Time to un-hibernate

The weather in this corner of the northeast has been a real challenge. Since January 1 we've accumulated 4 school snow day cancellations; thank goodness this week was a school vacation week or we'd be adding at least one more snow day to the list.Spending your vacation at home is not very exciting. Yes, we got some things accomplished, but there were no adventures for us this week. Unless you find shoveling heavy, wet snow up and over your head onto snowbanks the size of Mount Washington adventuresome. Or you think chipping 3 inches of ice off the driveway is fun.It is hard to be spiritually uplifted when everything around you is the color of slate, crusted with sand and embedded with the roadside detritus tossed by commuters on the way to somewhere. The endless supply of grey, overcast sky seems to be a constant lately.Yesterday, badly in need of a break from all this winter ambience, I took a detour from my to-do list of errands and ended up at a local garden greenhouse, miraculously open at this time of year. Oh, the beauty of the greens - ferns, prayer plants, coleus, African violets. There is something about the smell of the wet soil that is heavenly.And so, I've declared this the end of my winter hibernation. We are moving toward spring, even if the spring is within the walls of a greenhouse.And my soul is filled with promise and hope. 

February 3, 2013

I live in the Center of an Old New England town.  The wide stone walls that used to mark property lines or separate fields from farmhouses still stand in this part of town.  This wall still marks a border and delineates our property on nearly 2 sides.

Unlike the more roughly made stone walls that ran through property my parents owned in New Hampshire, this wall is massive - several feet wide in most places and about shoulder height.

On our side of the wall, the stones appear stacked with randomness, yet in the hundred or so years since the wall was built, they have stood strong. But on the other side - the side that faces an abandoned clearing of what used to be the estate for one of the town's more upright citizens, the wall is precisely assembled so that it forms a sheer wall of stone, carefully pieced together.

I like to hang out back near our wall. It is quiet there, through now overgrown with bittersweet vines, wild roses, and other herbage that was never purposely planted.

I wonder at the strength and the purposefulness of the builder of this wall. assembled long before machinery would have lessened the load.

If you don't like New England's weather wait a minute....

or a day, or a week.  We've been experiencing the ugliest winter weather in a while lately.  Off and on snow showers. Snow in some locations and the next town over will have rain. Torrential rains, destructive winds, shoveling and sanding. Grey, cloud filled skies. I don't remember the last day that I actually saw the sun.If I may be so bold as to speak for many, we are sick to death of it.  Ground Hog, damn you, we want spring and we want it now.