Our landscape is white and the skies have been quite gray and overcast – the gun-metal gray of winter. The days are short and the darkness sometimes seems especially long. This morning I got up before dawn and was drinking my coffee and reading the newspaper. I eventually looked up and noticed the brightness of the morning had started to take over the black sky. As I stepped out the front door, the blue of the sky and the white of the clouds caught my eye; it was a beautiful contrast and a welcome splash of color that we had been missing the past week. The trees are leafless structures now, thrusting their branches up and out, and the cotton-like clouds seemed to be catching on the branches of the tree as they were moving by.
landscapes
A week’s slide into winter
Our landscape that was brown and cold last week has been transformed into winter. Daytime temperatures in the single digits, subzero temps at night, and snow have brought the look and feel of winter. Ponds and lakes that were previously frozen with clear ice are now covered with snow, and are once again being populated with fish houses. The ducks and geese have all headed south in search of open water. And we are learning again how to drive in ice and snow. How quickly this seasonal change has taken place!
Frost and ice in the morning
Our temperatures have been dropping at night causing the sloughs and lakes to begin their ice-over. It isn’t thick by any means, but it is the start of our shift from fall to winter. I’ve always enjoyed the reflections of trees and horizons in water, and the change over to ice gives these same reflections a much different look. The lines are softer and more muted, and until our lakes are snow-covered the reflections can sometimes be almost mirror-like. On this morning two days ago, the sun was burning through the cold temperatures and the heavy frost causing the landscape to glow in the early light.
A final look at autumn
November is a transition month in Minnesota; our weather can be anywhere from warm and sunny to gray and cold, rain or snow to wind or calm. It seems like we’ve covered all these bases in the past few days. Early in the week I took this image of the brilliant colors of a cotoneaster in our yard. As the morning sun lit the leaves they came alive with a beautiful glow; perhaps it was their swan song. By Wednesday morning we awoke to two inches of wet snow gracing the golds and reds in the remaining leaves. Thursday night our temperatures plummeted below freezing, followed by strong winds on Friday. The leaf colors were killed off by the cold, and the leaves themselves were blown off the trees and bushes to the ground. Within a few days the colors and leaves of autumn had given way to the skeletal trees of winter.
The quieter side of fall
With my previous posts of fall I’ve shared some brilliant colors, and we continue to see those in our landscape now. But there’s a quieter side to this season too. This is the side that speaks of the upcoming change to winter, the coolness that is evident in the air, and the slow turn into the dark of winter. We were at Wild River State Park early one morning recently. The park sits along the St. Croix River which divides the states of Minnesota and Wisconsin. It’s a lovely, and quiet area, especially in the morning. The air was cool and yet the river temperature was still a bit warmer causing the fog to hang low in the river valley. This layer of fog seemed to soften the sunrise, to quiet any sound on the river or land, and to soften the golds and browns that were evident from the seasonal change. Eventually the sun rose high enough over the bluff to burn away the fog, and the light became much brighter and sharper, as did the sounds of the day too.
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