Quietude and The Peace of Winters Past
Once upon a time, our daily bread
I never took for granted the serenity, beauty and tranquility of our lives for twenty years on Goose Creek in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.
And I have come to value my image archive that can carry me back to time and place.
I calm my mind and remember. I smell snow. The first breath seems pure oxygen. I hear not a thing. No motion suggests that life is in a hurry to move on. There could be no calmer calm.
I look behind me at my tracks alone in the morning snow, save for the erratic hieroglyphic tracks of a field mouse, so slight of body that the soft powder holds it up to scamper briefly on the pure white before disappearing again under a foot of powder.
I want to pull to memory everything I can from these winter moments. The images show every detail of what my eyes took in. Can I retrieve every sensation from that instant I pressed the shutter?
I search out the comforts of beauty and meaning in a world where things fall apart. I am taxed by dread and anxious for the fate of quiet places. Our kind is at war with nature, but not in this place that the image transports me to.
The morning after a soft snow offers its best face early on. The back side of the storm often brings clear skies of the high pressure bubble that takes the place of the passing wet-cold low. Sun and wind will pick up after first light, and the tiniest bare branches will not hold their poses for long.
I both embraced it and loathed that, for twenty years, our winter’s warmth was my duty and constant obligation. The wood-heat economy was central to the way we lived. I can’t say we were never cold. But that would not have been on a morning when a blanket of new snow held to every twig and branch, without a whisper of wind, and the promise of a bright day ahead.
Gorgeous photos. Many a snow has fallen around that barn.
Helpful to remember that Ann had to drive a long way through that snow to make her serums.
Fred, I am no longer able to paddle about in deep snow quite as much as I used to. For all that, I remember winter days in the woods with my late husband when it was so still we could hear snowflakes falling on the old trees. I remember how the snowflakes smelled, and how they tasted on my tongue. It was sublime.