I’ve commented before, probably several times over the last weeks, about how slowly February crawls along. I think it’s the cold that makes it seem that way. It was very cold at the beginning of the week. Wind chills on Monday and Tuesday night hit -15°. Not the coldest it’s been here, or the coldest I’ve experienced, but too cold just the same. I slow down in cold weather – everything does. It is a scientific fact that as matter gets colder it slows down the movement of atoms. At absolute zero (0°Kelvin, -459.67°Fahrenheit, -273.15°Celsius) things pretty much grind to a halt at the atomic level, at least theoretically, because, from what I understand (Josiah might correct me on this), reaching absolute zero is impossible. I thought as long as it’s so cold, I ought to look at some statistics to help put things in perspective. The coldest temperature ever recorded on Earth is -128.6°F (-89.2°C, 184.0°K) at the Soviet Vostok Station in Antarctica on 21 July 1983. The lowest temperature ever measured in the solar system was on the Moon when NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter measured temperatures as low as -400°F(-240°C, 33.15°K) in permanently shadowed craters near the lunar south pole. The coldest known place in the universe is the Boomerang Nebula, 5,000 light years away from Earth in the constellation Centaurus. Scientists reported in 1997 that gases blowing out from a dying star there expanded and cooled to 1°K, only one degree warmer than absolute zero. The lowest temperature ever recorded was on Earth in a laboratory. In September 2003, scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced that they’d chilled a cloud of sodium atoms to a record-breaking 0.45 nanokelvin (-459.66999999°F,-17.22222C). So I guess it’s not so cold here after all.
In fact, midweek it warmed up a little. We hit 48° on Thursday. Seeing the forecast and how warm it was going to be, I was determined to start pruning the orchard that day. I knew it was supposed to rain, but not until later in the day and I hoped to do as much as I could before it arrived. I was foolish to hope it. The snow pack in the orchard was deep, hard, icy and treacherous. Trying to walk on it, let alone maneuver among the trees to prune, proved to be too difficult. Then the rain came early and made any thought of pruning impossible. It will have to wait a bit longer. After the rain fell on top of the snow and ice, it got cold again. The freezing and thawing and rain and re-freezing have transformed the snow pack into rock hard ice. The pathway from the front porch to the driveway and the driveway are especially treacherous sheets of ice. We have to walk slowly and carefully when we go out.
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| Thursday as the rain arrived. |
The rain falling on top of the snow and ice and also melting the snow and ice caused some flooding here. We had a two-hour delay for school on Friday morning because of it. The creek across the road from us rose over its banks for a while, but quickly subsided. The flooding was worse in other places. Pine Creek to the south of us, and the Genesee River up in Wellsville, New York, overflowed. Our house sits atop a knoll at 2,093 feet above sea level, so if flood waters ever reach us, the rest of world is in deep water.
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| Flooding on Pine Creek (not my photo). |
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| The Genesee River flooding in Wellsville, NY (not my photo). |
On Friday morning we saw our first robin, a nice plump male looking for something to eat under the bird feeders. It was exciting to see him, but I think he might be a bit early. Maybe he knows something we don’t and spring might come early this year. I’ve heard reports from others that red-winged blackbirds have been seen in the county, but we haven’t seen or heard any here yet.
Saturday the forecast said we could expect a few morning snow squalls. In my usual fashion, I wondered about the word “squall” and had to do some research. It means “a brief sudden violent windstorm, often accompanied by rain or snow.” It was originally a nautical term, probably derived from the Norwegian word skval which means “a sudden rush of water,” and the Swedish word skvala meaning “to gush or pour down.” What we had that morning certainly was a violent windstorm accompanied by snow, but it wasn’t brief. It went on for a long time. We’d planned to go out and run errands that morning, but we had to wait for the squall to cease. When it finally stopped snowing, Stacey wouldn’t go out, so I went alone. The wind was cold and fierce, and was blowing the new, loose snow around into shifting drifts. I drove to Genesee and back without too much trouble. The road was only snowy on the hill tops. But when I drove over to the dairy for milk, the back roads were terrible. I’d planned to go on to the Amish dry goods store up on Fox Hill, but decided not to. Fox Hill is notorious for its windy, drifting snow. I went home and didn’t go out again until chore time.
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| The front yard during our snow squall. |
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| The back yard during the squall. |
During the winter, one of the hardest things for me is finding good books to engage my mind. I read all year long. I’m always involved in a book. But during the gardening season my pace slows down as I spend more time outdoors and it takes me longer to get through a book. In the winter, there isn’t much going on to keep me from reading, but somehow seasonal discontent makes it more difficult for me to find books that hold my attention. Maybe I’ve become too critical. Maybe no one is writing the sort of books I like to read anymore. So much new literature is poorly written drivel. Some years I set myself on a Reading Project that focuses on a goal. For instance, one winter I decided I would read all the Discworld books by Terry Pratchett. I didn’t know when I set that goal that there were so many – thirty-seven at that time (in the end there were forty-one) – and it took me more than a delightful year to get through them all. This winter I’ve had an especially hard time with my books. Often out of desperation, I return to books that I’ve already read that I loved. That’s why I’ve decided to give myself a new project – Charles Dickens.
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| Charles Dickens. |
I was introduced to Dickens in the eighth grade when we read Great Expectations. I loved it from the start. Later in high school I read A Tale of Two Cities as a class assignment. I went on to read David Copperfield on my own. I didn’t read anymore Dickens until the 80's. In 1982 I watched The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, a filmed version of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s stage play. I was hooked. I went right out and bought a paperback copy of Nicholas Nickleby and devoured it. And I wanted more. In 1984, the year I got married, I signed on to a book club to purchase the complete works of Dickens, published by the Oxford Press. They sent me a book per month and, twenty-one months later, I had a full set. It took me several years to read them all, sometimes I had to take a break, but I loved them. Some of his novels I’ve read several times, some only once all those years ago. Last week as I sat looking at that set of books sitting in a prominent place on my best bookshelf, I realized that it’s been too long since I read Dickens. So my new Reading Project is to make my way through Dickens’ fifteen novels again. I’ll be reading them in chronological order. They are:
Oliver Twist (1838)
The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (1839)
The Old Curiosity Shop (1841)
Barnaby Rudge A Tale of the Riots of 'Eighty (1841)
Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit (1844)
Dombey and Son (1848)
David Copperfield (1850)
Bleak House (1853)
Hard Times (1854)
Little Dorrit (1857)
A Tale of Two Cities (1859)
Great Expectations (1861)
Our Mutual Friend (1865)
The Mystery of Edwin Drood, unfinished; (1870)
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| My set of Dickens. |
I don’t know how long it will take me, but I’m excited to do it. Dickens was a master at creating complex plots and wonderful characters that seem so real that I tend to think of them as people I actually know. Reading these novels will be like reacquainting myself with old friends that I haven’t seen in a long while. Pickwick Papers, here I come! It’s going to be fun.
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| The frontispiece and title page of an old edition of Pickwick. |
It was -2° when I got up this morning, but the sun rose in a clear sky and the morning was bright and beautiful. It warmed a little as the morning progressed. It was 10° when we left for church. I wore my thermal underwear to church. I sit most of sacrament meeting at the organ in the front corner of the chapel and it’s always cold there. I don’t really play the organ. It is programmed to play by itself. I run the controls, put in the hymn numbers, set the volume, and tap the tempo. It makes me feel so accomplished to “play” the hymns perfectly every Sunday. By the time we got home from church, it had warmed to 32°, which felt pleasant after such a cold morning. Lunch will be ready soon and while we wait, Hannah is playing her violin for us. I love it when my children make music.
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| Bright, cold Sabbath morning. |
Tomorrow is Presidents’ Day and there is no school. The weather is supposed to be warmer – partly sunny and 47° – and I will attempt once more to begin pruning the orchard. I’m looking forward to being out among the trees. As I prune, I always picture what they will look like in a few months when they bloom. It brings me so much hope to think of the flowers and fruit that lie dormant in the buds of the trees.
