Cold Winter

 

Cold front comes into Hollow.

Cold front comes to Hollow.

 

Winter comes early this year. The woods are browsed bare by deer and arctic winds have blown away the last leaf, except for a flat top of red oak at the top of the hill above the east meadow.

There is a dearth of acorns, though we did see hickory nuts at the edge of the woods beneath the pignut and shagbark hickories. Even the alien autumn olive in the lower garden is denuded.

The great winter constellation Orion has begun to peek over the hill and when I go out to “take a lunar”, I think, of course, of Tennyson’s Locksley Hall:

“Many a night from yonder ivied casement, ere I went to rest,

Did I look on great Orion sloping slowly to the west.”

But here in the hollow I watch him come up from the east, low at first, climbing higher as winter progresses.

There’s beauty in the bone of winter cruel though it may be. The solstice occurs on the 21st of December, when the sun is at its lowest arc on the shortest day of the year.

Every day after that, the Earth tilts back towards summer.

 

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