The calendar might say there are another dozen days before winter is officially here, but the weather doesn't care about that. Here in Potter County, winter always arrives long before the solstice is here. I find that these winter weeks of short days and long nights sometimes make me lethargic. During the day I tend to move more slowly and as night approaches, a sort of torpor sets in. I suspect that like woodchucks, bears, and poorwills, I might have hibernating tendencies. But humans don't hibernate. There is a name for what I'm feeling. It's called Seasonal Affective Disorder, appropriately abbreviated SAD, "a type of depression related to changes in seasons. Symptoms start in the fall and continue into the winter months, sapping your energy and making you feel moody." Moody? Me? The recommended treatments for it are light therapy, psychotherapy, or medication. I only have a mild case of it and I have my own methods for treating it. Although some might think I need psychotherapy, I don't think that would help. And I'm not the medicating kind. My methods are simple. I have a chair in my little greenhouse out by the long border and on sunny days, I try to sit out there for awhile. The temperature inside it on a bright day can get as high as 70 degrees. Another thing I do to combat the winter blues is that I try to look ahead to something exciting. I count the days until spring (73 days until the vernal equinox in case you're interested). I sit and make garden plans. I compile lists of seeds to buy and plant. I draw maps of the places I will plant them. And I dream.
It occurred to me the other day that lately I've had a lot of dreams about gardens. During the months when I was gardening, I don't recall dreaming of them at all. My days were filled with gardens then. Now, I think my brain tries to supply my need by giving me garden dreams while I sleep. I don't often remember the details of these dreams, just a calm and happy feeling when I wake and remember that I was in a garden. Some of these recent dreams I do remember. They are always of a garden I've never seen with my waking eyes. I enter it through a gate set in a low stone wall. I follow a path through flowers growing in a jumble of color. The path leads to a fountain, a low basin with a soft jet of water splashing. There is a stone bench and I sit on it and look around. It is a beautiful place. Sometimes in these dreams I name the flowers growing around me. Other times I just sit and listen to the quiet. I've had this happy dream four or five times now.
Then there are the other things I'm looking forward to that help to push back the blahs. There's Christmas just ahead. That's always exciting with the decorations, the baking, the secret gifts accumulating. This year we are gathering here to celebrate and the house will be jolly into the new year.
Another event I'm anticipating is a trip to Italy in the spring. We are planning to spend ten days in Italy in April. Stacey has been working on an itinerary. We will go to places we went to before and some places we did not visit on our previous trip. I'm making notes of sites in Rome and Florence that we did not see, and this time we plan to go to Venice. Anticipating that trip will fortify me through the winter.
On Monday I spent the morning tidying the house. We had a houseful over Thanksgiving and things tend to get moved around. With the guests gone, I straightened things up, swept the house, did laundry, and began getting things ready for Christmas decorations. Now that December is here, I've turned on the outdoor lights. They are all on timers set to shine from 5:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m.
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| Lights on the chicken yard fence. |
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| Lights on the front of the house. |
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| Lights on the back of the house. |
On Monday for Family Home Evening, we put up the indoor decorations. Everything went in its accustomed place -- garlands, wreathes, knickknacks, and nativities. We will get our Christmas tree this week on the 12th and then the decorations will be complete.
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| Panoramic view of the decorated house. |
The weather was cold all week. It never got above freezing, night or day. We kept the wood stove burning all week. The rain barrel down at the barn finally froze solid and I began carrying water down from the house every day. That will continue from now until sometime in March when things thaw out again. I carry down two five gallon buckets every day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. At forty pounds each, I like to think of hefting them as some sort of weight training, but it mostly just makes my elbows and shoulders ache.
The cold weather has brought birds flocking to my feeders. There are so many there from first light to dusk that I can't begin to count them. They empty all three of my feeders every day. I love to watch them. Standing at the kitchen window one morning last week, watching chickadees and titmice flit back and forth from the trees to the feeders, a snatch of poetry came to my mind. I only remembered one line and had to go and look it up. It's from Longfellow's Song of Hiawatha. I learned parts of that poem in the fourth grade. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was one of my teacher, Miss Charlotte Conley's, favorite poets and she read Part III: Hiawatha's Childhood to us over several days of after-recess poetry time. Then we had to memorize part of it. Fifty-six years later, I can still recite the lines:
By the shores of Gitchee Gumee,
By the shining Big-Sea-Water,
Stood the wigwam of Nokomis,
Daughter of the Moon, Nokomis.
Dark behind it rose the forest,
Rose the black and gloomy pine trees,
Rose the firs with cones upon them;
Bright before it beat the water,
Beat the clear and sunny water,
Beat the shining Big-Sea-Water.
But that wasn't the part I was recalling. It was the part where it mentions Hiawatha's chickens. It goes like this:
Then the little Hiawatha
Learned of every bird its language,
Learned their names and all their secrets,
How they built their nest in summer,
Where they hid themselves in winter.
Talked with them whene'er he met them.
Called them Hiawatha's chickens.
I have a few hens that like to jump the fence and come in the mornings to scratch under the bird feeders for fallen seeds. So sometimes I have my chickens and Hiawatha's chickens feeding side by side.
Tuesday morning early, around 4:30, I was awakened by the sound of the township snowplow going up our road. It was snowing when we went to bed the night before, but I didn't think it would amount to much. When I got up an hour later, there were two new inches of it and more came down during the day. The snow is very pretty, soft and fluffy. I love to sit inside by the wood stove and watch it fall. Going out in it -- not so much.
On Tuesday evening, the weather service issued a Severe Winter Storm Warning telling us there was a chance for lake effect snow and to expect six new inches of snow and high winds on Wednesday. Lake effect snow "occurs when cold air from Canada moves across the open waters of the Great Lakes. As the cold air passes over the unfrozen, and relatively warm water, warmth and moisture are transferred into the lower atmosphere. The warmer, less dense air rises over the denser colder air and becomes snow that is deposited on the leeward side of the lakes." Places like Buffalo, New York, and Erie, Pennsylvania, can get several feet of lake effect snow dumped on them in just a few hours. Here in Potter County, we are usually too far east to get lake effect snow, so a Lake Effect Warning causes some concern. On Wednesday morning we had a brief but pretty, pale red sunrise, a portent of bad weather coming. It started to snow around 9:00 a.m., but it was just occasional light flurries. I began to hope the weather service was wrong, as they often are.
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| Sunrise on Wednesday. |
I was the only one home during the day. I had the wood stove going and Christmas music playing and it felt almost festive in a lonely sort of way. I read for most of the day until chore time. I dozed off for a while as I waited for the predicted storm. Some serious snow finally began after sundown, but there was no high wind and only three inches of new snow on the ground on Thursday morning. Even so, school called a two-hour delay and then canceled altogether, but Miriam wasn't in school that day and that sort of thing doesn't concern me anymore. I spent the morning at the hospital. A sister in our branch had an appointment and I took her there. I sat and read while I waited for her. On the drive back from town, I could see that the real storm was arriving at last, late by a day. The snow began falling thick and the wind was blowing hard. The wind blew the snow into drifts and dropped the wind chill down to 10 degrees. The snow got even worse that night. The forecasters revised their warning and extended the snow warning on into Friday.
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| Thursday evening. |
Friday morning, the sun came out and shone on a cold and wintry snow-scape. I took a short walk after I did the morning chores. I crossed the road to the beaver pond and then climbed the bank to the meadow. The snow drifts on the bank were more than knee deep. All across the property, the soft snow revealed all the nocturnal animal activity. There were deer, cat, bird, and rabbit tracks all over. I could see that a rabbit had come up onto the front porch during the night, which I thought was odd. Maybe it was seeking refuge from the blowing snow. Despite some sunshine, the day did not warm. The temperature never rose above 20 degrees all day. The Fosters and the Shilligs came over for Friday pizza that evening. It was snowing pretty hard again when they left for home.
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| The beaver pond. |
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| Coming home through the meadow. |
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| Rabbit tracks on the front porch. |
The snow continued falling all night. When I went out on Saturday morning, I measured six inches of it on the ground with deeper drifts in places. So even though we got a substantial amount, it wasn't like the several feet of lake effect snow that got dumped to the east of us. Light snow fell off and on through the day.
I'm having a problem with starlings in the chicken coop again. It's been a long time since their last invasion. I think the weather has made them seek shelter inside the coop. But they devour the chickens' food and they poop on everything and they carry diseases and parasites that could infect my flock, so I have to take measures to try and keep them out. I've never found a good solution to the problem. This time I took drastic measures. On Monday morning when I went down, I found a dozen or more of them in the coop. I opened a window and drove them out and then shut the coop completely. I hoped that if they couldn't get in and get food, they would give up and go away. So for five days the chickens and the peacock were locked inside the coop. They weren't happy about it. I have three young roosters who usually stay outdoors during the day to avoid confrontations with my alpha rooster. Being cooped up like that, they had no place to hide and there was some scuffling because of it. Those three roosters will become soup soon. Saturday morning when I went down to do the chores, there was so much complaining from the flock about being shut in that I relented and opened the door into their yard. By the time I did the afternoon chores, the starlings were back inside the coop again. It really frustrates me.
Saturday the first round of Christmas baking took place. Miriam and Hannah spent most of the afternoon in the kitchen baking cookies and brownies. The did a batch of Bombard cookies and spice cookies and a pan of frosted brownies. The house smelled wonderful with the aroma of it all. I can't eat any of it, but I love the smell of it.
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| Bombard cookies left, chocolate dipped spice cookies right. |
We've begun watching our Christmas movies. Hannah keeps a list and every year she reads through it and we answer yes or no as to whether we want to watch it this year. The list is long and there is isn't enough time to watch them all and some of them aren't worth watching every year. We've already watched Miracle on 34th Street and A Charlie Brown Christmas and a few others. Saturday evening we watched a few more while Miriam worked on a sewing project and Stacey wrapped presents to send to family in far away places.
I was awakened by the wind at 4:00 this morning. As I lay there listening to it, I sensed that things had changed. It was no longer blowing cold and hard from the northwest. It was softer and perhaps a little warmer. When I went out to do the morning chores, the thermometer was at 33 degrees, already above freezing for the first time in a week and the sun was rising in a pale, clear sky. It was a quiet morning -- aside from the flutter of birds at the feeders and the noise inside the chicken coop. I could see from fresh tracks in the snow that the chickens had actually ventured out a little further into their yard, although they were all waiting for me inside the coop. When I got back to the house, I checked the woodstove. It had gone out during the night, but I didn't bother to light it again. The house was warm enough already. The forecast says we can expect rain during the week. That will make everything a slushy mess. But by the weekend the snow will be back. If we have to have snow, I prefer to have it now, at Christmastime. Then it can go away. But I know it won't.
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| Winterberries along the Genesee. |
Church was good today. We sang more carols. I gave one of the talks in sacrament meeting. Our second hour lesson was good. Along the road between Gold and Genesee, there is a patch of winterberry (Ilex verticillata) that grows by the Middle Branch of the Genesee River. On the way home from church, we stopped so I could take a picture of it. It is so bright against the drabness of December. So we are home. Lunch preparations are underway. Miriam and Hannah just left. The community choir they sing in is performing a Christmas concert this afternoon and they had to be there early to rehearse. Stacey and I will go later at 3:00 to attend the concert. It is at the CMA church in Coudersport. Then tonight at 8:00 is the First Presidency Christmas Devotional, which I always look forward to. Concerts, devotionals, carols, cookies, decorations, and snow. It is beginning to feel more and more like Christmas.
