territory.  Again. For six more weeks, the groundhog says. I suppose…
It is a mercy how quickly we forget. One temperate day, one afternoon when the colors of winter, such as they are, return in full sunlight; one moment when warmth wafts the smell of unfrozen sod that you inhale casually,…
Even into the third month of round-the-clock wood fires in the stove, it gets no easier to hoist yourself out of bed in the mornings to feed it. Some are harder than others. I vote for yesterday as this year’s…
I had told myself ENOUGH ice-talk and images on Fragments already. But winter does not relent, and waters winter forms dominate our days. We have a covering of snow to complicate things this morning. Coincidentally, I ran across this article…
Because January, if you don’t count white and gray, is the Monochrome Month, any hint of color can be almost painful by its contrast. A few deep pink coralberries cling to wizened sprigs along the creek. Smooth stones under the…