Maybe that title should better read meteoroillogical...
Freeze/thaw, freeze/thaw then freeze some more makes for a wicked nasty season.
Racing across three hundred miles of
freezing big water before smacking into the prairie, arctic winds howl. The grayest February skies seen 'round these parts in fifty-seven years persistently weep. Even when a warming sun shines, the landscape is bone
chill.
Every day the sun doesn't make an appearance and that's most of them, the world
is cruelly muted. It's voice, a crackling murmur.
Still, signs of hope are found. And what's hope for anyway, if not to
rely on during hard times?
Late autumn, I purged an accidental strawberry plant from the place it
claimed in our garden where we'd let it grow wild through last summer, just to
see. Purged that sucker with extreme prejudice, as only the squirrels benefited and not so much at that.
Yet there it is. Come back through hard frozen ground, even beneath a
sheath of ice.
The new lens helped turn this barely transitional season that's normally
opaque and indolent into a rich opportunity for fieldwork. On the right occasion, the freeze/thaw
not only reveals but frames a post-seasonal spectrum of life and death. I'll
remember that and be better prepared, next year.
"Death is life",
the late poet Patrick O'Neil wrote. So it is. On the prairie as well as in the
Northwoods, and everywhere else besides.
At least I know for certain that last autumn the Goldfinches twittering about outside my window feasted on this purple coneflower as it fell.
Beneath prairie tallgrass collapsed from exhaustion…
to inside the crust of barren native oaks obscured by waving ghosts, I
believe renewed life grows.
Soon enough this will be Blazing Star shining with riotous life, not just its bones:
Call that a matter of faith if you wish, but in this one tough little
bugger below, I keep finding early proof.
After the next chunk of polar vortex departs, I trust I'll find it still.
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